Literature regarding Southwest Spanish suggests gender agreement with nouns is being lost. A study of recorded speech from 11 Spanish speakers in San Antonio (Texas) shows gender agreement is neither random nor largely nonstandard, suggesting gender marking is a rule still observed in this dialect. (Author/MSE)

The applicability of the notion of "speech community" in urban centers where considerable dialect mixing takes place is discussed. Labov's model is examined and four speech community criteria are emphasized: nativeness of speech community members, uniform patterns of linguistic variation, shared evaluation of features, and close…

Mestreechs, the dialect of Dutch spoken in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is analyzed for patterns of phonological duration or quantity. Two forms of prosody, hard (H) and slurred (S), are distinguished and their distribution is examined, making reference to previous research on Dutch phonology and on the realization of prosody in Northern European…

Offers an optimality theoretic account for the phonological process of across-word regressive assimilation (AWRA) in Picard, a Gallo-Romance dialect spoken in the Picardie region in Northern France and Southern Belgium. Focuses on the varieties spoken in the Vimeu region of France. Examines one particular topic in the analysis of AWRA: the…

Tracing Appalachian speech to different areas of the British Isles entailed researching hard-to-find linguistic studies and original texts in Belfast, Edinburgh, and other locations. The Scotch-Irish contribution significantly outweighs that from Southern Britain and appears much more responsible for the grammatical features of Appalachian…

Historic linguistic consequences were studied in five separate areas of Atlantic Canada's Acadian population. Focus was on certain verbs in the third person present plural and the hypothesis that "allent" and faisent" are the result of hypercorrection. Results suggest complex reasons for their use and an indication of some social…

Acoustic analysis of two vowels thought to be merged in Utah English suggest that there are small but consistent differences between them. A matched guise experiment provides evidence that when the vowels are merged hypercorrection is involved. (33 references) (LB)

A sociolinguistic analysis of pronunciation patterns of postnuclear occlusive consonants in northern peninsular Spanish resulted in (1) understanding of the vitality of the use of distinct allophonic variations; (2) characterization of sociolinguistic usage tendencies in relation to speakers' demographic characteristics; and (3) identification of…

Brule and Isleno dialects of Spanish came to Louisiana from the Canary Islands simultaneously in the 18th century but have remained relatively isolated from each other and face extinction. Although they show common evidence of their origin, each has distinctive lexical, phonological, and syntactic features, some from contact with Acadian French or…

Traces the history and describes the present state of France's regional languages (Alsacien, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish, and Occitan) and analyzes the common problems encountered by speakers of these languages. (Author/CB)

Specific diphthongs were produced by four individuals from the coastal southern dialect region who were selected from among those who had successfully completed an accent-reduction program. Results showed that diphthongs used in Southern English were shorter and had less noticeable transitional elements than those in Standard American English.…

This study presents evidence collected from basilectal texts that the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) mental predicates "think, know, want, feel, say, see, hear" have clear lexical equivalents in Hawaii Creole English (HCE), and that these HCE predicates occur, with minor qualification, in the syntactic configurations predicted by…

The linguistic situation in Ireland over the last few centuries is examined from the rise of Irish dialects of English to the present. Four aspects of this history are examined: factors affecting the emergence of Hiberno-English dialects beginning in the seventeenth century, including opportunity for learning English, patterns in literacy and…

Many tone languages exhibit some form of downdrift or automatic downstep, the lowering of high tones separated by low tones. In extreme cases, the realization of high tones at the end of a domain (such as the sentence) may be lower than the realization of low tones at the beginning. Tone languages with this property are cross-level tone languages.…

A discussion of the perception and use of tense in Moroccan Arabic proposes that the language expresses verb aspect much more readily than tense. Implications for teaching Moroccan Arabic as a second language are discussed, and an analysis of the system of tense and aspect in the language is presented. (MSE)