This article explores area studies contributions to sociolinguistics by examining Sunni reformers’ use of the Arabic term al-qāida, or a ‘‘pragmatic base.” Material is drawn from an audiocassette collection formerly owned by Usāma Bin Lādı n. Divergent approaches to the qāida suggest that the term functions a base for many forms of spatial, temporal, social, and ethical orientation. Much of the...

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether different kinds of variation lead to different cogni...

The emerging interdisciplinary work in language politics and language policy and planning studies demonstrates a rising interest among researchers in the interface between sociolinguistics, political science and philosophy. Much of the resulting cross-disciplinary work, however, tends to focus on the subject matters (politics, language) themselves rather than explore the broader issues that tra...

No português brasileiro, o imperativo de 2ª pessoa do singular expressa-se modo variável por meio formas indicativo ( deixa/recebe/abre ) e subjuntivo deixe/receba/abra (FARACO, 1982; PAREDES SILVA et al. , 2000; SCHERRE, 2007; RUMEU, 2016; CARVALHO, 2020). Neste artigo, a partir cartas mineiras oitocentistas novecentistas autógrafas, mapeia-se um conjunto dados imperativas, com objetivo explor...

Abstract The evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to adoption that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented highlights three types in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform and centralization. Then results two perceptual experiments are...

This commentary reviews the papers in this volume as successful attempts at unthinking a legacy of nation-state sociolinguistics, enabled by developments in Europe-based sociolinguistics and US-based linguistic anthropology. After offering arguments on why superdiversity should best be seen as an advanced and synthetic perspective on language and society and pointing out its fundamentally criti...