The elaboration of the theoretical notion of communicative competence reflects a growing awareness of the importance of pragmatic knowledge in achieving mastery of a second language. Such awareness includes the recognition that teaching language effectively includes teaching culture in the most fundamental sense. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics to link theoretical work on ...

Within the Asian region, Singapore has long been seen as a leader within the field of higher education, with an unmatched record of success in implementing English-medium instruction (EMI) at all levels of education, including colleges and universities. This present study reports on a large-scale survey carried out at one of Singapore’s major universities on the use of English as a teaching med...

Most computational sociolinguistics studies have focused on phonological and lexical variation. We present the first large-scale study of syntactic variation among demographic groups (age and gender) across several languages. We harvest data from online user-review sites and parse it with universal dependencies. We show that several age and gender-specific variations hold across languages, for ...

Linguistic geography and sociolinguistics have been widely employed among dialectologists in postwar Japan. Over the last ten years, computer-processing of field survey data has become more and more common. The author originally developed the GLAPS processor to produce linguistic atlases by computer. GLAPS has since been modified to ,produce glottograms and crosstables and to handle sociolingui...

Human beings not only created language, but also become the users; therefore, the study on linguistics should not only be made from the perspective of symbol, but more should be people-oriented. But the most significant difference between human beings is the gender difference, so people of different genders from either physiology or psychology in the use of language will have their own gender c...

This paper presents a summary of developments in Austronesian linguistics during the period 1991–2002. The aim is to introduce a general linguistic public to the synchronic study of Austronesian languages. General typological characteristics and interesting features of Austronesian phonology, lexicons, morphology and syntax are discussed, followed by a summary of how these characteristics, or i...

The study of phonetic variation and change in sociolinguistics predominantly focuses on ‘the vernacular’ or at least on speech occurring in spontaneous conversations. While such studies are obviously vital to understand the patterns of change in a speech community, it is also desirable to understand how patterns of variation and change develop in a ‘prestige’ standard language which may functio...