Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.

This book has two related purposes. The first is to demonstrate the extent and importance of language play in human life; the second is to draw out the implications for applied linguistics and language teaching. Language play should not be thought of as a trivial or peripheral activity, but as central to human thought and culture, to learning, creativity, and intellectual enquiry. It fulfils a major function of language, underpinning the human capacity to adapt: as individuals, as societies, and as a species.

From riddles to proverbs, from jingles to jokes, from mnemonics to pig Latin to dueling with words, speech play is central to social life in all of its forms. These essays describe a variety of speech play genres, formulate the "rules" for play with language, and discuss the relevance of speech play to current issues in linguistic theory, cognitive development, and the ethnography of speaking.

Can language change be modelled as an evolutionary process? Can notions like variation, selection and competition be fruitfully applied to facts of language development? The present volume ties together various strands of linguistic research which can bring us towards an answer to these questions. In one of the youngest and rapidly growing areas of linguistic research, mathematical models and simulations of competition based developments have been applied to instances of language change. By matching the predicted and observed developmental trends, researchers gauge existing models to the needs of linguistic applications and evaluate the fruitfulness of evolutionary models in linguistics. The present volume confronts these studies with more empirically-based studies in creolization and historical language change which bear on key concepts of evolutionary models. What does it mean for a linguistic construction to survive its competitors? How do the interacting factors in phases of creolization differ from those in ordinary language change, and how - consequently - might Creole languages differ structurally from older languages? Some of the authors, finally, also address the question how different aspects of our linguistic competence tie in with our more elementary cognitive capacities. The volume contains contributions by Brady Clark et al., Elly van Gelderen, Alain Kihm, Manfred Krifka, Wouter Kusters, Robert van Rooij, Anette Rosenbach, John McWhorter, Teresa Satterfield, Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth C. Traugott. The book brings together contributions from two areas of research: the study of language evolution by means of methods from artifical intelligence/artificial life (like computer simulations and analytic mathematical methods) on the one hand, and empirically oriented research from historical linguistics and creolisation studies that uses concepts from evolutionary theory as a heuristic tool in a qualitative way. The book is thus interesting for readers from both traditions because it supplies them with information about relevant ongoing research and useful methods and data from the other camp.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Trier, language: English, abstract: The goal of this thesis is to find out how often language learning apps are already used and to analyze their potential for the upcoming years, i.e. whether they might be able to supplement or even replace traditional language classes one day. The study presented in this thesis consists of two parts: an analysis of the term language learning app, their user numbers and their teaching methods in order to be able to find their strengths and weaknesses and a survey conducted among students of the University of Trier in which they were asked about their past usage of language learning apps, as well as their attitudes and opinions towards language learning apps in general, including their opinions about the potential of language learning apps. Not long ago, mobile phones were only a means of communication and it was hard to imagine that one day they could fulfil literally hundreds of tasks. Today, thanks to mobile apps, they can be a map, a book, a video game and even a spirit level all at once. One of their most valuable new features, though, are educational apps. They allow users to learn anything from coding to chemical elements to languages and have been changing the educational landscape ever since. Language learning apps have been especially disruptive. No other type of educational apps is used as often as they are. Today, apps like Duolingo and Babbel have more than 100 million active users, with their numbers increasing by the day. They offer courses in languages from Spanish to Hawaiian and are no longer limited to vocabulary teaching only.