Studies on language shift often refer to the demise of the ousted variety by detailing various stages of language decay and extinction. Problematic for these accounts are well-documented cases of intervening social phenomena, such as language revival movements, which can alter in some way the stages of decline. French Louisiana's situation illustrates language shift interacting with a strong revival movement. In the wake of the revival and in spite of continued shift, another trend is apparent -the writing of Louisiana French. Whereas shift clearly represents a stage of language decline, the creation of a written code functions as a key ingredient for language maintenance. A sociolinguistic analysis of these forces reveals the complexity and the conflict involved in the choice of the written word. (Sociolinguistics, Louisiana French, Cajun, Louisiana French Creole, variation in writing, ethnography, literacy, language maintenance)

At Spectrum Health, Grand Rapids, Mich, a process to verify patient identification, procedure, and procedure side and site was developed and implemented to improve the current process. Focusing on risk-reduction strategies, an interdisciplinary task force revised the facility's surgical site identification policy and improved the surgical scheduling form to highlight information for sided procedures. Task force members also designed a verification checklist to require the comparison of any procedure data to the physician's order. This article describes these improvements and other methods that were established to ensure patient safety and reduce risk. Ongoing data collection verifies that the process remains in place and that team members are compliant. The improved process maximizes patient safety because it allows for early intervention when any discrepancies are identified.

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The nature of lexical and structural borrowing has been at the forefront of sociolinguistic debates for many years. This study analyzes bilingual lexemes and morphemes of English-origin loanwords from a Louisiana corpus of twenty-two French/English speakers. French Louisiana, however, has been undergoing language shift from French to English for three generations and, as a consequence, language dominance is in a parallel state of shift. This competing dominance produces borrowings characterized by a range of phonological integration coupled with bound morphemes from both languages. These data suggest that examining borrowing beyond the word level reveals a highly complex interplay of often competing and overlapping grammars.

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