The notion of the speech community has been one of the key concepts in sociolinguistics since its beginning, and yet at the same time remains one of the least satisfactory. This paper examines data from urban Jamaican Creole to shed light on it, in the process taking into account problems that have been raised by other Caribbean creolists in dealing with what Lawrence Carrington has aptly dubbe...

1 . The present paper presents an original interdisciplinary study of style-shifting in literary translation, which draws upon methodologies and techniques from corpus stylistics and computational stylometry, and relevant sociolinguistic theories of style variation. Such an innovative approach to the literary translator’s idiosyncratic use of language sets out to address one of the most difficu...

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...