If you don't want to write your term
paper on the topic of your oral presentation, either devise a topic of your
own (which you need to clear with me, however) or select a topic from the following
list.
Potential paper topics other than the topics of class discussions (= topics
of oral presentations) are:
· The status of American English: dialect or language proper?
· The development of the American language
· Immigrants' languages
· The South as dialect region
· Jewish English
· Canadian English [contact me for tips about sources if you choose this topic - there are a certain old sources I don't want you to use]
· The linguistic east-west differential [Gefälle] in the U.S. and Canada
· Religious factors in language spread
· Language maintenance and language shift
· Language planning and standardization
· Language variation and change
· Occupation-specific varieties (e.g. soldiers, drug users, computer specialists, marketing experts)
· Politically correct language
· "Uptalk" and quotative "like" in teenage slang
· Pidgins and Creoles
· Hawai'ian Creole English
· Native American pidgins
· Chinook Jargon
· Language and ethnic identity
· Language attitudes
· Linguistic profiling
· Diglossia, language choice, and/or multilingualism in the U.S.
· Style shifting / Code switching
· Language education policies
· The "No Child Left Behind" Act
· Dialects and Testing
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