When it comes to learning an additional language, it is important that teachers prepare students to communicate with different speakers, respecting and understanding the different English-accented speeches around the world. This article helps English teachers from different parts of the world embrace language variation in their lessons,…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

The expansion of the English language produced by non-native speakers has, in recent decades, been discussed by applied linguists from various theoretical perspectives. The discussion has highlighted evidence showing that the multiplicity and diversity of English uses have given rise to an acceleration in the rate of inter-variety contacts where…

The aims of this study were 1) to examine the effectiveness of the World Englishes instructional model in enabling students to improve their listening comprehension towards varieties of English, and 2) to investigate students' attitudes towards the use of the World Englishes instructional model. The methodology of this study followed a…

Over the past few decades, there has been considerable effort to find the mechanisms through which adult listeners can accommodate the rampant phonetic variation in natural speech. My dissertation concerns one source of variability: phonetic variation in speech produced by individuals with foreign accents. Mounting evidence shows that listeners…

Gondi, a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million people in central India, is a chain of dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible. This study looked at a two-step sound change, responsible for this dialect division. (ER)

Analyzes the speech of three speakers of Linxian Chinese, indicating the dialect's features and the problems involved in communication between speakers of Linxian and speakers of Putonghua (or Standard Mandarin). (Author/AM)

The present work is divided into two parts. Part I provides a general orientation to the material for both linguists and non-linguists. Part II contains information about 700 of the world's languages. Chapter 1 presents a few of the essentials about language and languages for non-linguists. Chapter 2 provides a brief explanation of how the data…

Twenty-four English speakers from various regions of India were tested for the intelligibility of their speech. Recordings of speech in a variety of contexts were evaluated by listeners from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, and Germany. On the basis of the resulting intelligibility scores, factors which tend to hinder…