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The language practices of Latinos in the US continue to attract attention from politicians, educators, journalists, linguists and the general Hispanic and non-Hispanic public. While monolingual speakers of English in the US expect Hispanics to shift to English like other minority language speakers have done in the past, monolingual speakers of Spanish expect them to speak "pure" Spanish. Even Spanish-English bilingual speakers criticize Latinos for mixing Spanish and English or speaking Spanglish. This term has been rejected by some linguists who claim that it is technically flawed and only applies to casual oral registers. In this paper I consider the linguistic nature, sociolinguistic functions and attitudes towards Spanglish, I show that Latinos are using this hybrid, heteroglossic variety beyond casual oral registers, and I suggest a broader perspective which not only considers the linguistic features of Spanglish but also the political, social and cultural issues involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors present their views on political science writing in the U.S. Topics discussed include liberal use of technical terms or jargons in political science through five propositions such as interdisciplinary Cooperation, technical terms that have no specific denotations and use of metaphors to symbolize social science concepts.

Analysis of Spanish and English speech in a new immigrant community of Latinos in Georgia, USA, shows that Spanish and English pattern differently. There is a higher frequency of Spanish sentences containing English words than English sentences containing Spanish words. But the reverse is true of grammatical influence without mixing words. There is a higher frequency of English influenced grammatically by Spanish than Spanish influenced grammatically by English. This asymmetry of the two languages may be due to the asymmetrical status of each language in the social setting. Spanish is the first and dominant language of the Latino immigrant community, but English is their second language, the dominant language of the larger community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article views the American black play as a new genre of English with its own material, aesthetic and ideological characteristics, and traces its discursive development into a hybrid construct. Exploring the course of its development from the 1960s to the present, it focuses upon canonical plays by the most significant African-American playwrights whose common goal has been to emphasize the sociopolitical necessity for re-identification or transformation of African-American identity and so challenge the politics of homogenization that determined the monocultural character of American theatrical discourse for many decades. Their plays use subversive strategies resulting from the hybridization of language, of narrative forms and aesthetic styles. In the conclusion, attention is drawn to the success of the black play in destabilizing the linguistic and narrative networks of the past and establishing a new subversive theatrical language of substantial political significance for the theatre within and beyond the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. Sixty-three percent of all Hispanics self-identify as Mexican, and 41% of these individuals were born outside of the United States. The purpose of this article is to introduce mental health professionals to the use of the genogram as an intervention to help Mexican immigrants identify traditional resources that they can modify or adapt for success in a new culture. Suggestions for constructing a genogram with Mexican immigrants and Spanish translations of basic genogram jargon are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education for youth. Two related constructs are emphasized: collective Third Space and sociocritical literacy. The construct of a collective Third Space builds on an existing body of research and can be viewed as a particular kind of zone of proximal development. The perspective taken here challenges some current definitions of the zone of proximal development. A sociocritical literacy historicizes everyday and institutional literacy practices and texts and reframes them as powerful tools oriented toward critical social thought. The theoretical constructs described in this article derive from an empirical case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Within the learning ecology of the MSLI, a collective Third Space is interactionally constituted, in which traditional conceptions of academic literacy and instruction for students from nondominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students' sociohistorical lives, both proximally and distally. Within the MSLI, hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicizing literacy practices link the past, the present, and an imagined future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The blend between Spanish and English found in Hispanic or Latino communities in the United States is usually known as "Spanglish." It is suggested that Spanglish represents the most important contemporary linguistic phenomenon in the United States that has barely been approached from a linguistic point of view. Spanglish may be interpreted in different ways." as a pidgin, a Creole language, an interlanguage, or an anglicized Spanish dialect. Regardless that Spanglish is spoken by millions of people, significant variations within the language are observed. To account for its development, two types of phenomena are proposed: superficial, including borrowing and code-switching; and deep, including lexical-semantic, grammatical, and the "equalization to English "phenomenon. An analysis of both superficial and deep Spanglish phenomena is presented. It is suggested that the future of Spanglish depends on two factors: (a) number of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States, and (b ) U.S. policies concerning bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with the copula variability in Gullah and Southern rural Aave in relation to creolist hypothesis. Relationship between Gullah and the African American Vernacular English; Argument raised by creolists; System of copula variability in Gullah.

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward "Black" identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the range of sociolinguistic variation exhibited by children residing in Hawaii along a decreolizing speech continuum. The immediate setting is a multiethnic, socially mixed suburban neighborhood in the city of Hilo in Hawaii. The larger setting is the island chain of Hawaii. All the children are local. They are participating in the later stages of decreolization. Overlapping in ranks occurred for all variants, and it became clear that codes of speakers were distinctive only when viewed as complexes of variants and when compared with codes of other speakers. When all speakers were considered, ranking correlation for most pairs of variables was at the .001 level or better. Results were similar when the criterions ranking for the other ten variants was the rank for deletion be before a progressive. However, when only the eight consistently midscale speakers were considered, ranking correlation was of much lower statistical significance. In another study, the term code shifting has been chosen to denote the often very limited changes which occur as the subjects move toward one or another of the dialectal poles by increasing the number of target-code variants and the frequencies of such variants, sometimes over the course of a whole conversation and sometimes for brief turns of talk.

Provides an overview of the development of the Chinook Jargon, a means of communication between the white traders and Indians and among various groups of Indians themselves, in Oregon country. Dispute over the origin of the jargon; Features of the jargon; Groups of people represented by the jargon; Dialects used in the newspaper 'Oregon Spectator.'

Presents news on the American language as of February 1, 1945. Statement about the fish grindle in a publication by Rachel L. Carlson, 'Fishes of the Middle West'; Information on the jargon of waiters and sodaclerks which appeared in 'The New York Weekly' of June 23, 1884; Description of a form that is found frequently in American Yiddish correspondence and in the spoken language.