The English spoken by Creole African Americans in southern Louisiana reveals language change in the shift from French to English and the persistence of local forms of English. The overview of the socioeconomic history of Louisiana details the number of ethnic groups and the fluctuating social and linguistic relations among them over time. The study sample consists of 42 African Americans with French ancestry living in Opelousas in St. Landry Parish and Parks in St. Martin Parish. The high rate of the absence of glides in the vowels (ai, au, oi, i, u, e, o) is maintained across all generations of the 24 male speakers described. A possible source of glide absence, such as foreign language influence, is explored but found unconvincing. A more plausible explanation is that glide absence was part of the English brought to the area by native speakers in the early 19th century.We acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation (BSR-0091823) as well as the coding work done by two research assistants Vicky Polston and David Herrell. We also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the text and their valuable comments.

We test the hypothesis that single other-language-origin words are nonce loans (Sankoff, Poplack, & Vanniarajan, 1990) as opposed to code-switches in a corpus-based study of English-origin nouns occurring spontaneously in New Mexican Spanish discourse. The object of study is determinerless nouns, whose status is superficially ambiguous. The study shows that, even with typologically similar languages, variable rule analysis can reveal details of the grammar that constitute conflict sites, even when relative frequencies for variants are similar. Though the rate of bare nouns is identical, their distribution patterns in Spanish and English differ. Linguistic conditioning parallel with the former, and at odds with the latter, shows that the contentious items are loanwords. In information flow terms (Dubois, 1980; Thompson, 1997), it is not lack of grammatical integration but nonreferential uses of nonce-loan nouns to form recipient-language predicates that is manifested in zero determination.We are grateful to Neddy A. Vigil for access to the New Mexico–Colorado Spanish Survey tapes. Mayra Cortes-Torres, Matt Alba, Jens Clegg, and Mark Waltemire helped with data transcription and extraction. This work was supported by a University of New Mexico Research Allocations Committee grant to Torres Cacoullos (#02-01). Work was completed during a postdoctoral fellowship for Torres Cacoullos at the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory, for which we thank Shana Poplack. A preliminary version was presented at NWAV-31, Stanford University, October 2002.

This study focuses on language variation in three families with small children in Antwerp, an officially Dutch-speaking large city in Belgium. Language variation is mainly considered here in terms of whether utterances contain local dialect features or not. Phonetic transcriptions of recorded natural family interaction were coded for language variation on an utterance-by-utterance basis. The following distinctions in usage emerge: “local” utterances containing dialect elements tend to be used when older children and adults in the family address each other. “Neutral” forms, which are common all over Flanders, may also be used, whereas “distal” features, which are imports from a Dutch variety outside Flanders, are to be avoided. However, when older children and adults address the younger members of the family, they increase their use of neutral forms, substantially reduce their use of local forms, and occasionally use distal forms. The younger children use mainly utterances categorized as neutral, dependent on who they are addressing. Implications of this variation across family members for language change are discussed.Financial support for the project reported on in this article comes from the Belgian National Science Foundation (KAN-grant to the author) and the Research Council of the University of Antwerp/UIA. Many thanks to the families, schools, and students who helped at the data collection stage. I also thank Wolfgang Wölck and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

This study is part of a larger unpublished work. The data collection is based on the Labovian sociolinguistic interview: 200 randomly selected Wolof speakers were interviewed and recorded for 20 minutes in Senegal. They were divided into two groups: 100 subjects over 50 years old and 100 subjects between 20 and 30 years old. Each group comprised 50 males and 50 females. The number of loanwords from Arabic, French, and English in subjects' vernacular was statistically analyzed using the Wilcoxon (rank sums) test across three registers (cultural, political, and religious), age groups, and gender. The study argues that loanwords in Wolof reflect the social groups in Senegal and the prestige of lender-languages. First, the article discusses the influence of foreign languages in Senegal. Second, it examines the social status of loanwords from these languages. Third, it shows the relationships between loanwords, registers, age group, and gender in Senegal.