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Languages, Volume 9, Issue 12

2024 December - 30 articles

Cover Story: Heritage language (HL) research has primarily focused on adults and children, with teenagers receiving less attention despite adolescence being crucial for language development and maintenance. This study examines morphosyntactic divergence in the HL usage of Estonian–Swedish bilingual teenagers (aged 12–17). Data from 21 first- and second-generation heritage speakers revealed low but consistent rates of non-standard usage in certain domains of morphosyntax. Our analysis draws on the example of two structures: object marking and experiencer constructions with the verb meeldima ‘to like/please’. The findings suggest that divergent usage stems from cross-linguistic influence, simplification, and input frequency. We also found that the speakers’ place of birth and home language differentially affects usage of the different constructions. View this paper
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Articles (30)

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
4,107 Views
12 Pages

23 December 2024

African anthroponyms are a rich repository of the socio-cultural materials of ethnolinguistic groups. They reveal speakers’ collective beliefs, norms, traditions, practices, philosophies and worldview. Among other things, literature on Igbo per...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,857 Views
22 Pages

21 December 2024

The literature on bilingual language development often reports cases of cross-linguistic interaction of the two languages being acquired. In this paper, we investigate possible cross-linguistic interaction outputs in the development of branching onse...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
3,334 Views
36 Pages

20 December 2024

Italian has a length contrast in its series of voiced and voiceless obstruents while also presenting phonetic differences across regional varieties. Northern varieties of the language, including Veneto Italian (VI), are described as maintaining the v...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4,186 Views
25 Pages

20 December 2024

The effects of individual differences factors on second language (L2) pragmatic competence are of interest to researchers because the development of L2 pragmatic competence is directly related to learners’ personal traits and their knowledge of...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3,719 Views
24 Pages

20 December 2024

While both French and Spanish have complex onsets, the languages differ in the variety and distribution of clusters allowed as well as in the realization of voiced stops. The present study examines the effects of C1 voicing, place of articulation, an...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,835 Views
18 Pages

19 December 2024

This study examines how Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) learners acquire the Chinese stance marker haihao with a focus on type and saliency. A total of 56 participants took part in the research, including 28 English-speaking CSL learners and 28 na...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,735 Views
26 Pages

Exploring Tonal Variation Using Dialect Tonometry

  • Ho Wang Matthew Sung and
  • Jelena Prokić

18 December 2024

Most research on dialectometry so far primarily focuses on European languages. Within these studies, analyses on the phonetic level predominantly focus on segments. A lack of studies on languages outside of Europe means that the variation in many les...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6,612 Views
23 Pages

17 December 2024

This article presents an updated view of the language history of Vietnamese from its native Austroasiatic roots, including key historical phonological, morphological, and syntactic features and developments; a characterization of its Austroasiatic et...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
9,820 Views
20 Pages

17 December 2024

Philippine English (PhE) is a dynamic variety of the English language influenced by local languages and cultures. Despite its widespread use, PhE acceptability studies have often focused on Metro Manila, neglecting regional variations. This study aim...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,701 Views
38 Pages

Exploring Bilingual Adaptation to Structural Innovations: Evidence from Canadian French

  • Foteini Karkaletsou,
  • Alina Kholodova and
  • Shanley E. M. Allen

13 December 2024

Bilinguals have been shown to adapt to syntactic innovations (i.e., structures that deviate from the standard grammar) either by producing such structures more or by processing them faster after repeated exposure. However, research on whether they ad...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
3,169 Views
18 Pages

10 December 2024

The Polish diaspora is represented worldwide. Yet, little is known about Polish language and culture maintenance in Finland. However, the language practices of Polish families living there are worth being investigated, particularly in relation to lan...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,946 Views
15 Pages

9 December 2024

This article explores the order of possessives with respect to nouns in Megleno-Romanian, a branch of Daco-Romance, and Eolian, a variety of southern Italo-Romance. Both are in intense language contact situations, the former with the south Slavonic v...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,577 Views
19 Pages

6 December 2024

Low transitive constructions are ubiquitous in English conversation and as such can be considered “typical” clauses. This article furthers this claim by showing that these constructions are also most frequent in a different genre: argumen...

  • Review
  • Open Access
1 Citations
2,649 Views
13 Pages

Greek as a Heritage Language in Germany

  • Angelika Golegos and
  • Theodoros Marinis

3 December 2024

Research on heritage languages (HLs) has expanded considerably within the last 10 years worldwide. Despite the large waves of migration from Greece to other countries in Europe, the Americas, and Australia within the 20th century, research on Greek a...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,447 Views
23 Pages

30 November 2024

Previous studies have shown that language learners’ auditory word recognition behavior provides evidence for independent contributions of perceptual and phonolexical representations, and learners’ patterns of auditory word recognition hav...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,879 Views
19 Pages

29 November 2024

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks have been used to assess word retrieval speed and reading speed. However, measures of reading rate may be affected by structural differences between languages. This study was designed to measure talking speed diff...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,572 Views
19 Pages

28 November 2024

The article explores the visible, semiotic use of languages in two schoolscapes on the Arctic borderland and how these schoolscapes stimulate the learning of languages and cultures. The schools are situated in a historically multilingual area with se...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,519 Views
37 Pages

28 November 2024

Heritage language (HL) research has investigated adults and children, while adolescents have garnered far less attention, despite adolescence being a crucial time in the development of idiolects and identities, and, hence, also for language maintenan...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,863 Views
17 Pages

Children’s Interpretation of Conditional Connectives

  • Duygu Sarısoy,
  • Semih C. Aktepe and
  • Sena Gül

28 November 2024

Previous studies have shown that the uni-conditional marker if can be interpreted biconditionally in some contexts. Similarly, the biconditional marker unless may receive a biconditional interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (e.g., eve...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,852 Views
29 Pages

Rhotic Variation in Brazilian Portuguese

  • Michael Ramsammy and
  • Beatriz Raposo de Medeiros

27 November 2024

We present acoustic and articulatory data from an experiment designed to test the phonetic variability of rhotics in Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on the São Paulo variety. Ultrasound tongue imaging was used to examine the realisation of rhot...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
3,906 Views
23 Pages

27 November 2024

The contrast between languages such as Italian that allow subjects of tensed sentences to be null (i.e., pro-drop languages) and those like French that do not (i.e., non-pro-drop languages) is a classic issue for comparative syntactic research. Never...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,247 Views
16 Pages

26 November 2024

Despite the growing interest in the study of intonation in bilingual regions in France, the case of Basque French remains under-investigated. Previous research on yes-no questions in standard French has shown that rising contours are the prototypical...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
3,593 Views
21 Pages

26 November 2024

Children born preterm are at an elevated risk of language delays compared to children born full-term. However, there is a dearth of research investigating language outcomes in premature children exposed to more than one language. There is also limite...

  • Review
  • Open Access
3 Citations
8,624 Views
16 Pages

26 November 2024

Adult readers’ cognitive effort during text processing is often associated with their reading comprehension, learning ability, and achievement scores. The aim of this review is to examine and analyze the current literature on the use of eye tra...

  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
5,661 Views
14 Pages

25 November 2024

Arabic phonotactics significantly differ from English phonotactics in that they usually follow a framework that forbids the presence of consonant clusters in syllabic onsets. This study examines the relationship between Arabic-speaking EFL learners&r...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
4,279 Views
20 Pages

25 November 2024

(1) Background: The article addresses the issue of geospatial dynamics of Lithuanian–Slavic ethnolinguistic boundaries in Southeastern Lithuania (SEL) that were influenced by long-term Lithuanian–Slavic linguistic competition. The aim of...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,707 Views
17 Pages

25 November 2024

In this work, we analyze the narrow focus strategies in the written Italian of university students. Although prosodic prominence is a characterizing feature of focus—functionally more important than morphosyntactic marking, according to some au...

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Languages - ISSN 2226-471X