Wales has been in contact with English since as early as the 12th century, with the English language exerting regular influence on the indigenous Welsh-language community since the 14th century. Since the earlier times of contact the two languages have interacted, mutually influencing each other to a differing and asymmetrical degree. The situation is that of widespread bilingualism, with everyday occurrences of natural code-switching between Welsh and English, as well as constant interaction and mutual influence of one language on the other, most notably in the form of borrowing and substratum patterns, not restricted to the area of the lexical stock. Within the lexical sphere, however, there is evidence that borrowing from English must have begun as early as the Old English period; and that the process is in full force today. The older borrowings are not straightforwardly so noticeable or recognisable since they have undergone substantial phonological modification and adaptation to the native system. One of these modifications has concerned the suprasegmental feature of word stress. The adaptation of Anglicisms at the segmental level has been investigated before, while the accent accommodation to the Welsh pattern has only occasionally been noticed or commented upon. And yet, since there exists a systemic difference between the two phonological systems in that in English the word-accent is quantity sensitive, whereas in Welsh it is fixed (mostly) to the penultimate syllable, one can expect a considerable amount of conflicting points and necessary adjustments to eliminate illicit metrical structure. The research into these issues appears to suggest that we cannot talk about mechanical inclusion of borrowed words into the word-stress pattern functioning in Modern Welsh, as will hopefully become clear after examination of the data set. It is to such issues that this paper is going to be devoted.

This article is an attempt to establish the time-frame and relative chronology of the evolution of consonant harmony in north-western Karaim. The sample material used for the present article comes from a Karaim handwritten Torah translation dating back to 1720 (the oldest analysed Western Karaim Bible translation), copied in Kukizów by Simcha ben Chananiel and written in the Karaim semi-cursive variant of the Hebrew script. Additionally, in the present article an attempt is made to describe step by step how the harmony shift operated.

Intended as a follow-up to Part 1 of the study focusing on the use of I mean in police interview data, Part 2 of the analysis offers insight into the recruitment of the related marker you know by the interviewers and the interviewees, respectively. In particular, acknowledging that the primary function of you know is that of “inviting addressee inferences” (Jucker, Smith 1998) and in agreement with the categorisation of functions proposed by Fox Tree and Schrock (2002), the paper reveals how you know is deployed for interpersonal, turn management, repairing, monitoring and organising purposes. To this end, it focuses on the syntactic behaviour of you know and examines the patterns of use linked to individual interview participants. What is more, given the potential of you know to invite addressee feedback, the analysis also looks at listener responses to you know and you know-introduced ideas, revealing at the same time the linguistic coding of power asymmetry in institutional interaction. In sum, Part 1 and Part 2 of the study highlight the subjective and intersubjective meanings conveyed by the markers I mean and you know in police interviews and draw attention to the contribution that pragmatic marker research can make to court and police interpreting practice.

The present study is composed of two parts. In Part 1, the definition, as well as the actual and the desired profile of Eurolinguistic studies are discussed, and a strict differentiation between cultural and linguistic aspects is postulated. In Part 2 some suggestions of this author are made, concerning the future methodology and topics of Eurolinguistic research.

This paper shows common extralinguistic factors influencing conservatism and purism in languages of Northern Europe (Nordic, Baltic, Finnic). Users’ motivation, environment, culture, history and conscious policy are the keys to understand some tendencies in the slower rate of change of these languages.