Despite many folklore and cultural history projects seeking to identify the formative immigrant groups of Appalachia and their contributions, there has yet to be a systematic effort to connect Appalachian English to regional varieties of British English. This paper examines 40 grammatical features characteristic of Appalachian speech and…

The statement by the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication affirming the student's right to his own language--his dialect--poses a challenge deserving further research, especially as it concerns the classroom situation. Black English, a dialect with linguistic principles whose roots can be traced to West…

The standard view of language attitudes in a creole continuum is that the creole is considered bad and the standard language is considered good. This standard view fits with the theory of decreolization by which such continua are thought to have come about. A study was carried out in Guyana in an effort to overcome the perceived limitations of the…

A corpus of Black English (BEV) data is re-examined with exclusive attention to the "is" form of the copula. This analysis differs from previous examinations in that more constraints have been introduced, and the Cedergren/Sankoff computer program for multivariant analysis has been employed. The analytic techniques that are used allow for a finer…

In standard American Spanish, the velar nasal surface variant of systematic /n/ occurs only in syllable-final environments, when the immediately following segment is a velar consonant. In many American Spanish dialects, however, "ng" may also optionally appear phonetically in other phonological environments. Cuban Spanish is such a…

Information is presented in this paper regarding suprasegmental features of Black English thay may cause reading interference for some Black children. Much of the research concerning reading problems of many Afro-American students stresses the segmental differences of the phonology, the morphology, the syntax, and lexical selection between two…

An extrinsic relationship between generative semantics and dialect geography should be exploited because contemporary transformational grammarians have too easily ignored the work of the dialectologist and have been too readily satisfied with what might be called armchair evidence. The work of the dialect geographers needs to be taken into…

The pronunciation and use of /s/ in the isleno dialect of Spanish, a dying language spoken in a small ethnic enclave in southeast Louisiana, is examined. Today, there are fewer than 20 fluent speakers of isleno Spanish, which has been described as a fossilized derivative of the speech of Canary Island peasants with additions from Spanish sailors.…

The purpose of this study is: (1) to document the existence of a population speaking vernacular Black English (VBE) in Waterloo, Iowa, a middle-sized urban community in the Midwest; (2) to examine how Waterloo VBE contrasts with the surrounding majority language, Midland vernacular; (3) to investigate Iowans' language attitudes; and (4) to…

A study of speakers of a range of English dialects was conducted to investigate some influences on the pattern of phonetic final devoicing of phonologically voiced fricatives and affricates. With the help of spectrographically examined tape-recorded speech derived from sociolinguistic interviews of the subjects, the study examined seven English…

A study was undertaken to gather attitudes of Spanish-speakers toward specific types of Chicano Spanish dialect lexical items. Reactions were randomly taken from 11 Latin American students who attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale during the 1975 spring semester; 20 Mexican residents of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, who attended English as…

This paper describes a graduate course for language arts teachers at Georgia State University in Atlanta, titled Social Dialects and Language Learning. Classroom procedures and activities in the course were organized into five cumulative, related phases to engage the teachers in useful fieldwork in order to achieve major objectives of the course.…

In Guyana Creolese, the word "doz" appears frequently in the speech of people on a wide range of social levels. The term signals that the action occurs habitually. The use of "doz" is not widely noted among creolists, however, possibly because it often occurs in phonologically reduced forms such as "Iz" or…

A survey of written and spoken Tennessee English was recently begun. Work is in progress on the first stage of the project, which involves the compilation of a bibliography. Data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will be examined in planning the survey itself. The next stage…

It seems highly likely that many of the features of Black American English can be traced back to the Afro-Portuguese Creole dialects that sprang up in the fifteenth century in Portuguese slave camps along the West African coast, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea area, the area of greatest concentration of activity during the slave trade. This…