In the last decade of the nineteenth century, when pidginized Sango became the vehicular language of the Ubangi River basin, colonization by the French and Belgians was accomplished with little direct linguistic contact between the whites and the indigenous populations but with great rellance on the real or assumed linguistic skills of their foreign African personnel. The whites' use of African languages was limited with respect to the referentlal function but powerful with respect to the expressive or affective. (Colonization, Africa, Sango, pidginization, ethnography of communication)

This paper sketches Spanish colonial policies toward Southern Peruvian Quechua in order to identify long-term trends and constants. I emphasize the following conjunctures in the debate on the status of the indigenous languages: (1) the simultaneous efforts to restrict the inroads of bilingualism in the legal and political domain and to encourage bilingualism among local headmen so as to facilitate indirect rule in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; (2) the debate as to the role of the vernacular in religious education and missionary work in the same period, a debate in which the position favoring use of the vernacular held out for a time against calls for forced liquidation of the indigenous languages; (3) the ascendancy of the position calling for liquidation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and (4) the role of Southern Peruvian Quechua as a nationalist emblem during the eighteenth century.

These conjunctures have considerable relevance today. Differences in vocabulary and ideological justification have obscured the continuity between colonial and modern language policy. The issues debated, the limits of the alternatives proposed as solutions, and even the practical efforts carried out on behalf of alternative policies, have been surprisingly perdurable. For four and a half centuries the “Andean language debate,” the issues and terms of language policy, have continued to have at their center the question of whether or not the Quechua have a right to exist as a separate community. (Language policy, colonialism, South America, Quechua)

Every speech community boasts an array of devices for characterizing communicative events. These native metacommunicative repertoires are culturally patterned in terms of both use and acquisition. Interviews meet with varying degrees of success by virtue of their relative (in-)compatibility with the norms underlying such events. An analysis of the way in which Spanish speakers in rural New Mexico gain metacommunicative competence suggests that native metacommunicative routines provide a rich source of sociolinguistic and social/cultural data and that awareness of these repertoires can assist fieldworkers in using interviews more appropriately and effectively. (Interview techniques, metacommunication, acquisition of sociolinguistic competence, ethnopoetics, New Mexican Spanish)

The style dimension of language variation has not been adequately explained in sociolinguistic theory. Stylistic or intraspeaker variation derives from and mirrors interspeaker variation. Style is essentially speakers' response to their audience. In audience design, speakers accommodate primarily to their addressee. Third persons – auditors and overhearers – affect style to a lesser but regular degree. Audience design also accounts for bilingual or bidialectal code choices. Nonaudience factors like topic and setting derive their effect by association with addressee types. These style shifts are mainly responsive – caused by a situational change. Speakers can also use style as initiative, to redefine the existing situation. Initiative style is primarily referee design: divergence from the addressee and towards an absent reference group. Referee design is especially prevalent in mass communication. (Sociolinguistic variation, code-switching. bilingualism, accommodation theory, ethnography of communication, mass communication)

Among the Weyéwa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, place names are not merely labels or verbal tools for referring to locations, but rather resources for the construction of discourse. As such, they figure in Weyéwa ritual speech events in two fundamental ways. First, an individual place name can be the topic of etymological speculation, in which the verbal account of the history of a name is an exercise in the establishment of authority. Second, place names frequently occur in lists, as syntagmatic chains which serve to guide the form of ritual speech events. This use of toponyms not only characterizes Weyéwa epic narratives, but rites of misfortune, prayers, and songs. These genres utilize a “path” or “journey” metaphor in which points of the itinerary are spatially anchored by means of place names. (Ritual speech, narrative, authority, place names)

A description of the verbal and nonverbal characteristics of the language of stock auctioneers and a comparison with oral poetry show that these auctioneers use an oral formulaic technique. It is suggested that this technique is a response to performance constraints which place a heavy load on short term memory. This hypothesis accounts for features of stock auction speech which are not recognized as characteristically oral formulaic as well as those which are. It also sheds light on two problems that have exercised students of oral literature: the effect of literacy and the role of memorization. These findings support the view that the difference between traditional oral formulaic and ordinary spoken language is one of degree, not kind. (Oral literature, register, stylistics, situational constraints, psychological constraints, formulae)

Talk that is argumentative in form can have sociable functions for members of some groups. In sociable argument, speakers repeatedly disagree, remain nonaligned with each other, and compete for interactional goods. Yet they do so in a nonserious way, and in ways which actually display their solidarity and protect their intimacy. The analysis raises questions about the adequacy of many current views about conversational cooperation, showing that the levels at which cooperation (and competition) exist are not always overt. The analysis also demonstrates the cultural relativity of norms of evaluation about dispute. (Conflict, conversation, cooperation, culture, evaluation, frames, key, pragmatics, rhetoric)

A particular factor in linguistic variation which has often been connected to female speech is politeness, as first described by Lakoff (1973a, 1973b), manifested not only by means of intonation, but also through the use of particular formulae of courtesy, through the use of tag questions at the end of interrogatives, and the use of longer, less direct and peremptory sentences.

There is a lack of perception of the interrelatedness of the three fish-naming systems: the scientific, the common, and the folk naming systems. Ichthyologists and regulators of fish names do not sufficiently appreciate the motivations and intricacies of folk naming systems or problems of professional and commercial use of names. At the common name level, there seems to be little exchange of information concerning problems and solutions, objectives, and procedures. Also, communities and networks that use the same language(s) seek different solutions to the same or equivalent naming problems. The authors list some common problems and offer a tentative classification. (Taxonomy, naming, language planning, fisheries)

Aspects of the precontact ontology of the Yurok Indians of northwestern California may be explored through analysis of lexical and semantic shifts that occur between two speech registers in Yurok: “ordinary” speech and an auxiliary. “high,” or esoteric, speech style. In the “high” register, use of which was the prerogative of a social and spiritual elite, a variety of mechanisms are implemented in altering “ordinary” lexation and in attributing different meanings to parts of the “ordinary” lexicon. These include circumlocution, antonymy, attribution, and, most significantly, the shifting of referential focus. Semantic shifts are systematic within specifiable lexical sets and implicitly comprise subtle ontological exegeses. (Ritual languages, speech registers, translation, world view, Native North America)

The study reported here reports data on the validity of a Canadian version of Labov's “index of linguistic insecurity.” Data were gathered from a random sample of two census tracts in Winnipeg, Canada. Both Labov's original test and a new Canadian equivalent test were given to the sample of eighty adults. Scores on the two tests were highly correlated, indicating high criterion validity of the Canadian test. Also, social class and gender differences followed the same pattern as in Labov's study, with the lower middle class and females showing higher levels of linguistic insecurity. The use of the New York City test in Winnipeg is discussed, and some details concerning Canadian English are presented. (Language attitudes, linguistic insecurity, Canadian English, social class)

The sociolinguistic pressures now exerted on the Gullah-speaking communities match the general conditions that DeCamp (1971b) described for postcreole speech communities or communities in which the traditional language variety is decreolizing or dying. There is a correspondence between the dominant official language and the creole, and there is sufficient breakdown in the formerly rigid social stratification brought on by educational programs and other acculturative forces to cause social mobility and to motivate large numbers of Gullah speakers to modify their speech in the direction of standard English. Preliminary research of the processes involved in this modification activity reveals that certain features of the pronominal system are elaborating and dying while certain other features of this system are remaining static and unchanged. Elaboration is well underway in the nominative case, for example, while in the objective case elaboration has barely begun. (Sociolinguistic pressures, postcreole, decreolizing or dying, social mobility, certain features, elaborating, static)

An analysis of the salutations of seventy-five letters of application for an academic position at a large southwestern university showed that a majority of the writers (forty-seven as compared to twenty-eight) had become sensitive to the problems of beginning a letter to an unknown person or group with a masculine greeting. The twenty-eight applicants who used masculine greetings used only four different forms. But the forty-seven applicants who chose to use sex-neutral greetings had no well-established pattern to follow. Hence, they used nineteen different forms, which shows that the matter is currently in a state of experimentation. From an analysis of the candidates' supporting data, it was clear that the writers who used the sex-neutral greetings were the better qualified candidates. Females were more inclined than males to use sex-neutral greetings. And there was a correlation between the part of the country where a candidate lived and whether or not a sex-neutral greeting was chosen. (Sexism, diachronic linguistics, regional dialectology)

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” W.I. Thomas's insight along with the Whorfian Hypothesis provide us with a clue to the immense significance of language as the essential key to the social construction of reality. This article explores linguistic implications for transformations in language usage as applied to gender-role and the cultural ideal of equality. (Definition of the situation, Whorfian Hypothesis, nonsexist language strategies, social transformation)