In the last decade of the nineteenth century, when pidginized Sango became the vehicular language of the Ubangi River basin, colonization by the French and Belgians was accomplished with little direct linguistic contact between the whites and the indigenous populations but with great rellance on the real or assumed linguistic skills of their foreign African personnel. The whites' use of African languages was limited with respect to the referentlal function but powerful with respect to the expressive or affective. (Colonization, Africa, Sango, pidginization, ethnography of communication)

Among the Weyéwa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, place names are not merely labels or verbal tools for referring to locations, but rather resources for the construction of discourse. As such, they figure in Weyéwa ritual speech events in two fundamental ways. First, an individual place name can be the topic of etymological speculation, in which the verbal account of the history of a name is an exercise in the establishment of authority. Second, place names frequently occur in lists, as syntagmatic chains which serve to guide the form of ritual speech events. This use of toponyms not only characterizes Weyéwa epic narratives, but rites of misfortune, prayers, and songs. These genres utilize a “path” or “journey” metaphor in which points of the itinerary are spatially anchored by means of place names. (Ritual speech, narrative, authority, place names)

Aspects of the precontact ontology of the Yurok Indians of northwestern California may be explored through analysis of lexical and semantic shifts that occur between two speech registers in Yurok: “ordinary” speech and an auxiliary. “high,” or esoteric, speech style. In the “high” register, use of which was the prerogative of a social and spiritual elite, a variety of mechanisms are implemented in altering “ordinary” lexation and in attributing different meanings to parts of the “ordinary” lexicon. These include circumlocution, antonymy, attribution, and, most significantly, the shifting of referential focus. Semantic shifts are systematic within specifiable lexical sets and implicitly comprise subtle ontological exegeses. (Ritual languages, speech registers, translation, world view, Native North America)

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” W.I. Thomas's insight along with the Whorfian Hypothesis provide us with a clue to the immense significance of language as the essential key to the social construction of reality. This article explores linguistic implications for transformations in language usage as applied to gender-role and the cultural ideal of equality. (Definition of the situation, Whorfian Hypothesis, nonsexist language strategies, social transformation)