Sociolinguistics - Science topic

Hi, that's a great question! You're absolutely right in observing that much of the research on sociolinguistic competence tends to focus on speech acts. One reason for this focus could indeed be that speech acts are more easily measurable and observable in controlled environments. Speech acts, as a component of pragmatic competence, often have clearer boundaries and can be studied through concrete examples of language use, such as requests, apologies, or commands, making them more accessible for empirical studies.

In contrast, other aspects of sociolinguistic competence—such as understanding and applying cultural norms, levels of formality, politeness strategies, and variations in language use across different social groups—can be more challenging to assess. These aspects are often more implicit and deeply intertwined with cultural knowledge, making it harder to design studies with quantifiable outcomes. Researchers might prefer speech acts because they can more easily collect data through surveys, role-plays, or discourse analysis, and draw conclusions based on observable patterns.

That being said, there is growing interest in the broader aspects of sociolinguistic competence, especially in multicultural and multilingual settings where effective communication goes beyond just performing speech acts appropriately. Research on how learners navigate social norms, use language appropriately in varying contexts, and develop an understanding of sociocultural nuances could provide rich insights that complement the studies on speech acts.

It would be interesting to see more studies focused on these broader, harder-to-measure aspects of sociolinguistic competence, as they play a crucial role in language proficiency and real-world communication.

Dear Stéphane Ndondji Kaludi,

Thank you for your thought-provoking question. Indeed, it is possible to carry out sociolinguistic studies using data from chats on social networks. These platforms provide a wealth of spontaneous language data, reflecting various sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender, geographic origin, and multilingualism, as you rightly pointed out.

To address such studies, the methodology would need to carefully consider data collection, ensuring the ethical handling of participants' consent and anonymity, particularly given the personal nature of social media interactions. Data analysis could involve both qualitative and quantitative approaches, depending on the research focus. Tools like corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic variation analysis would be invaluable for examining the interplay of linguistic features across different sociolinguistic categories.

If you're considering writing or co-writing an article on this topic, it would be a fascinating exploration of how digital communication reflects and shapes sociolinguistic realities. I'd be interested in discussing this further and possibly collaborating on this project.

Best regards,

Prof. Gutemberg Rapôso

sociolinguistics is quite a varied subject to delve deep in .Godspeed

Bien sûr, nous avons effectué des recherches similaires sur les sociolectes. Nous avons étudié la présence d'expressions associées à l'argot militaire dans les mémoires d'un vétéran de l'armée. Nous en avons fait plus, mais cette étude est en français. Elle vient juste d'être publiée. N'hésitez pas à me contacter et je vous l'enverrai lorsque j'aurai la version finale.

هل يمكن الحديث عن بناء نظام جديد للكتابة، فالامور التعبيرية العاطفية والنفسية والتفاعلية ناقصة جدا وفق ما تتضمنه منظومة علامات الترقيم العالمية . !

ألا يمكن أن نلاحظ أن علامة تعجب مزدوجة غير كافية للتعبير عن الصدمة!! وعلامات تعجب متتالية لا يمكنها التعبير عن الذهول!!!!!!!!

نحن بحاجة لنهضة كتابية رقمية وليس مجرد التعديل والترميم .

فتح حوار مع صاحب المنشور، أو مراسلة خاصة للأفراد عينة الدراسة، وقراءة حقيقة ما يقومون بنشره من حقائق ، واساليبهم اللغوية في العرض والإقناع.

Some use case scenarios that come to mind:

1. Social Network Analysis: AI can analyze the structure of online social networks and how language flows within them. This helps us understand how social connections and communities influence language use.

2. Analysis of Speech, Text, etc.: AI-based Natural Language Processing techniques like named entity recognition, different types of topic modeling, etc., can be used to identify patterns and topics from the corpus.

3. Machine Translation, Dialect identification

4. Sentiment Analysis

I hope others can add some recent use cases as well.

That is a very important aspect, with respect to terminological content and social context. Good work !

A seminal study of the future expressions:

Suzanne Fleischman, The future in thought and language. Diachronic evidence from Romance. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 36.) Cambridge Univ. Press : Cambridge 1982

The book is confronted with facts (not only in the Romance languages) and not with psychological speculations.

Grounded theory will be greatly appreciated in Comparative studies. You can look out for: Strauss, A.L and Corbin J. M(1990), Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques, Bradby, H. (2002). Translating culture and Language.. Birks, M. and Mills, J. (2011). Grounded theory: Practice Guide.

I intend to use open-ended questions and target linguistics students, although I haven't yet begun to formulate the questions.

First and foremost, you have to specify the main variable you want to work on . Then, you have to collect an adequate corpora on both WhatsApp and LinkedIn. Next, you need a theoretical framework to implement your comparative analysis. Finally, you should report the results as clearly as possible.

Hello Azia -- my own doctoral research refers to this factor in bilingualism - below is a link where you can download my dissertation. I conducted research using native speakers of five languages (Japanese, Russian, Navajo, Spanish, and English) and it gives strong evidence of neurolinguistic interference of the native language structure into second (and third, etc.,) language acquisition.

You can download my thesis here: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/110/

I am also sending you a link to a general description of interference: https://onlineenglishstudies.com/the-impact-of-interference-on-communication-at-various-levels/#:~:text=Interference%20occurs%20at%20the%20following,Syntactic%20level%2C%20and%20Lexical%20level.&text=At%20this%20level%2C%20interference%20is,the%20production%20of%20speech%20sounds.

The other document I am attaching is a longer paper that offers information on bilingualism and interference by using an experimental approach - with native speakers of Arabic learning English.

I work as an independent reseacher in the MENA region - I live in Eastern Türkiye. My emali is skmetheny@gmail.com if you would like to contact me with any other questions.

both

The peculiarities of neologisms' use are determined not only by the semantic compe-tence of the speaker. It is not only responsible for the correlation of the sign and the wordbut also the pragmatic one, which provides a permanent connection between the speakerand the sign. Pragmatic parameters of neologisms most fully manifest in Internet discourse,characterized by constantly updating lexical vocabulary.

This feature is since Internet dis-course is inherently a heterogeneous phenomenon that integrates the characteristics of other types of discourse and covers all spheres of society. Therefore, functional analysis of discursive neologisms is an essential aspect of studying neologisms

(PDF) Linguistic Democratization of the Modern English Language: Functional Parameters of English Youth Slang Neologisms. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366230053_Linguistic_Democratization_of_the_Modern_English_Language_Functional_Parameters_of_English_Youth_Slang_Neologisms [accessed May 30 2023].

Dear Colleague,

This is a good question!

Since the test is about teaching English as a Foreign Language with the content of the intervention is "just" polite requesting. Attention should be attached to the following two aspects:

(1) Test items type: Is it a test of multiple choice questions or short answer questions? If it is an objective test of 20 or 30 multiple choice questions, the interval may be longer, say, two weeks or so. If it is a test of short answer questions or an essay question, the interval may be shortened to one week;

(2) Test effect

If test effect is put into consideration, the time interval btw pre- and post-test should be no more than 3 days. The reason is simple: during those three days, the general proficiency of the students, statistically, will not have significant changes.

Thank you Dr. Mistecky

Cees Jan Mol states that "when people reject linguistic relativity, they can only attempt to make their rejection understood by creating a different grammar." On the other, Hand Alireza Khormaee is right when he writes: "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has to do with language not logic [...] , and we are dealing with the normal interpretation of language as a means of thought and communication." If we take 'grammar' in its usual meaning (see also Spring's reply), it is undeniable that there exist 'markedly different grammars' in Whorf's wording. Neurosciences and large typological studies have nowadays raised strong doubts on the ALEC axiom (All Languages are Equally Complex), already discussed by Bickerton in his 'linguistic bioprogram'. Moreover, studies on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have proved that some languages are more difficult to learn than others that show a more complex grammar. Evidence seems to speak in favour of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Language maintenance is the maintenance of a language (usually L1) despite the influence of external sociolinguistic forces (usually powerful language(s) and language shift, is a shift, transfer, replacement or language assimilation of usually L1 to L2 due mainly to the external sociolinguistic forces influencing a speech community to shift to a different language over time. This happens because speakers may perceived the new language as prestigious, stabilized, standardized over their L1 (lower-status). An example is the shift from first languages to second language(s) such as the English language.

Social network deals with the relationships contracted with others, with the community structures and properties entailed in these relationships (Milroy, 1978,1980 &1987)

· It views social networks as a means of capturing the dynamics underlying speakers’ interactional behaviours and cultures.

The fundamental assumption is that people create their communities with meaningful framework in attaining stronger relationship for solving the problems of daily life.

Personal communities are constituted by interpersonal ties of different types, strengths, and structural relationships between links (varying in nature) but a stronger link can become the anchor to the network.

Such networks have the following characteristics, they are

Where do we find some close-knit networks? In smaller communities, but also in cities, because of cultural and economical diversity, e.g. newer emigrants communities, or High-educated individuals.

Functions:

These networks have the following characteristics, they are:

Lead to weakening of a close-knit network structure -> these are prone to change, innovations and influence between groups and may lead to language shift/language transfer/language/language replacement.

The factors are diverse and include political, social, demographic, economic, cultural, linguistic, psychological and institutional support factors. They are demonstrated in this article

Language carries and conveys meaning which feeds assumptions and judgments that can lead to the development of stereotypes and discrimination. Continued examination of linguistic encoding is needed in order to recognize and rectify language-based age discrimination.

Ethnologue: 157 sign languages and counting... Glottolog 215 sign languages and counting... Usually, indigenous sign languages are considered isolates.

Thank you very much, Akhter Al Amin!

I was interested in language contact and how one language can influence another. For example, in the case of Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) we have many linguistic borrowings from the Portuguese language. Some signs are spelled using the sign alphabet and others use a hand configuration that refers to the initial letter of the Portuguese word. In addition, we can also observe a lot of influence on the Libras syntax. Now about the other question, could a sign language also influence an oral language, in a small community, perhaps influencing prosodic or even pragmatic aspects of the oral language?

Nothing springs to mind at the moment, but I imagine there are significantly different variables that could impact this. For instance, one of my colleagues speaks Farsi as his first language, and he oftentimes relies on "make" and "do" in English as light verbs in V+N constructions to mimic the Persian-language structure. With that being said, it might be worthwhile to look into research that presents more prescriptive-based "issues" when studying English as an L2--not because it's correct but, rather, because it might shed light on some common verbal patterns.

As Sociolinguistics focuses on the relationship between language and society, this relationship being multilayered has led to the emergence of all those subfields which connect language with the sociocultural fabric of any society. Whether one looks at cross-cultural linguistics, language and gender, dialectology, contact linguistics, multilingualism or language endangerment, all these areas fall under the domain of Sociolinguistics.

Exactly Dr. I appriciate your answer , i do agree with you

Hello

It is easier to finalize a research topic if you follow these steps.

1- Choose the area of your interest in which you can perform better

2- Narrow down the area focusing on the a specific aspect

3- Highlight the problems in that particular area

4- Choose a problem that is very important and you want to solve it

5- Think of how you will solve the problem

6- Write a question about the problem and how you will solve it

7- Google your topic/question and find the research gap before you finalize the topic

8- Rephrase the topic and add some variable[s] that the topic has not yet been studied

9- Ask your research supervisor to help you polish the topic

10- Reading the papers in your area of interests can hep you decide the topic for research

Thefollowing researches are relevant tp your study:

1.THE LANGUAGE CONTACT PROFILE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2004

Authors: Barbara F. Freed, Dan P. Dewey, Norman Segalowitz and Randall Halter

2. The Language and Social Background Questionnaire: Assessing Degree of Bilingualism in a Diverse Population

Authors: John A. E. Anderson, Lorinda Mak, Aram Keyvani Chahi, and Ellen Bialystok

Very good question. As I understand that there are six main theoretical approaches include: “(1) the welfare approach; (2) women in development (WID); (3) women and development (WAD); (4) gender and development (GAD); (5) the effectiveness approach (EA); and (6) mainstream gender equality (MGE). You can opt as per you study perspectives.

Perhaps a study on the challenges for sexual-neutrality posed by languages that have gendered inflections that, unlike English, seemingly have nothing to do with sex? Or perhaps a comparative study of English and such languages?

well it refers to both, but you can shed light on the sociolinguistics field more than the other field.

a synchronic investigation of language deals with a language or its parts studied as a fixed phenomenon existing at a given moment of time, whereas a diachronic investigation of language concerns the development of language or its parts over time. The synchronic / diachronic distinction was introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1916/1959) and it is a standard part of a linguist’s conceptual armoury. Among philosophers, on the other hand, this distinction is scarcely known and it is rarely used by them in practice

Individuals change society for good and bad. Individuals get angry at the system and begin movements to change it. Revolutions start with a single person. Sometimes we know their names - Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, Hitler, Trump* - but mostly we don't.

Dear Dr Ameer Ali . Thank you for highlighting this important subject. Translanguaging, as a concept, has gained currency in the last years. It reflects the shift from monolingual ideologies in the study of multilingual education to multilingual ideologies and dynamic views of multilingualism. This shift is clearly related to recent developments in the social context. I believe it would be of great benefit to all fields of linguistics.

socialization is one of the important factor for language teaching process. Sociolinguistic knowledge helps us to make learning natural and real.

Garcia or Cangarajah's concepts of translanguaging might help you.

Hi Amma,

Interactional sociolinguistics is a really good way. I suggest as a pre-survey a questionnaire identifying most used strategies, for example: "do you do XXX when you interact with your child?" Yes-No. If Yes, can you develop more. There is a very famous questionnaire for child development that can inspires you, the CDI: https://mb-cdi.stanford.edu/referencesEL.html

Then, you have to choose a good software for your transcriptions. I suggest CLAN and ELAN, both free.

Good luck

Sociolinguistics is broad and interdisciplinary. It is recommended that you choose a topic based on your interest. That being said, you might find one of the following topics interesting:

- Language and identity: (e.g., How people use language to construct and reflect particular aspects of their identity?)

- Language and Culture: (e.g., How certain cultural aspects influence language use?)

- Language and gender: (e.g., How men and women use certain linguistic features and practices in particular contexts/settings?)

- Language and Media: (e.g., How certain language features used differently according to particular media modes?)

- Language of Social Networking Sites: (e.g., How certain linguistic features are shaped by human interaction on a particular SNS platform?)

Mohialdeen Alotumi Thank You very much

There is already found marriage between linguistics and sociology in such sociological methodology as ethnomethodology, which considers not only routine practises, but ordinary, daily language. If there will appear more daily life research of celebrities', ordinary or marginal groups, certainly, more marriages between linguistics and sociology will appear.

Assuming you're referring to the UK context, I'd think that this kind of data may be kept private in the Department of Education. Perhaps it's worth trying to check with the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education https://www.supplementaryeducation.org.uk/

I do agree with the amazing answer and opinions of dr. Amjed 🌹🌺

Hello, here are some titles for your consideration:

Bilingualism in schools and society: Language, identity, and policy (https://rb.gy/i1ozrj)

Endangered languages and languages in danger: Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights (https://rb.gy/pgehof)

Language Endangerment (https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107041134)

Languages in danger of death and their relation with globalization, business and economy (shorturl.at/orEW8)

The cultures of Native North American language documentation and revitalization (https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2016.1179522)

Why save a minority language? Meänkieli and rationales of language revitalization (https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74047)

I would say that there is a great influence of the Society on the language and its behavior. Taking into account terms such as: "linguistic attitude" or "linguistic identity". The first refers to the responses that as individuals or a community we make to the use of the language of a certain individual or social group, these can be: rejection, acceptance, prestige, pride. It also has a great influence on the adoption, use or study of a language. so that, if a language has prestige, the more likely it is to be reproduced or spoken; Quite the opposite happens with languages ​​that do not enjoy that prestige, due to disuse, they are gradually forgotten until they become extinct. On the other hand, linguistic identity is the link we have with a speaking community. Duzak (2002) indicates that we do not develop a single linguistic identity, but rather that according to situations and contexts we adapt a multiplicity of identities.

However, taking into account aspects such as the use of language in a community, and its impact on the modification and acceptance of certain rules regarding speech, we find phenomena such as the insertion of terms that we could consider incorrect in the Dictionary of the Real Language Academy.

Following.

Good answer Daniel Z. Kadar

Process of second language learning. Are you looking at proficiency? Or influence and reliance on grammar from the first language may be of interest. Another focus - influence of the use of verb tenses from the first language. Do they all reflect this pattern? If not, why not? This could make your analysis comparative and, possibly more text linguistic. Not sure if that is what you are aiming for. Where are the research gaps? Lit review should determine this. :-) Hope this helps

Hi Moustafa Amrate This is a really thought-provoking question. In the past, that was certainly the case in many different European contexts, see for example what the prescriptivists tried to do with the English language (for ex. Dryden wanted to "fix" the language) and the (mostly failed attempts) of the Royal Society to reform the language in the XVII century. Today three examples of academies that are considered as sources of how language should be used are the Académie française in France. This body gives prescriptive rules on how good French should be, even though I don't think it uses measures to enforce its recommendations (but I'm not sure). The same can be said about the Royal Spanish Academy in Spain that gives recommendations for standardisation in the many Spanish-speaking countries (with controversies about what real Spanish is, considering that Standard Spanish is simply a regional variety, Castillan - something that it is true for EVERY Standard) is THE prevailing variety. In Italy we have the Accademia della Crusca, even though I suspect this is not formally into language planning policies as in other contexts.

It is not by chance that all these languages that I am here referring to are Romance languages, with a long history of well-established prescriptivism.

Hope this may be useful, this is not my area of study, just some comments :)

Thank you very much, Manuel! The article is worth reading, indeed...It helped me a lot.

Interesting question! Here are my thoughts (apologies if I misunderstood what you are after).

To begin with the obvious, ‘sociolinguistic competence’ should encompass something more than linguistic competence, i.e. mainstream accounts on grammatical skills, etc. ‘Something more’ here means social aspects within and beyond the speaking subject. This could be, for example, the social skill of knowing what to do with linguistic skills; that is, the speaking subject’s ability to make use of the resources s/he has acquired, in ways which others will find socially acceptable. I would recommend looking into the work of Hymes and Bourdieu, as they were among the first to break with purely linguistic accounts, so as to additionally account for the social. A lot of good research has later come out of that, I think. In my view, ‘pragmatic competence’, ’communicative competence’, and the like, are all sociolinguistic competences. It is thus a wide field of inquiry.

depends on your data - could be ideology, identity, power relations, style... socio-political...

One of the most important requirements to teach sociolinguistics in international universities is research publications, especially those related to top-tier journals such as Sociology of Language and Sociolinguistics. Of course, teaching quality is also important and the employer may require you to attach a teaching evaluation form. All in all, it would be really hard to be short-listed but it is worth trying. Good luck.

Teun De Rycker Thank you very much for your very concise and good answer. I also find the field very useful concept when researching special social space in detail or for researching society on a big scale and big data. Still, I have found myself in a bit of methodological mess, because I am working on a linguistic behaviour of a (small) ethnic group, located in a special geographic area. Sure there are some fields to consider also there (educational, media etc), but to describe or analyse that “class” of bilingual speakers, who practice their bilingualism in more or less all fields (the premise of balanced bilingualism), you have to consider the family (or private domain) and you have to consider public domain. I can hardly name these domains “the field”… this is my (Boursieusian?) problem.

Many thanks, Agnieszka Will geb. Gronek !

I hope grad students read this who are assigned large stacks of research essays outside their own areas.

Here are the three key parts in outline form (from my Ph.D. professor):

METHODS (note number of subjects in experiment and who is funding if noted in this or INTRO.) Who funded the study is most important when cnsidering possible biased findings or not.

DISCUSSION OF DATA AND EXPERIMENT (skim this unless needed for evaluating the text. May have difficult material such as advanced equations ans innumerbale names of chemical reactions, etc.)

CONCLUSION

The Intro, methods, and conclusion can re written in understandable langauge. If more is needed, get help from a person of that speciality.

In sociolinguistics, the term social register refers to specific lexical and grammatical choices as made by speakers depending on the social situational context like formality level , the participants relation and distance of a conversation and the function of the language in the discourse.

Applied linguistics includes teaching languages' the fist language & the second language', different kinds of written and spoken texts (corpus linguistics), style, sociolinguistics, compiling dictionaries, machine translation, language and brain 'neurolinguistics', language disorders.

Good luck

As a field of study still in its infancy, I don't think there is an agree upon definition for the various terminology out there. Crystal himself referred to it as 'netspeak and textspeak' in his glossary, but it is from 2004 so this may not reflect current usage. 'Textese' also appears commonly in recent scholarly literature. Perhaps you could do keyword search terms in some research databases and see what comes up more frequently?

Hi. "Face and facework in daily conversation and debates". This can also be informed using Arundale, whose article introduces an innovative approach to analyzing the way participants in a verbal interaction preserve or violate face. It is beyond Brown & Levinson' s (1987) good framework to deal with face and politeness. Hope you will find it more useful. Good Luck and keep up encouraging your students to do and find novel issues.

Dear Melgani,

You may check out the following links. Good luck.

By amount of contact, I mean the degree of cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal exposure.

The members of one culture do things in special patterned ways for specific culturally shared and understood meanings . I think the position is totally different in different cultures in manner of misunderstands . The same is true for my colleagues Indians , French , Chinese code-switching when they have a secret talk and they don't want others to know. Some times a lot of jokes occur in that areas . As a fun .@

It depends on what you want to measure. Sociolinguistic scale is a very broad term and constructing a scale that measures every aspect of sociolinguistics is not possible.

We are creating the discussions and use English so it is a resource in a positive sense. Why English? Of course it is the matter of power but it's been historical process and no sense in condemning it now - we have to deal with it, and leave space for other languages including minor languages and in science too. There is an author writing on linguistic imperialism - Robert Philipson - he published a lot on that.

I personally think major languages representing major economies will be used in all processes during our way to Industry 4.0 and I assume within the Industry 4.0 era minor languages will be in the most vulnerable position and might not survive that era. However if they do survive and reach the next stage - Society 5.0 - they will have a chance as the technology will be supposed to serve human needs first, not businesses and languages as well as age and gender will stop being a tool for personal social and professional development - but that is the distant perspective and more of a hypothetical view

The fields of linguistics are lot and you need to decide which one you are interested in. Then, google what you need.

Hi,

Actually, there are opposing views in ethnography on this issue. Broadly speaking, If you prefered extended case method, you would start with a theory and go into the field, then go back to the theory to elaborate it. However, if you would prefer gorunded theory, you would enter the field without a specific theory and you would end up with a theory. For extended case method, I suggest you to look at Buroway and for grounded theory , as the previous answer mentioned, Glaser and Strauss.

Hello,

If you haven’t yet, you could take a look at the following works:

Matsyuk, H. (2014) ‘Urban Street Names as a Marker of Language/Authority Interaction in Ukraine: Soviet (1922-1991) and Post-Soviet Periods (1991-2011).’ In: Names in Daily Life: Proceedings of the XXIV International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, pp. 361 – 369, Generalitat de Catalunya

Kostanski, L. and Puzey, G., (eds.), 2016, Names and Naming: People, Places, Perceptions and Power, Multilingual Matters, Bristol

Neethling, B. (2016) ‘Street Names: A Changing Urban Landscape.’ In: The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, Hough, C. (ed), pp. 144 – 157, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Puzey, G. (2016) ‘Linguistic Landscapes.’ In: The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, Hough, C. (ed), pp. 395 – 411, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Taylor, S. (2016) ‘Methodologies in Place-name Research.’ In: The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, Hough, C. (ed), pp. 69 – 86, Oxford University Press, Oxford

In terms of methodology, you could check out ‘interactional onomastics’ which is a comparatively new approach within socio-onomastics:

De Stefani, E. (2012). ‘Crossing perspectives on onomastic methodology: Reflections on fieldwork in place name research. An essay in interactional onomastics.’ In A. Ender, A. Leemann, & B. Wälchli (Eds.), Methods in Contemporary Linguistics (pp. 441-462). Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter .

De Stefani, E. (2016) ‘Names and Discourse.’ In: The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, Hough, C. (ed), pp. 52 – 68, Oxford University Press, Oxford

De Stefani, E., Gazin, A.-D., & Ticca, A. C. (2012). ‘Space in social interaction. An introduction.’ Bulletin VALS-ASLA, 96 (pp. 1-14).

Good luck!

MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) has been open access since completion. No registration required!

I totally agree with Nael Hijjo and I strongly believe that any serious linguist would. Nevertheless, it is always positive challenge to discuss about it. First of all, we should define "difficult to learn", in terms of oral aspect, written aspect, grammar etc. Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language (grammatically isolating), which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships, so from this point of view it is considered one of the easiest languages to learn. But then we have tones, and phonetics and things get more complicated. So one should specify "difficulty" with clear scientific criteria. If we step out of the strictly objective scientific area, should I be asked to make a list in order of "difficulty", and following my own multilingual experience, Mandarin Chinese would definitely be in the middle. I would probably top list Japanese, Hungarian and Slovenian, for almost exclusively grammatical reasons.

I need the official and the exact number

I don't think so. There is no one language that is easier or harder than the other. It is a common misconception that people believe that Mandarin is a difficult language to learn. All languages are the same but it is related to the motivation of the learner when learning a language. E.g.: A worker from India working in China will learn Mandarin quickly because in order to get a job, s/he must know how to communicate with the people.

Depending on the the grammatical structures you'd like to focus on, the answers will vary. However, here is a good resource on dimensions of register:

Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison by Douglas Biber https://goo.gl/LaVxip

I would write it this way: I am doing a research project and the question is "Do students' perceptions of the (non)-native-like status of a teacher's accent significantly predict their teacher's credibility evaluations?”

I assume the reference is to an individual teacher, not a group of teachers. If it is more than one teacher, however, the apostrophe would stay after the 's'.

Thanks for being so open about grammar corrections. Glad you found the correct questionnaire, too. Good luck with the project!

when I do my research about the language used among teens, I find the phenomenon that the use of slang words by young people is not intended to make distance with older generation but to show a closer relationship with the older participant. But may be is different with what happen in your place....

Not sure why this is directed at me: has nothing to do with my current research.

Check out the work of Robin Dodsworth (NCSU); I bet it's touched on this kind of thing.

Thanks a lot, everyone. It's been really helpful.