Literacy is a central issue to many language planning works. However, there are
few studies which focus primarily on literacy as a language planning activity.
This volume tries to explore some of the complexities and consequences of
literacy in a range of contexts and from a range of perspectives. It brings
together a collection of fifteen papers on language planning for literacy in
official and vernacular languages and deals with the related issues in first and
additional languages in North America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Pacific.

This volume presents us a complex view of literacy planning, which is not simply
a matter of planning a written form of a language, and is also a highly
ideological activity relating to the nature and practice of literacy and the
power relations which exist within societies. The studies in this volume clearly
show that literacy planning is a language policy and planning activity, and not
just a sub-category of language-in-education planning.

Hear are a couple of things gleaned recently from a lecture given by one of the latter. He was reflecting on the influences of bedouin culture on people who may not be living as bedouins today, but still retain certain cultural practices even though they may not know why.

• Place of Honor - The most important guest should be seated in the chair (or preferably couch) farthest from the door.  A few people have told us this.  This seems to indicate prominence.  But it also seems to have something to do with you as host giving that person some comfort and security.  In bedouin times this seat would be farthest from the flap of the tent and the elements and intruders perhaps.
• Standing to Greet Guests - It is customary for all people seated in the room to stand and greet a new guest who has arrived whether you know them or not.  This is apparently true when visiting in people's homes, but I have also witnessed the phenomenon in the mobile shop and the carpet store.  I always thought this was just another marker of the politeness connected to social gatherings in this culture; however, there is deeper significance.  This custom also makes it easier for the seating of guests to be reshuffled in case a more important guest arrives and should be in the place of honor.  The relative importance of seats (and people) flows away from the place of honor.  Doesn't this cultural fact give so much richness to the following saying of Jesus:

"When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests."      - Jesus in Luke 14:8-10

• Giving Stuff to Those Who Admire It: I have often heard it said not to admire anything of your host's because they will give it to you.  Or, if someone admires something of yours that you should give it to them. This is a funny one, because I have heard this many, many times but have never seen it in action.  It is a very common piece of cross-cultural training for anyone going to the Middle East.  But, truly, I've never witnessed it take place.  But the origin of this is interesting - the lecturer said that for a Bedouin the only thing they truly possess is their honor.  They typically have very little stuff, and what they do have is fleeting.   But honor is lasting and is passed down from generation to generation.  Someone from a bedouin background can deal with something happening to their stuff - but never their honor.

Does honor play a role in American culture back in the States?  Certainly not to this extent.  Or maybe it's just different.  Maybe we honor our guests by letting them sit wherever they want and drink whatever they want (Serving food and beverage is a whole other post).  Being free to choose is so important to Americans, but seems less so here.  Honor and status play such a very important part here in our new culture.  The tricky part is learning what brings honor and what doesn't as such different cultural values are in play!

As always I would love your thoughts, questions, and feedback, esp. as it relates to the place honor/shame play in your own culture.  And please, if any Jordanians are reading - give your feedback on the cultural points above. Are they accurate?

The Sami languages

The Sami languages are spoken in Sápmi in Northern Europe, in a region stretching over the four countries Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, reaching from the southern part of central Scandinavia in the southwest to the tip of the Kola Peninsula in the east.

During the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age now extinct Sami languages were also spoken in the central and southern parts of Finland and Karelia and in a wider area on the Scandinavian peninsula. Historical documents as well as Finnish and Karelian oral tradition contain many mentions of the earlier Sami inhabitation in these areas (Itkonen 1947). Also loanwords as well as place-names of Sami origin in the southern dialects of Finnish and Karelian dialects testify of earlier Sami presence in the area (Koponen 1996; Saarikivi 2004; Aikio 2007). These Sami languages, however, became later extinct under the wave of the Finno-Karelian agricultural expansion.

The Sami languages form a branch of the Uralic language family. According to the traditional view, Sami is within the Uralic family most closely related to the Baltic-Finnic languages (Sammallahti 1998). However, this view has recently been doubted by some scholars, who argue that the traditional view of a common Finno-Sami protolanguage is not as strongly supported as has been earlier assumed, and that the similarities may stem from an areal influence on Sami from Baltic-Finnic.

In terms of internal relationships, the Sami languages are divided into two groups: the western and the eastern ones. The groups may be further divided into various subgroups and ultimately individual languages. (Sammallahti 1998: 6-38.) Parts of the Sami language area form a dialect continuum in which the neighbouring languages may be to a fair degree mutually intelligible, but two more widely separated groups will not understand each other's speech. There are, however, sharp and absolute language boundaries, in particular between Northern Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami, the speakers of which are not able to understand each other without learning or long practice.

Western Sami languages

- Southern Sami
- Ume Sami
- Pite Sami
- Lule Sami
- Northern Sami

Eastern Sami languages

- Inari Sami
- Kemi Sami (extinct)
- Skolt Sami
- Akkala Sami (extinct)
- Kildin Sami
- Ter Sami

At present there are nine living Sami languages. The largest six of the languages have independent literary languages; the three others have no written standard, and there are only few, mainly elderly speakers left. The ISO 639-2 code for all Sami languages without its proper code is "smi".

The other Sami languages are moribund and have very few speakers left. Ten speakers of Ter Sami were known to be alive in 2004, and Pite Sami and Ume Sami likely have under 20 speakers left. The last speaker of Akkala Sami is known to have died in December 2003, and the eleventh attested variety Kemi Sami became extinct in the 19th century.

Of course the data needs to be continuoslly revised as the sociolinguistic situation is always dynamic. Advice an info in that direction would be very appreciated, so if you are Sami and are reading that, do not hesitate to comment!

When someone get's a haircut you say to them:

نّيماً or "na3iiman" which literally means "Grace"

the response is always, اللّه ينعِم عّليك "allah yn3im 3layk" which literally means "God's grace on you"

What a friendly way to say "nice haircut!"

Sorry for the confusion =)  And please, any speakers of Arabic feel free to correct me in the comments!

It's not something I know a huge amount about, but a quick trawl around Google Scholar brings it up in a couple of articles by Paul Foulkes and Gerry Docherty, phoneticians with a sociolinguistic bent at York and Newcastle respectively. I'll just quote the relevant passages here for information and list the references at the end so that they can be followed up if anyone is sufficiently interested to do so.

One article is titled 'Phonological variation in the English of England,' available here in pdf.

"One of the most noticeable innovations in recent years has been the development of rising intonation in the Closed tone category in dialects which traditionally use falls. This has been found in the USA, Australia and New Zealand as well as Great Britain, and has been variously labelled high rising tone (HRT), Australian Question(ing) Intonation (AQI) and uptalk (see Cruttenden 1995, 1997: 129-131, Fletcher, Grabe & Warren in press). The pattern is associated with the upwardly mobile (‘yuppies’) in England (Cruttenden 1997: 130), but lower class and/or female speech elsewhere.

"Because of its perceptual salience, HRT has been the subject of much comment by non-linguists, including the mass media. Some of these comments are highly speculative and empirically untested, for example, that Australian soap operas are responsible for the spread of HRT (Bathurst 1996, Lawson 1998). Others, taking up the mantle of John Walker and others in lamenting change of any kind, identify HRT as a sign of unstoppable decay in modern English (e.g. Bradbury 1996, Norman 2001). Still others draw a logical but naïve conclusion, based on comparison with standard English, that rises indicate questions, and thus the use of rises in declaratives reflects a psychological state of uncertainty. The voice coach Patsy Rodenburg, for example, is quoted by Kennedy (1996) as claiming ‘that rising inflection is about being unsure…you make a question rather than a statement because you are scared’. Such statements are ill-founded in that they equate a particular intonation pattern with a single linguistic function. They thereby fail to take account of issues raised earlier: the form-function problem; the fact that intonational meaning is derived from a complex set of sources; and that social and linguistic evaluation of features may vary from speaker to speaker. It is obvious from examination of intonation patterns in dialects such as Newcastle and Liverpool that rises may be employed in the Closed category without any indication of interrogative meaning or uncertainty. Furthermore, linguists who have analysed HRT have identified its positive discourse functions. It has been shown that HRT serves to track the listener’s comprehension and attention, especially when the speaker is presenting new information. Listeners perceive HRT to be deferential but friendly (Guy & Vonwiller 1984). It also acts as a turn-holding mechanism in narratives (e.g. Warren & Britain 1999)."

The other article is Foulkes and Docherty's 2006 paper in the Journal of Phonetics (a pre-publication version is available here in pdf); the section I'm quoting is useful mainly for the references to descriptive work in other varieties of English:

"Rising contours in declaratives have begun to emerge recently in English dialects where they are not traditional features, a phenomenon variously referred to as ‘uptalk’ or ‘high rising terminal’ (see Cruttenden, 1995, 1997). This innovation has been observed in the USA (Arvaniti & Garding, 2005), Australia (Guy, Horvath, Vonwiller, Disley, & Rogers, 1986), New Zealand (Britain, 1992; Warren & Britain, 2000), and England (Cruttenden, 1997). In most locations, it is characteristic mainly of young speakers. In the USA, Australia, and New Zealand it is also most common in lower class and/or female speech, but by contrast it seems to be associated with the upwardly mobile in England."

Selected references in full:

• Arvaniti, A., & Garding, G. (2005). Dialectal variation in the rising accents of American English. In C. T. Best, L. Goldstein, & D. H. Whalen (Eds.), Laboratory phonology 8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Britain, D. (1992). Linguistic change in intonation: The use of high rising terminals in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change, 4, 77–103.
• Cruttenden, A. (1995). Rises in English. In J. Windsor Lewis (Ed.), Studies in general and English phonetics: Essays in honour of Professor J. D. O’Connor (pp. 155–173). London: Routledge.
• Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Guy, G., Horvath, B., Vonwiller, J., Disley, E., & Rogers, I. (1986). An intonational change in progress in Australian English. Language in Society, 7, 23–51.
• Warren, P., & Britain, D. (2000). Intonation and prosody in New Zealand English. In A. Bell, & K. Kuiper (Eds.), New Zealand English (pp. 146–172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

The 2006 paper in the Journal of Phonetics is useful for a variety of reasons and worth reading if phonetics/phonology interest you at all. The full citation is:
Paul Foulkes & Gerard Docherty (2006), 'The social life of phonetics and phonology.' Journal of Phonetics 34: 409-438

After a long period of strenuous study of complete SIXTEEN years, I'm going to have a rest on May 28, 2008!!

Yes, have to appear in the last paper of my MA (Linguistics) at Karachi University.. Emotions poised between sadness and joy..!! Will write about how I have journeyed through all these years, maybe, after have taken the last paper, i.e., Sociolinguistics.

Ah, what joy!! :)

But, I know that I'm sure to miss the assignment submission deadlines very mutsh!! :(

But.. it's LIFE... goes on... new destinations... new paths... new milestones!!

After all, even THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT!!

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=22

Oh, but I will need a GRE score to apply.