Author reaffirms the value of the Black idiom" in speech, and criticizes those who would either eradicate the Black idiom or teach Blacks to be switchers from the Black idiom when they be around Blacks, to the white idiom when they are around white employees and others." (Author/DR)

A description and analysis of the various functions of black language as an integral part of the collective experience and identity of American blacks. (EH)

Black English-Negro Nonstandard English, or Negro dialect,"-although perhaps represented by less divergent varieties in the Northern cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is here shown to have been there all along. (JM)

The use of "have,""got,""have got," and alternate forms was investigated in the speech of Anglo and black grade-school children from lower and middle income neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Techniques were devised to elicit multiple occurrences of the construction, including questions and negatives. One technique used was a convergent communication…

This study was designed to investigate, describe, and compare the intonation patterns of Black English and Standard English speaking children in a reading (formal) and free discourse (informal) situation. Black English was defined as the linguistic code of the subjects sampled from the inner city black poverty area schools, and Standard English as…

The concept of the chorophone forms the basis for this study of vowel differences between Southern Negro English and Southern white English. The author isolates chorophones for the speech community under study according to the occurrence of a particular segmental phoneme or corresponding phoneme sequences in a set of words, all of which contain…

Analyzes an Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to mixed audience. Dialect alternants signal switching between contrasting styles in both. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings, and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and…

When 130 African American college students were asked to rate the likability and desirability as a committee work partner of black-English-speaking, code-switching, or standard-English-speaking voices, they tended to prefer the speaker of standard English. Implications are discussed. (SLD)

If our historic goals of individual opportunity and literacy are to be realized, contributions from all appropriate disciplines must be brought to focus in classroom language instruction. The organization and content of this book reflect this interdisciplinary point of view. A basic concern is to explore possible solutions to educational problems…

Previous studies have demonstrated that certain differences in speech behavior can be related to the social characteristics of speakers. However, these studies have not explicitly examined the effect of level of linguistic analysis on correlations observed between language variables and status variables. Three levels of analysis of a linguistic…

Presents research on the situational dimension of linguistic power in social context and the relevance of this research within culturally pluralistic educational contexts. Offers suggestions for class activities that can engage standard and nonstandard speakers of English as well as those who do not speak English. (SRT)

The speech habits of the most oppressed --and the largest-- segment of the black population in the United States did not spring solely from an inability to handle acceptable forms of spoken English, nor mainly from the limitations caused by the particular stock of words known to the speaker. Black slang stems from a somewhat disseminated rejection…

Teachers of culturally different students should not ridicule or verbally abuse their students, but should try to show them how the characteristics of formal English differ from urban Black English. They must be able to explain the appropriateness of standard English usage in certain situations, while they still maintain respect for the students'…

Verbal and nonverbal patterns of communication found in the black community are discussed in this paper. They have been selected on the basis of their potential as interference factors in intergroup communication. A section on black language describes and explains the following categories: rapping, running it down, jiving, shucking, copping a…

The influence of the socioeconomic background and sex of the child and the race of the clinician on the frequency of implementation of nonstandard phonological and grammatical structures was examined in 72 black 4-and 5-year-olds. In order to generalize findings to typical clinical settings, language samples were elicited by 3 black and 3 white…