Sketches the history of the Scots language and the political and social history of Scotland, following with a description of the dialect, including its differences from standard English in phonology and vocabulary, and in the area of sociolinguistics. Some thoughts about the possible future of the dialect are added. (IFS/WGA)

Describes the lexical characteristics of South African Indian English, focusing on its similarities with English in India, pidgins and creoles, and other expatriate Indian Englishes. (Author/CB)

Variation in the past-tense model of the verb "be" is widespread amongst English dialects, and is often considered to be the result of analogical levelling. Through an analysis of non-standard "was" in buckie English, a variety spoken in a small fishing town in northeast Scotland, this article shows that the historical record…

A study compared salient variables of Canadian English from two concurrent sociodialectal surveys, one for Ottawa, Ontario and one for Vancouver, British Columbia. Using the Labovian model of phonological variation in association with sociological parameters and other linguistic variables within each specific area, the analysis investigated four…

Gives an overview of the language situation on Ponape, with reference to social structure. (AM)

A social dialect survey of a New Zealand community documented a change in progress in the pronunciation of the vowels in words such as "air" and "ear." The data support a tentative interpretation that a shift to the variant with the closer onset for AIR words was initiated by middle-aged Pakeha women. (38 references) (Author/LB)

An analysis of lexical innovation in Ghanaian English uses ten linguistic categories identified in earlier research on Nigerian English, offering an explanation of each category and a number of examples. The categories include: loanshifts (English words manipulated to produce and transmit meanings beyond purely denotative reference and conveying a…

In order to help explain language variation and promote an understanding of spatial networks and diffusion patterns, data from the records of the Survey of English Dialects (SED) are analyzed with respect to geolinguistics. The data include all recorded instances of words with morpheme-final consonant clusters for all 75 interviews with older…

Presents examples of vocabulary items and expressions which can be found in Canada, particularly in Quebec, and which would be misunderstood, or not understood at all, by the average Frenchman. (AM)

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…

Cape Barren English is clearly the most aberrant dialect of English spoken in Australia. Descended from English sealers, whalers and ex-convicts and their Aboriginal wives, the inhabitants of Cape Barren Island, Tasmania, have lived in relative isolation for the last 150 years or more. Their dialect is not a creolized pidgin; it has a number of…

Focuses on factors governing the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses with relativized subjects from the 16th century to the present, using spoken and written data and including non-standard and regional varieties. The study addresses claims by Romaine (1982) that the "wh"-strategy has not affected spoken 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 report, entirely in French, details a study of the concepts of "anglicism" drawn from a wide sample of French Canadian metalinguistic material published between 1800 and 1930. The study analyzed the use of the term "anglicism" and various associated concepts, identified the principal trends in the way anglicisms were…

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…