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This paper discusses the origins of linguistic elements in three Northern Songhay languages of Niger and Mali: Tadaksahak, Tagdal and Tasawaq. Northern Songhay languages combine elements from Berber languages, principally Tuareg forms and from Songhay; the latter provides inflectional morphology and much of the basic vocabulary, while the former is the source of most of the rest of the vocabulary, especially less basic elements. Subsets of features of Northern Songhay languages are compared with those of several stable mixed languages and mixedlexicon creoles and in accounting for the origin of these languages the kind of language mixing found in Northern Songhay languages is compared with that found in the (Algonquian) Montagnais dialect of Betsiamites, Quebec. The study shows that Tagdal and the other Northern Songhay languages could be construed as mixed languages, although the proportion of Berber and Songhay elements varieties somewhat between these languages and also indicates that the definition of 'mixed language' is labile because different mixed languages combine their components in different ways, so that different kinds of mixed languages need to be recognized. NS languages seem to belong to the category of Core-Periphery languages with respect to the origins of more versus less basic morphemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of Portuguese on Amazonian French Creole lexicon. Topics discussed include usage of French-lexified Creole language by three groups in the state of Amapá in Brazil, numbers of Amazonian French Creole (AFC) speakers, and the role played by adstrate language in the development of Creole lexicons. It also explores the origin of several Amazonian French Creole words.

Unserdeutsch, also known as Rabaul Creole German, is the only known German-lexifier creole. This critically endangered language has its origins in an orphanage in German New Guinea for mixed-race children, where Standard German was taught by mission personnel. Unserdeutsch was creolised in one generation and became the in-group language of a small mixed-race community. It is now spoken by around 100 elderly speakers, nearly all immigrants to Australia. The current project is only the second documentation based on actual fieldwork and has a specific focus on the use and vitality of the language as used by the last generation of speakers. It has the aim of producing an Unserdeutsch corpus that will facilitate both future linguistic research and contact with the language for the descendants of Unserdeutsch speakers. Preliminary findings show variation among speakers along a continuum from heavily creolised basilect to an almost European German acrolect. Most of the lexicon is derived from German, while a number of basilectal grammatical constructions are the result of the loss of marked features in German and possible imperfect second language learning as well as relexification of Tok Pisin, the presumed substrate language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines and analyzes the views of different authors on the issue of axiological approach of modern higher education. Also the specificity of plurilingual education for the values system development of the students is revealed, the plurilingual competence as one of the most important skills for the values development is theoretically grounded, the main tasks and objectives of plurilingual education are distinguished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Russian Linguistics is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to contribute to the current discussion of world Englishes by revealing the seamless English language incorporation in the linguascape of the popular music scene of post-socialist Mongolia, a context that has been rarely addressed in previous research. Drawing on sets of linguistic (n)ethnographic data, the paper argues that the role of English in the mixed language practices of young musicians should be understood as 'translocal language', which makes its meaning through the contact of transnational linguistic flows and resources embedded within the idea of 'linguascape'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We define the notion of controlled hybrid language that allows information share and interaction between a controlled natural language (specified by a context-free grammar) and a controlled visual language (specified by a Symbol-Relation grammar). We present the controlled hybrid language INAUT, used to represent nautical charts of the French Naval and Hydrographic Service (SHOM) and their companion texts ( Instructions nautiques). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on offline and online casual interactions in the context of youth in Mongolia, on the Asian periphery, this article looks at youth mixed language practices from the perspective of ' linguascapes' in order to capture the current flows of transnational linguistic resources in relation to other social landscapes. The study seeks to contribute to current discussions of the sociolinguistics of globalization by investigating to what extent and in what way resources make up linguascapes among youth groups with different access to resources. The main implication of this study is that youth linguascapes in Mongolia are fundamentally diverse, as a result of the combination of varied transcultural resources. At the same time, these resources are unevenly distributed and unequally localized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on how auto mechanics students in an upper secondary school in Sweden use teasing in everyday peer interactions to comment on one another's language use. Data are drawn from video-ethnographic work during two years in a Vehicle engineering programme taught in and through a foreign language, English. The analyses concern how and in what ways normative expectations on language can be seen to play a role in building an English-speaking classroom community. A linguistic ethnographic approach is taken in order to explore how students’ teasing activities are organized to invoke broader language ideologies. It is found that students deploy teasing as a way of co-constructing shifts between different second language registers, linked to classroom language ideologies. It is here argued that engaging in teasing and other joking activities should be seen as conditional for identity construction and peer group participation at the English medium instruction Vehicle programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

On the basis of a survey from June/July 2014, this article investigates the attitudes towards Ukrainian, Russian, and the widespread Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech in central areas of Ukraine. Although there are certain differences between areas that are differentiated by the amount of use of the three codes, all in all there are no hints at a profound language conflict. While Ukrainian is clearly preferred as the dominating language in state and society, the attitude towards Russian is not a hostile one, and there is an open-minded stance to settle questions of language politics on a more regional level. As for the Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech, which is stigmatized by many politicians and representatives of the cultural elites, the attitude towards it among ordinary people is differentiated. It includes two aspects: Whether it is seen as a menace to culture, and whether it is seen as convenient in daily life. While there are respondents who either approve or reject this code in both aspects, there also more than a few who evaluate it positively in the one, but negatively in the other dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bildts is a speech variety spoken by around 10,000 persons as a first or second language in the province Fryslân, in the north of the Netherlands. It is commonly claimed to be a dialect of Dutch containing some Frisian loan words. This article provides an analysis of Bildts based on a comparison of Bildts with its source languages: Frisian on the one hand and specific dialects of the province of South Holland on the other hand. It argues that Bildts combines a core lexicon mainly derived from Hollandic dialects with a grammar mainly derived from Frisian. However, the core lexicon also contains some Frisian words and the grammar has to some extent been levelled. The precise mixture is not easily described, let alone accounted for, in most models of language contact. Our approach combines sociological-historical information with linguistic factorisation in order to arrive at a plausible view of how Bildts came into existence. It is argued that Bildts is a mixed language, comparable to better known cases such as Ma'á, spoken in Tanzania, and that the specific nature of the mix involved the mutual accommodation of two groups of speakers: a group of mother tongue speakers of Frisian who acquired Bildts as a second language and a group of balanced bilingual speakers of Bildts and Frisian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined if iconic pictures belonging to one's native culture interfere with second language production in bilinguals in an object naming task. Bengali-English bilinguals named pictures in both L1 and L2 against iconic cultural images representing Bengali culture or neutral images. Participants named in both "Blocked" and "Mixed" language conditions. In both conditions, participants were significantly slower in naming in English when the background was an iconic Bengali culture picture than a neutral image. These data suggest that native language culture cues lead to activation of the L1 lexicon that competed against L2 words creating an interference. These results provide further support to earlier observations where such culture related interference has been observed in bilingual language production. We discuss the results in the context of cultural influence on the psycholinguistic processes in bilingual object naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language mixing in a given class is often avoided in bilingual education because of the generally held belief that one subject should be taught in only one language and one person should stick to one language in order to minimize confusion. Here, we compared the effects of mixing two languages and monolingual functioning on memory performance in immediate recall as a proxy for comprehension and attention during learning. In Experiment 1, nonbalanced bilingual youngsters were provided with definition pairs introducing familiar objects in a single-language context (SLC) or in a mixed-language context (MLC). After each definition block, participants were asked to identify previously introduced objects presented among a stream of Old and New items. In Experiment 2, the same speaker produced the two definitions in the mixed-language context, thus violating the second principle introduced above. In both experiments we found no advantage for the SLC over the MLC of exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial amounts of resources are usually required to robustly develop a language model for an open vocabulary speech recognition system as out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words can hurt recognition accuracy. In this work, we applied a hybrid lexicon of word and sub-word units to resolve the problem of OOV words in a resource-efficient way. As sub-lexical units can be combined to form new words, a compact set of hybrid vocabulary can be used while still maintaining a low OOV rate. For Thai, a syllable-based unit called pseudo-morpheme (PM) was chosen as a sub-word unit. To also benefit from different levels of linguistic information embedded in different input types, a hybrid recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) framework is proposed. An RNNLM can model not only information from multiple-type input units through a hybrid input vector of words and PMs, but can also capture long context history through recurrent connections. Several hybrid input representations were also explored to optimize both recognition accuracy and computational time. The hybrid LM has shown to be both resource-efficient and well-performed on two Thai LVCSR tasks: broadcast news transcription and speech-to-speech translation. The proposed hybrid lexicon can constitute an open vocabulary for Thai LVCSR as it can greatly reduce the OOV rate to less than 1 % while using only 42 % of the vocabulary size of the word-based lexicon. In terms of recognition performance, the best proposed hybrid RNNLM, which uses a mixed word-PM input, obtained 1.54 % relative WER reduction when compared with a conventional word-based RNNLM. In terms of computational time, the best hybrid RNNLM has the lowest training and decoding time among all RNNLMs including the word-based RNNLM. The overall relative reduction on WER of the proposed hybrid RNNLM over a traditional n-gram model is 6.91 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For any given mixed-language text, a multilingual synthesizer synthesizes speech that is intelligible to human listener. However, as speech data are usually collected from native speakers to avoid foreign accent, synthesized speech shows speaker switching at language switching points. To overcome this, the multilingual speech corpus can be converted to a polyglot speech corpus using cross-lingual voice conversion, and a polyglot synthesizer can be developed. Cross-lingual voice conversion is a technique to produce utterances in target speaker's voice from source speaker's utterance irrespective of the language and text spoken by the source and the target speakers. Conventional voice conversion technique based on GMM tokenization suffer from degradation in speech quality as the spectrum is oversmoothed due to statistical averaging. The current work focuses on alleviating the oversmoothing effect in GMM-based voice conversion technique, using (source) language-specific mixture weights in a multi-level GMM followed by selective pole focusing in the unvoiced speech segments. The continuity between the frames of the converted speech is ensured by performing fifth-order mean filtering in the cepstral domain. For the current work, cross-lingual voice conversion is performed for four regional Indian languages and a foreign language namely, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, and Indian English. The performance of the system is evaluated subjectively using ABX listening test for speaker identity and using mean opinion score for quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively improves the quality and intelligibility mitigating the oversmoothing effect in the voice-converted speech. A hidden Markov model-based polyglot text-to-speech system is also developed, using this converted speech corpus, to further make the system suitable for unrestricted vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author uses Norf'k fishing ground names on Norfolk Island (South Pacific) to illustrate how toponyms can be exposed to geographic, anthropological, and linguistic scrutiny. The grammar of the names demonstrates how Norf'k, the language of the Pitcairn descendants, typifies an esoteric insider language because of its ecologically connected toponyms and pragmatic determinants. Norf'k fishing ground names vary in their linguistic form and hence in their geography and spatiality. The toponymic and linguistic landscape of Norfolk Island reveals several processes that are significant for understanding sea-based geographies and the intertwining of creole languages, other contact languages, and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies reported reductions of well-established biases in decision making under risk, such as the framing effect, during foreign language (FL) use. These modulations were attributed to the use of FL itself, which putatively entails an increase in emotional distance. A reduced framing effect in this setting, however, might also result from enhanced cognitive control associated with language-switching in mixed-language contexts, an account that has not been tested yet. Here we assess predictions of the 2 accounts in 2 experiments with over 1,500 participants. In Experiment 1, we tested a central prediction of the emotional distance account, namely that the framing effect would be reduced at low, but not high, FL proficiency levels. We found a strong framing effect in the native language, and surprisingly also in the foreign language, independent of proficiency. In Experiment 2, we orthogonally manipulated foreign language use and language switching to concurrently test the validity of both accounts. As in Experiment 1, foreign language use per se had no effect on framing. Crucially, the framing effect was reduced following a language switch, both when switching into the foreign and the native language. Thus, our results suggest that reduced framing effects are not mediated by increased emotional distance in a foreign language, but by transient enhancement of cognitive control, putting the interplay of bilingualism and decision making in a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utopian Eskayan language and script has been spoken for at least three generations by a small community on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Speakers, who use the language in special domains, attribute its creation to a legendary ancestor known as Pinay. In this paper I consider the origins of Eskayan vocabulary, showing how lexical models from Cebuano, Spanish and English account for a small proportion of Eskayan lexemes. The traces of these colonial languages lend important clues to the development of the lexicon as a whole, shedding light on the tumultuous historical context in which Eskayan came into being. Further, the patterning of Eskayan vocabulary reveals Pinay's folklinguistic conceptions about the nature of 'language' and linguistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we examine mass and count in Michif, a language often called a mixed language, which has elements from French (and English) and Cree (and Ojibwe). French has an obvious grammatical mass/count distinction (Doetjes 1997); Cree does not. Michif could therefore display a mass/count distinction, like French, or look like it lacks one, like Cree. In fact, the system is mixed (contra Croft 2003: 58): French-derived nominals display an obvious mass/ count distinction and the Cree-derived nominals do not. Number, numerals and quantifiers disambiguate within the French-derived part of the grammar but do not in the Cree-derived part. Michif has inherited both the French system and the Cree system, reflected in the behaviour of the nominals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Traces of Portuguese in Afro-Yungueño Spanish?" by Danae M. Perez that was published in the previous issue.

A response from the author of the article "Traces of Portuguese in Afro-Yungueño Spanish?" that was published in the previous issue, is presented.

The article discusses the relations between linguistic theory, creolization, language change and language acquisition. It examines the features of source and target languages to identify interferences from one language to the other. It notes that the causes of specific interference phenomena can be determined by linguistic methods.

The colonial history of Australia necessitated contact between nineteenth and twentieth century dialects of English and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages. This has resulted in the emergence of contact languages, some of which have been identified as creoles (e.g. Sandefur 1979, Shnukal 1983) while others have been hidden under the label of 'Aboriginal English', exacerbated by what Young (1997) described as a gap in our knowledge of historical analyses of individual speech varieties. In this paper we provide detailed sociohistorical data on the emergence of a contact language in Woorabinda, an ex-Government Reserve in Queensland. We propose that the data shows that the label 'Aboriginal English' previously applied (Alexander 1968) does not accurately identify the language. Here we compare the sociohistorical data for Woorabinda to similar data for both Kriol, a creole spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia and to Bajan, an 'intermediate creole' of Barbados, to argue that the language spoken in Woorabinda is most likely also an intermediate creole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists who have studied the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero -- which shares a lexicon highly cognate with Spanish -- have noted the introduction of Spanish elements, ranging from conjugated verbs and preverbal clitics to more complex morphosyntactic constructions. The apparent mixing has variously been attributed to decreolization, language attrition, code-switching, interference from Spanish, performance errors, and the possibility that such configurations have been an integral part of Palenquero since its origins. The present study reports the results of experiments conducted in San Basilio de Palenque, to probe Palenqueros' implicit partitioning of Spanish and Palenquero. The results suggest that the Spanish incursions are not all feasibly characterized as code-switching, and do not meet the criteria for decreolization. The introduction of Spanish elements may be the residual effect of a return to the active use of a language that had lain effectively dormant for many years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the properties of the Present Perfect in Barranquenho/ Barranqueño, a contact variety spoken in the southern border of Portugal and Spain. In this variety, the Present Perfect displays a mixed structure: while the forms of auxiliary and participle are from Portuguese, its range of interpretations is not attested in Portuguese but rather in Spanish. As in other domains of the grammar of Barranquenho that have been studied, the Present Perfect displays features attributable to Portuguese and to Spanish. These findings are discussed against hypotheses regarding the emergence of this contact variety as well as the theoretical debate concerning the relation between language contact and second language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the identity and language of three groups which are considered to display hybrid characteristics. These three groups are the Samsams, Baba Nyonya and the Jawi Peranakans. They are predominantly found in the northern part of peninsular Malaysia. As a concept, hybrid refers to the nature of a system which forms a cluster of several subsystems or segments that are different from one another. This hybrid concept is used to explain the identity of the three above groups. Even though the language spoken by the three groups display hybrid characteristics, their linguistic classifications indicate the speech systems of both the Samsams and Jawi Peranakans as dialect, whereas the speech system of the Baba Nyonya as creole. The essay also reviews the linguistic classification of speech systems of these three groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports on language mixing in two Romani communities, with a century-long presence in Finland and in Greece respectively. A quantitative analysis of free-speech data shows that verbs from the contact languages, Finnish and Turkish, are systematically inserted into a dominant Romani speech with their respective Finnish and Turkish tense, mood, aspect, and person morphology. The insertion in language A of non-integrated single words from language B is atypical for classic code-switching and borrowing, but is a well-known mechanism in the creation of mixed languages. Unlike mixed languages, however, where no single dominant language can be identified, Romani is the main component in the corpora under study. We suggest that this type of Romani language mixing illustrates an early stage of mixed language formation that did not develop into an independent mixed language, owing to changes in the sociopolitical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper shows that English in modern Russia, like in many other Expanding Circle countries, is predominantly used in a mix with Russian in the creative (poetic, aesthetic, imaginative, or innovative) function in various domains. In this article, the peculiarities of the creative use of English in the Russian context are highlighted, and the article also discusses the semantic and pragmatic aspects of English-Russian language play, demonstrating that English can be played on either just for entertainment or for conveying complex ideological meanings, determined by controversial attitudes to Westernization and Englishization in Russian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tradition of classical rhetoric coined the term barbarolexis for the use of hybrid language and considered it a grammatical defect that should be avoided. The literature of the high Middle Ages inherited this perception, but paved the way for the consideration of multilingualism as a stylistic feature and for the production of bilingual Latin-Romance texts. Troubadour lyrics used multilingualism as a means of raising the artistic profile of poetry, a practice begun by Occitanian troubadours, who used multilingualism to indicate which Romance languages were worthy of attaining the status of literary languages. And in their wake, the Galician Portuguese incorporated fragments of Occitanian, French or Latin into their songs ( cantigas), as a means of reasserting the artistic and aristocratic nature of their poetry. The growing favour enjoyed by multilingualism in the literature of the time should be linked to the development of the social class of the clergy, who had the monopoly of Latin and the written word, but who were also capable of expressing themselves in several languages and of placing this linguistic competence at the service of the incipient royal chancelleries. The rise of the clerical spirit therefore prompted a change in the negative perception of multilingualism, which until then had been associated with the myth of the Tower of Babel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we look at words for bodies of water (e.g., words for 'lake' and 'river') in a large number of a posteriori and mixed artificial languages. After presenting the data and briefly discussing some of them, we analyze some aspects of them, including which meanings seem to be more basic than others. For example, words meaning 'river' appear to be unmarked with respect to words meaning similar, but smaller, bodies of water (e.g., 'brook'), since some artificial languages derive the latter from the former, but no languages in our sample derive the latter from the former. This sort of analysis can be applied to other semantic fields in artificial languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study shows that the extended projection of nominals in Jamaican Creole (JC) is composed of a rich array of hierarchically organized functional projections, in line with cartographic research (Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2004, Belletti 2004). The functional material identified strikes parallelisms with that previously reported for the clausal domain of JC, both in their distributive and interpretative properties and their tendency to overtly realize either their specifier or their head (Durrleman 2001, 2005, 2015). We argue that the identified nominal architecture, coupled with the last resort phenomenon of doubly filling both head and specifier positions (Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, Koopman 1993, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Giusti 1998, Starke 2004), has implications for another construction in Creole, namely 'bare sentences' (Dechaine 1991). These sentences give rise to telicity effects depending on, amongst other things, properties of the internal argument, whose high functional structure must be made visible by respecting the doubly filled XP filter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intense Berber-Songhay language contact that produced Northern Songhay cannot be understood adequately without taking into account the existence of a Northern Songhay language outside the Azawagh valley — Korandje, in Algeria — showing few, if any, signs of Tuareg contact. This article proposes a new explanation based on linguistic, epigraphic, and historical data: Western Berber-speaking Masūfa, present throughout northern Mali around 1200, founded Tabelbala to facilitate a new trade route; they chose Northern Songhay speakers, already a distinct group, for their experience in oasis farming and possibly copper mining. As Masūfa influence waned, the language was reoriented towards North Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caló (also known as Romanó) is the mixed speech that Spanish Gitanos developed by combining a Romani lexicon with Spanish morphosyntax (Catalan or Basque in the regional varieties). For two centuries, Caló has been portrayed as being in a terminal state, but there is a lack of data on the knowledge and use of Caló by Gitano speakers. To begin filling this void, we developed a specific questionnaire that includes 355 key Caló words with their Spanish translations, and we applied it to an intentional sample of 68 Gitanos and Gitanas in Andalusia. Our informants recognised 129 words on average, a knowledge greater but also more varied than expected. Among the younger generations, however, few remembered more than 80 words. Caló is not learned by children as a mother tongue, nor considered a complete language. In this article we offer a model of levels of knowledge of the Caló lexicon by Gitano speakers that can be tested in other regions. We also advance a tentative proposal of three main social environments in which Caló is learned, and the social and cultural relations that predominate in each of them. Additionally, we list the words that are known by a majority of speakers and the semantic fields to which they belong, and provide some examples of the mixed discourses the informants produced when prompted with the terms from the questionnaire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "The Tin Drum" by Günter Grass is presented. Topics discussed include novels' thematic framework and formal design; theoretical framework comprising reflections of philosophers Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno on storyteller and narrator; and novels hybrid language such as Polish, Cassubian and German.

A mixed-language phenomenon such as language shift has been acknowledged to constitute one of the hallmarks of the manuscripts in which the members of the City of London livery companies recorded their financial transactions during the late medieval period. Despite these texts having been studied by scholars in very diverse disciplines, inconsistencies pertaining to the exact date when some companies shifted from Latin and/or French to English as their official language of record keeping have prevailed in the literature. This article is intended to shed light on the evolution over time of language shift in different livery companies, by revisiting the two single studies which, albeit marginally, have so far touched on this topic (Heather Creaton's [1976] edition and translation of the London Mercers' Wardens' Accounts and Lisa Jefferson's [2003] edition and translation of the London Goldsmiths' Wardens' Accounts and Court Minutes), and by contrasting each perspective with linguistic information from first-hand sources. I conclude that there remains a need for a much more consistent and focused approach to the issue of language shift in the City of London livery companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sheng and Engsh, Kenya's two major hybrid urban languages, are the subject of this wide-ranging enquiry into the sociolinguistic realities of contemporary Kenya and their impact on politics, media, literature, and popular culture. While the precise boundaries of 'Kenyan English' and, even more so, 'Kenyan Swahili' are hard to establish, English and Swahili form the matrix languages of Engsh and Sheng, which the author prefers to call hybrid 'codes' rather than languages. While Engsh is mainly spoken by upwardly mobile middle-class youth in Western Nairobi, Sheng is spoken by a much larger proportion of urban youth and has evolved from a stigmatized 'ghetto' code in eastern Nairobi into a prestigious code that symbolizes ideological affinity, in-group identity, coolness, generational rebellion, linguistic innovation, and rejection of tribal identities. Yet both languages have contributed to the expression of new forms of cultural meaning and to the construction of a linguistic third space between the global, represented by Western images and artefacts, and the local, represented by Kenyan /African symbols and languages. The growing importance of Sheng and Engsh in Kenyan literature and popular culture blurs established boundaries between Swahili and English, creates a space of hybridity in which multiple voices can be heard, and is likely to eventually expand the literary space in East Africa as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]