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…

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…

THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO ANALYZE THE SOCIAL CAUSES FOR THE DIFFERENTIAL RATE OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR BETWEEN BRAHMINS AND NON-BRAHMINS. INDICATIONS ARE THAT (1) INDIAN SPEECH COMMUNITIES ARE CONSCIOUS OF CASTE DIALECTS, (2) LINGUISTIC FORMS DIFFUSE MORE RAPIDLY AMONG LOWER-STATUS GROUPS, (3) THE SPEECH OF LOWER-STATUS GROUPS DISPLAYS FORMS…

Comparison of the moribund dialects of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, and Smith Island, Maryland, demonstrates that valuable insight into the patterning of variation and change in language death can be obtained by investigating moribund varieties of healthy languages. Discusses comparative investigation of two kinds of linguistic decay:…

Presents comparison of Cantonese and non-Cantonese students' expressed judgments of two samples of speech produced by same person but presented as coming from two different speakers. Although all students thought the better speaker would have a better chance for social advancement, Cantonese subjects who spoke with heavy Cantonese accents were…

The rhyming practices of Sima Xiangru and Wang Bao, early and mid-western Han poets of the Shu area, reveal details about the finals of their languages. Comparisons are made of similarities and differences of their dialects to that of a later compatriot, Yang Xiong. (Author/CB)