This paper sketches Spanish colonial policies toward Southern Peruvian Quechua in order to identify long-term trends and constants. I emphasize the following conjunctures in the debate on the status of the indigenous languages: (1) the simultaneous efforts to restrict the inroads of bilingualism in the legal and political domain and to encourage bilingualism among local headmen so as to facilitate indirect rule in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; (2) the debate as to the role of the vernacular in religious education and missionary work in the same period, a debate in which the position favoring use of the vernacular held out for a time against calls for forced liquidation of the indigenous languages; (3) the ascendancy of the position calling for liquidation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and (4) the role of Southern Peruvian Quechua as a nationalist emblem during the eighteenth century.

These conjunctures have considerable relevance today. Differences in vocabulary and ideological justification have obscured the continuity between colonial and modern language policy. The issues debated, the limits of the alternatives proposed as solutions, and even the practical efforts carried out on behalf of alternative policies, have been surprisingly perdurable. For four and a half centuries the “Andean language debate,” the issues and terms of language policy, have continued to have at their center the question of whether or not the Quechua have a right to exist as a separate community. (Language policy, colonialism, South America, Quechua)

Talk that is argumentative in form can have sociable functions for members of some groups. In sociable argument, speakers repeatedly disagree, remain nonaligned with each other, and compete for interactional goods. Yet they do so in a nonserious way, and in ways which actually display their solidarity and protect their intimacy. The analysis raises questions about the adequacy of many current views about conversational cooperation, showing that the levels at which cooperation (and competition) exist are not always overt. The analysis also demonstrates the cultural relativity of norms of evaluation about dispute. (Conflict, conversation, cooperation, culture, evaluation, frames, key, pragmatics, rhetoric)

The study reported here reports data on the validity of a Canadian version of Labov's “index of linguistic insecurity.” Data were gathered from a random sample of two census tracts in Winnipeg, Canada. Both Labov's original test and a new Canadian equivalent test were given to the sample of eighty adults. Scores on the two tests were highly correlated, indicating high criterion validity of the Canadian test. Also, social class and gender differences followed the same pattern as in Labov's study, with the lower middle class and females showing higher levels of linguistic insecurity. The use of the New York City test in Winnipeg is discussed, and some details concerning Canadian English are presented. (Language attitudes, linguistic insecurity, Canadian English, social class)

The sociolinguistic pressures now exerted on the Gullah-speaking communities match the general conditions that DeCamp (1971b) described for postcreole speech communities or communities in which the traditional language variety is decreolizing or dying. There is a correspondence between the dominant official language and the creole, and there is sufficient breakdown in the formerly rigid social stratification brought on by educational programs and other acculturative forces to cause social mobility and to motivate large numbers of Gullah speakers to modify their speech in the direction of standard English. Preliminary research of the processes involved in this modification activity reveals that certain features of the pronominal system are elaborating and dying while certain other features of this system are remaining static and unchanged. Elaboration is well underway in the nominative case, for example, while in the objective case elaboration has barely begun. (Sociolinguistic pressures, postcreole, decreolizing or dying, social mobility, certain features, elaborating, static)