We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

In this paper, the author argues that the theoretical groundings of code-switching are flawed, in that they rely on a flawed understanding of language. For code-switching to function as described by sociologists and educators, language would have to be a skill--and particular languages and dialects to be discrete subsets of this skill--to be…

This study examined the latent factors of dialect variation as they relate to reading achievement of second grade students. Sociocultural theory, identity theories, and critical theory used against a metaphorical backdrop of a bundle of locks were used to illustrate the complexity of language variation and its effect on reading achievement within…

This paper examines language stylization in "Aigia Fuxia" ("The Fuchsia Goat"), a highly popular Greek Cypriot sitcom, where the (imagined) linguistic and socio-cultural "self" of a dialect-speaking community is subjected to extreme and aberrant stylization. The overarching filmic and generic trademark of "Aigia…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases…

The uses of the eleven Spanish clitic pronouns are discussed for various regional dialects and formal and colloquial speech in Spain and Latin America. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

"Gastarbeiterdeutsch" includes varieties of German spoken by the many foreign workers employed in low-paid, less desirable jobs in Germany. It is characterized by reduction and simplification of syntactic and semantic forms. Study of this dialect reveals patterns of natural language acquisition necessary for communication, useful in classroom…

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…

Knowledge about how language works is often considered superfluous by the public. In general, the public image of language is that language is in a serious decline and that outside influences on language have led it astray, views that are supported by false assumptions about language on the part of writers. Writers in newspapers and magazines note…

This book examines dialect variations in the United States. Chapter topics include an introduction to dialect study, colonial English, eastern settlement, eastern words, eastern pronunciation, eastern grammar, the westward movement, sectional atlas studies (the Great Lakes, the Upper Middle West, Texas, Colorado and other Rocky Mountain areas,…

Explores the general features and some unique usages of West African English, Caribbean English, and Indian English. (EL)

A china factory in Pennsylvania was the setting for a study of the characteristics of the factory, its workers, and the community. Specifically, the speech of 151 informants, representing 12 1/2% of the plant population, was analyzed for both careful and casual speech, in order to focus on lexical and grammatical forms which reflect regional and…

Some bases of intra-group identification among Black people who inhabit urban ghettoes are discussed, as well as the economy of the ghetto, especially as it pertains to the strategies that Black Americans have evolved to deal with their subsistence problems. An attempt is made to relate these strategies to the presence of in-group schisms and to…

Discusses the sociolinguistic hypotheses of deficit and difference, criticizing the latter for deriving a "functional equivalence" from clearly different social contexts, leading to passivity and lack of results in current school practice. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

This article discusses the problem of choosing a language style for literary purposes in Quebec. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)