This study aims to identify the two principal reasons why college students choose a certain language to satisfy a general education second language requirement by polling 172 students enrolled in first‐year language courses in 13 languages at a large Northeastern research university. Students answered a questionnaire and chose the two main reasons from 10 choices articulated in sentimental, value, instrumental, and communicative dimensions. Cross‐tabulations by SPSS showed significant statistical relationships between the attitudinal factors and the language studied. Spanish students strongly favored an instrumental orientation for both first and second choices. Danish, Dutch, French, Arabic, Russian, and German students also indicated instrumental preferences, but their second choices fell into other domains. Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean students favored communication factors, while Chinese students selected sentimental and communication reasons for their first and second choices, respectively.

Este trabajo describe los resultados de una encuesta metalingüística completada por veinte costarricenses sobre el uso del pronombre de tratamiento (vos, tú o usted) en varios contextos sociales. En esta investigación, se ha valido del programa S.P.S.S. para cruzar las respuestas del uso pronominal con las variables sociales de género, estado civil, edad, ingresos, estudios y provincia de nacimiento. La forma de tratamiento no-marcada en todas las situaciones estudiadas es el pronombre usted, tanto en ámbitos de solidaridad (familiaridad, amistad y confianza) como en los de distanciamiento y de poder. Los encuestados indican el empleo del vos, siempre la forma marcada y de uso minoritario, en ciertas relaciones de confianza y amistad, por ejemplo, con miembros de la familia, amigos y, a veces, con compañeros de trabajo. La prueba chi-cuadrado de Pearson muestra una dependencia significativa entre el empleo del vos en contextos de confianza y las variables independientes de género y edad. El uso costarricense del vos no equivale ni al vos de otras regiones voseantes ni tampoco al tú. El tratamiento con tú, pronombre tradicionalmente ajeno al sistema costarricense, aparece con escasa frecuencia entre las respuestas.

The work presented here is based on 400 Spanish loanwords attested in Altamura's Dizionario dialettale napoletano, one of the first etymological works in Neapolitan. Thirteen semantic fields have been identified, which have a direct relationship with certain groups of Spaniards and represent the linguistic legacy left in Naples by the Spanish masters. The soldiers and sailors left loanwords related to the semantic fields of the armed forces, aggression, robbery, insults, sexual practices and the camorra. The aristocrats left vocabulary associated with clothing, work-industry and the court. Other fields include loanwords used by all Spaniards: animals, food, administration, and leisure. This study shows that the loanwords themselves enclose information about their users and by extension, information about the type of social and linguistic contact among Spaniards and Neapolitans.

This paper studies code-switching between Andalusian Arabic and Romance in thekharjas, the closing verses of themuwashshahaatpoems. These poems, dating from the 11thto the 14thcenturies, were composed in Classical Arabic, while thekharjaswere written in two languages of Al-Andalus: Andalusian Arabic and Romance. The purpose is to investigate to what degree the structural aspect of code-switching in thekharjasconforms to descriptions in the current literature on code-switching in bilingual communities and what that tells us about the degree of bilingualism in Al-Andalus. The 43kharjas(Corriente, 2008) present a total of 104 code-switches: 82 intra-sentential, 13 word-internal and 9 inter-sentential. The base language in the majority of cases is Romance: 73 % of the switches occurred from Romance to Arabic. Cross- tabulations of the direction of the switch, lexical category of the switched parts and what immediately precedes and follows them show statistically significant relationships, indicating that the code-switches found in this corpus are not the result of a random process of language mixing resulting in “an outlandish and deliberately unsophisticated patois” (Monroe, 1974:31). A study of the intra-sentential code-switches also contributes to an explanation of the behavior of the Arabic definite article,al-and its allomorphs, in Arabic loanwords.

Fifty-four Hispanics from Utica, NY completed questionnaires about the languages that they spoke in three domains (family, friends, and formal) during their childhood and adulthood. The social variables considered were age, level of education, time in the USA and Utica, gender and generation. The latter two most influenced reported language selection. The participants overwhelmingly answered that they used Spanish during their childhood with parents and grandparents. However, comparing the participants' reported language use between childhood and adulthood, the parent-child and grandparent-grandchild relationships showed the largest decreases in reported use of Spanish among all the family relationships. This result is consistent with language shift to English in the family. The informants also report less exclusive use of Spanish with friends in adulthood than in childhood. However, 78 % of them said that they use both English and Spanish with friends in adulthood. In the formal domains of religion, stores, workplace, and restaurant, more responses of only English are registered in adulthood than in childhood. Nevertheless, adults report using Spanish or both English and Spanish in Utica in all the formal domains. The reported use of Spanish is especially high in the religious domain.