This study describes the segmental phonemes of five 4-year-old speakers of Black English, and analyzes both their language development and ethnic characteristics. The study group of Negro children, born and living in Washington, D.C., came from homes that met two of three specified criteria based on the mother's education and family income. The…

A communicativity index (Index I) is described that measures the potential communication function performed by a given language in a designated communication situation. Significant sociolinguistic contrasts between the language situations of West Malaysia and Singapore are revealed by applying this index. (PMJ)

During the past two decades the educational community has focused much attention on the language of urban minority children. Analytic positions set forth tend to assume varying degrees of either language deficit or language differences. The language deficit position is examined in this work from a sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic point of view.…

Based on transcribed conversations with black children in kindergarten and the intermediate grades, a study was devised to determine whether black urban children from lower socioeconomic areas speak a systematic, consistent form of nonstandard English, and if so, to provide a syntactical analysis of the dialect of nonstandard speakers. Speech…

The great majority of poor readers in urban schools are members of an ethnic minority, a low social class, and a poor family. The simple recognition of these factors, however, is of no help in characterizing the specific sources of language norms among urban minority students or in determining the ways these distinctive norms interfere with…

An exploration of issues in language diversity addressing the nature of dialect, features of the dialect, features of black English Vernacular (BEV), linguistic phenomena in the black urban community, theories of the origins of BEV, and its social, economic, and political ramifications suggest that BEV, like other dialects, meets the needs of its…