Written Language & Literacy - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2003

Young Japanese women effectively construct and manipulate their emotive stances through the use of special pictorial signs and their graph(em)ic modifications in casual letter-writing among friends. To achieve this, the writers use a para-/metalinguistic and indexical means of “contextualization” for the socio-cultural mediation of affect and textual awareness. At the same time, they heavily rely on such cognitive mechanisms as “schematization” and “semantic reduction” — phenomena widely observed in grammaticalization processes. I propose that these devices not only provide the basis for mutual appreciation of the emotive (con)text, but also suggest a mode of literacy aimed primarily at emotive, phatic, and poetic communication.

This article reports a sociolinguistic analysis of the French spelling system in newly discovered, authentic personal letters written by literate settlers living in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries. After showing that French and non-French vernaculars were very much alive among the Louisiana founding population, the paper examines the use of old and new French norms in Louisiana for three socio-economic classes over time: the elite, planter, and military/merchant populations. Socio-demographic pressures are described that could have led to the maintenance of old French features or the expansion of some French varieties. It is shown that the history of French spelling in France, the origins of diverse migrant populations that settled in colonial Louisiana, and the powerful socio-economic events that shape the expansion of a socially well-delineated population not only explain the linguistic behavior of both French settlers and Louisiana-born writers, but also provide many hints to determining the sociolinguistic attributes of the illiterate French vernacular-speaking population.

In Danziger & Pederson 1998, the suggestion was made that the discrimination of left/right mirror images from non-reflected images in a part/whole judgment task correlates not just with degree of literacy, but also with the nature of the script in wich the subject is literate. This follow-up study directly addresses this hypothesis by comparing acceptance/rejection responses and the reaction time of these responses among Tamil speakers who were coded for type of literacy (nonliterate, literate only with Tamil script, literate with Tamil and Roman script). There was a reliable difference between the monoliterate and biliterate speakers in that biliterate Tamils were far more likely to reject mirror images than monoliterate Tamils. The critical difference between the monoliterates and biliterates is taken to be whether a graphemic distinction (i.e. a distinction which is symbolically meaningful) between left/right reflections has been acquired.

Questions of biliteracy and multiliteracies increasingly move into the centre of literacy research. This paper focuses on the question how perceptions of spoken and written language are shaped by diglossia and multilingual language practices in Lebanon. A brief introduction to the language situation in modern Lebanon, plus a discussion of the basic concepts of literacy and diglossia, are followed by a study of excerpts of a series of qualitative case studies, conducted in Beirut. Multilingualism in Lebanon is characterised by a dominance of colloquial Lebanese Arabic in oral discourse; this contrasts with the use of a variety of languages — English, French and Modern Standard Arabic — in the written domain. The analysis of statements taken from the interviews suggests that perceptions of continuity and discontinuity between the spoken/written modes are related to and shaped by diglossia. The paper ends with an outlook on educational implications.