Cappadocian in the social media era

Until very recently, Cappadocian Greek seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and dialectologists even believed it had become extinct altogether. However, one Cappadocian variety, Mišótika, is still spoken in some villages and towns in the decentralized administrations of Macedonia and Thrace, Epirus and Western Macedonia, and Thessaly and Central Greece. The dialect is undergoing attrition under the growing pressure of Standard Modern Greek and its regional varieties and is actually being re-Hellenized. Even the oldest speakers make free use of Greek instead of Misiótika words and expressions and attrition is noticeable in at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. As a result, there are now many semi- or even would-be speakers whose speech is located somewhere on a continuum from Mišótika with Standard or Regional Modern Greek elements in it to Standard or Regional Modern Greek with Mišótika elements in it - in both cases mostly words and phrases. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Mišótika as a marker of (Mišótika) Cappadocian identity. Speakers feel more confident to speak their language in public, for instance at the annual Gavoustima, where theatrical plays in Mišótika are now regularly performed by the syllogos of Néo Agionéri (to the amusement and also to bewilderment of the audience). Remarkably and very fortunately, Mišótika is now also used in the Social Media. I will concentrate here on Facebook, especially on the page called Έναρξη Διδασκαλίας Εκµάθησης Μυστιώτικου Ιδιώµατος ( group 470281169768316 on FB). The title is identical with the subtitle of Thomas Fates’ book Χ͜ιογός α ας χαρίσ̌’, which is some sort of “Teach Yourself Mišótika” and in which, interestingly, a special orthography for Mišótika has been developed. I will discuss the kind of information found on the FB page: questions, questionnaires, explanations of words and short phrases, folktales and other short stories, audio & video clips etc. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of using the Greek alphabet to write Mišótika in relation to the ongoing phonological attrition and also to the insecurity when it comes to interpretation linguistic phenomena in Mišótika

The role of linguistics in language teaching: the case of two, less widely taught languages - Finnish and Hungarian

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well suited for less widely used and less taught languages as it enables students to draw comparative and historical parallels, question terminologies and raise their sociolinguistic and pragmatic awareness. A linguistic approach also provides students with skills for further language learning

MEASURING WORD FREQUENCY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING TEXTBOOKS USING LEXITÜRK

Vocabulary is a fundamental component of language usage, and study into its interactions with other aspects of language competence is an essential topic of language teaching. There are strong relationships between vocabulary and language competency measurements. Learners with larger vocabularies are better at a variety of language abilities than those with lower vocabularies. As a result, it may be stated that vocabulary knowledge is inextricably tied to total language proficiency. This suggests that the quantity of words we know has an impact on how much text we can comprehend. The more often a word is used, the more polysemy and irregular morphology it is likely to have. One of a word's quantifiable qualities is how extensively it is used. Based on this measurable attribute, the word's prevalence and frequency can be considered a guiding reference. Analyzing the frequency of recurrence of a specific word or phrase is the most basic sort of corpus analysis. Words frequently occur together, forming collocations, colligations, and other word combinations. Exploring such trends is another sort of corpus analysis that one may perform. This is also known as chunks, n-grams, or lexical bundles. In particular, when selecting which word should be prioritized for language learners. If this model is adopted, foreign language students will be taught essentially the most often used words. The development and application of measurement like an analysis tool can assist developers or researchers in the dilemma of preferences arising from the inevitable use of a word corpus. For teaching after the stage of creating a corpus and shaping the language textbook's content with the marked and dense frequency words from a corpus are discussed in this study, and a tool which is created by the author is presented to and for the scientific community.  Kelime bilgisi, dil kullanımının temel bir bileşenidir ve dil yeterliliğinin diğer yönleriyle etkileşimlerinin incelenmesi, dil öğretiminin temel bir konusudur. Kelime bilgisi ve dil yeterliliği ölçümleri arasında güçlü ilişkiler vardır. Daha geniş kelime dağarcığına sahip öğrenciler, çeşitli dil becerilerinde daha düşük kelime dağarcığına sahip olanlardan daha iyidir. Sonuç olarak, kelime bilgisinin ayrılmaz bir şekilde toplam dil yeterliliğine bağlı olduğu söylenebilir. Bu, bildiğimiz kelimelerin miktarının, ne kadar metni anlayabileceğimiz üzerinde bir etkisi olduğunu göstermektedir. Bir kelime ne kadar sık ​​kullanılırsa, o kadar çok anlamlılık ve düzensiz morfolojiye sahip olması muhtemeldir. Bir kelimenin ölçülebilir niteliklerinden biri, ne kadar kapsamlı kullanıldığıdır. Bu ölçülebilir özelliğe dayanarak, kelimenin yaygınlığı ve sıklığı yol gösterici bir referans olarak kabul edilebilir. Belirli bir kelimenin veya ifadenin tekrarlanma sıklığını analiz etmek, en temel türde korpus analizidir. Kelimeler sıklıkla birlikte bulunur, eşdizimler, birliktelikler ve diğer kelime kombinasyonları oluşturur. Bu tür eğilimleri keşfetmek, kişinin yapabileceği başka bir tür korpus analizidir. Bu aynı zamanda parçalar, n-gramlar veya sözcük demetleri olarak da bilinir. Özellikle, dil öğrenenler için hangi kelimeye öncelik verilmesi gerektiğini seçerken. Bu model benimsenirse, yabancı dil öğrencilerine esasen en sık kullanılan kelimeler öğretilecektir. Ölçümün bir analiz aracı gibi geliştirilmesi ve uygulanması, bir kelime bütünlüğünün kaçınılmaz kullanımından kaynaklanan tercihler ikileminde geliştiricilere veya araştırmacılara yardımcı olabilir. Derlem oluşturma ve dil ders kitabının içeriğini bir bütünceden belirgin ve yoğun sıklıktaki kelimelerle şekillendirme aşamasından sonra öğretim için bu çalışmada ele alınmış ve yazarın oluşturduğu bir araç bilim camiasına ve bilim camiasına sunulmuştur

L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner

Applied Language Typology:Applying typological insights in professional practice

In this paper we introduce and outline a new research area, Applied Language Typology (ALT). ALT builds on fundamental typological findings in morphology, syntax and semantics. ALT examines the attested and potential practical consequences of these contrasts for different professional contexts of communication, such as translation, the law and second language learning and teaching. We propose three general organising principles that underlie ALT, illustrating how these principles enable us to identify exact points of language contrasts that result in significant practical difficulty, and we suggest future directions in ALT research for the benefit of academics and language practitioners