The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

This dissertation establishes the utility and reliability of a statistical distance measure for syntactic dialectometry, expanding dialectometry's methods to include syntax as well as phonology and the lexicon. It establishes the measure's reliability by comparing its results to those of dialectology and phonological dialectometry on Swedish…

Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, in the section on language of his book "The Myth of the Negro Past" (1941), gives one of the first scientific orientations to the study of black speech in the United States. His basic contribution was to establish the following main points: (1) that the black people in the New World came from regions…

Ways in which negation varies in two dialects of French, called "standard" and "colloquial" are investigated. The two dialects under consideration are representative of an extensive scale of styles, often overlapping and varying according to social status, education, contextual situation, age, and geographical area. Although the great majority of…

On the basis of a study of the language of 22 black children in a rural county of northern Florida, the author states that apart from geographical dialects, there are two "genera" of English: Black (BE) and White (WE). Within each of these genera there are two varieties: Educated and Uneducated. These are further defined by…

This paper deals with three problems encountered in the areal study of "colonial" and "immigrant" languages (used in Haugen's sense) and examines how data presented in tabular or map form can assist in their solution. They are: (1) the mechanisms by which the speakers of various dialects of a single language--dialects which…

This work seeks to fill important gaps existing in the study of Peninsular Arabic, especially that of the United Arab Emirates. It presents an explicit outline of the structure of Gulf Arabic, based on the dialect of Abu Dhabi. It is intended for students and teachers of Gulf Arabic, for linguists and dialectologists, and for other individuals who…

Special issue on French dialects. (RL)

No evidence was found to indicate that grammatical reading interference is an important factor in the poor reading achievement of Black youngsters. (JH)

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

Several focal points for southwestern American Indian English research are proposed. This variation is used on reservations or in urban Indian enclaves when the "Indianness" of the discussion or participants needs formal linguistic marking. One research goal is to demonstrate that tribal varieties of Indian English actually exist.…

This paper suggests an explicit way of integrating sociolectal and dialectal facts in the overall description of a language. Phonetic, morphological, syntactic and semantic units of the whole language are defined. (CK)

Special issue on French dialects. (RL)

Simplification in structure and confluence between the local-language structure and the prestige-language structure are usually predicted in language death as in pidginization. For a dying Scottish Gaelic dialect, speakers were tested in the two most excessively complex morphological structures the dialect offers. (Author/NCR)