this study aimed to investigate the effects of economic status and level of education on the choice of address terms by iranian couples in shahrekord, iran. to this end, 50 couples were selected, based on their educational and economic statuses, and were studied in terms of their choice of address terms. a discourse completion task was used as the data elicitation technique and chi-square was c...

This chapter will shift the focus of attention away from the problems of understanding linguistic change that have occupied the discussion so far in order to examine the opposite situation: stable linguistic variation. The first step in a considered study of linguistic change is not the examination of change, but rather an investigation of the sociolinguistic patterns in the particular speech c...

Many scholars anticipate that online interaction will have a long-term effect on the evolution of language, but little linguistic research yet addresses this question directly. In sociolinguistics, social network relations are recognized as the principal vehicle of language change. In this paper, I develop a social network approach to online language variation and change through qualitative and...

Arabic, which is the fifth world language with regard to the number of speakers, geographical spread, and socio-literary prestige (Weber, 1997), similar to all other languages whose orthographical system is not based on Latin symbols has been subject to various types of changes resulted from the language contact with English as the default language used in the computer mediated communication su...

One of the most commonly mentioned features of informal spoken Iranian Persian in contrast to its formal or written form is the pronunciation of /ān/ as [un], as in [tehrun] ‘Tehran’, and [iruni] ‘Iranian’. While several aspects of this phenomenon have been reported, a comprehensive treatment of the dialectal, sociolinguistic, phonological and phonetic aspects has not appeared. This paper attem...

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language’s sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and the relationship between ‘communities’ and ‘langu...

This paper introduces the term ‘supervernacular’ as a descriptor for new forms of semiotic codes emerging in the context of technology-driven globalization processes. Supervernaculars are widespread codes used in communities that do not correspond to ‘traditional’ sociolinguistic speech communities, but as deterritorialized and transidiomatic communites that, nonetheless, appear to create a sol...