With a focus on an under-studied group of immigrants in the UK, this paper examines Iranian families’ language ideologies and practices at home in relation to Persian acquisition and maintenance for their children. Working within a family language policy (FLP) framework, we draw on sociolinguistic data from semi-structured interviews with eighteen mothers to understand how parental beliefs, their ...

In this article, we discuss the perceptions of researchers who work on heritage language bilingualism (HLB), educators who teach heritage speakers (HSs), and, crucially, HSs themselves regarding the nature of bilingualism in general as well as HLB specifically. Despite the fact that all groups are invested in HLB and that researchers and educators tend to have a similar basic understanding of HLB ...

In the Romance languages, definite plural articles (e.g., le rane ‘the frogs’) are generally ambiguous between a generic and a specific interpretation, and speakers must reconstruct the intended interpretation through the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. Following the “polar bear” paradigm implemented in Czypionka & Kupisch (2019)’s investigation on German, the goal of the present study is ...

The present study addresses three concerns: (1) presents the areal classification of Ethiosemitic languages; (2) identifies major determinants of the distance among the languages; (3) challenges previous genealogical classifications of Ethiosemitic languages. To address these objectives, cluster analyses were performed on randomly selected 147 word lists. Multidimensional scaling was employed for ...

Agreement attraction, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g., <i>*The key to the cabinets were rusty</i>), has been influential in motivating models of memory access during language comprehension. It is contested, however, whether such effects arise due to a faulty representation of relevant morphosyntactic features, or as a result of memory retrieval. Existing studies of ...

The Covid-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of public libraries’ buildings in Norway in March 2020 as was the case in almost every other European country. This article investigates the situation for the public library in Tromsø in the period from 12 March 2020 and towards a gradual reopening of the library building to the public in April the same year. The lockdown of the physical library building led ...

Abstract The current thesis examines the themes trauma and orphanhood and how they are connected in Toni Morrison’s two novels A Mercy (2008) and Beloved (1987), respectively. I will examine how traumatic experiences and the notion of both literal and cultural orphanhood affects the community, and how this has changed from the story in A Mercy being set in the late 17th century and to the story in ...

This article analyzes Russian aspectual prefixes from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. First, a general schema is advanced that involves a trajector, a landmark, and a relation connecting the two. Second, it is argued that there are con- ditions on the trajector involving an observer and a domain of accessibility and that the trajector of the prefix is not necessarily the same as the trajector ...

This thesis compares the media habits of 86 Norwegian youth with their English proficiency. The goal is to investigate how much English we learn by e.g. watching TV, playing video games or listening to music. The 86 participants were between 16 and 20 years old, and answered a survey where they specified the number of hours they spent on an average day on each type of media. After this, they took ...

This paper investigates spontaneous production from 50 speakers of Norwegian heritage language in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech and studies the interplay between four linguistic properties: possessives and double definiteness, verb second word order, grammatical gender, and the amount of language mixing. It is shown that speakers cluster in the sense that some speakers produce more Norwegian-like ...