Intended for use with students who have just become aware of dialect variations, this book addresses dialects of American English. Chapters include an introduction to dialect study, discussions of colonial English, Eastern sttlement, Eastern words, Eastern pronunciation, Eastern grammar, the Westward movement, an analysis of sectional atlas…

Discusses the applicability of the notion of structured variability in language to contrastive analysis. (Author/AM)

Reported here is the work of two linguists, William Labov and Paul Cohen, and of two black researchers who know the culture of the inner city, Clarence Robins and John Lewis. Together they explore certain aspects of Black English vernacular (BEV) and certain political and cultural aspects of the black community. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) deals with…

Presents results of a study of the phonological, morphological, and syntactical oral language patterns of disadvantaged children of New Orleans. Many of the findings are relevant to beginning reading instruction. (TO)

Criticizes mainstream dialectology and linguistic atlases as outdated, and suggests a method for mapping the language of the Southwest. (CK)

The first section of this paper is a general discussion of standard English. The nine sections which follow discuss the concept of correctness and the ideological differences between grammarians and purists; standard English in a historical perspective; Eric Partridge's (1969) taxonomy of the degrees and kinds of standard English, including…

This article examines several major sociological characteristics of the Caribbean region in a study of pidginization and creolization. Three major conditions which may have affected the ways that Creole languages develop are discussed. They include: (1) the relative proportion of Africans, Europeans, and other groups now present in specific…

Most studies of dialects in English-language literature have focused on works of the nineteenth century or earlier. However, modern literature can expand the scope of dialectological investigation. In John Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," use of non-standard dialect forms occurs when the author uses an unusually informal register…

An investigation is reported which was designed to determine to what extent second generation male West Indians have accommodated to local white speech norms in the city of Cardiff. (RM)

There are two facets to the lyric rhythm of Taiwanese folk songs: beat alignment and metrical pattern selection. Because the lyrics are metrically derived from classical Chinese verse, a prosodic line may have syllable-beat symmetry. However, syllable-beat mismatches are also common. Lexical syllables have preference over functor syllables in beat…

A study of dialectal variation in Mexican Sign Language (MSL), the primary language for a large segment of Mexico's deaf community, is presented. Signs used by nine different sources representing various locations, ages, and social groups are compared. The first section reviews a number of previous informal assessments of dialectal variation in…

This is a presentation of the Slovene language, one of the three official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the official or administrative language of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. The presentation covers the following topics: (1) description of the language, the speech area, and contemporary standard Slovene; (2)…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…