This list of obscene, ambiguous, or offensive Spanish words indicates their off-color meaning in various Spanish-speaking countries. The list comprises words beginning with letters H-M, and is intended to protect the traveller or non-native speaker from embarrassment. It is a continuation of a previous article. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

Two of the most stigmatized languages in the United States today are African American dialect and Appalachian English dialect. The attitudes many hold about Appalachia have come from the literature written about the place, the people, the cultural life of the mountain region, in general, and the spoken dialect. Arnow's "The Dollmaker,"…

Sketches the history of the Scots language and the political and social history of Scotland, following with a description of the dialect, including its differences from standard English in phonology and vocabulary, and in the area of sociolinguistics. Some thoughts about the possible future of the dialect are added. (IFS/WGA)

The range of Spanish varieties found among Chicanos is broad and can be expressed in terms of a linguistic continuum where particular varieties or rules are triggered by the presence of social and economic factors which permeate the relationships among speakers involved in a locutionary act. (Author/NQ)

Discusses ethnic-social variation in American Sign Language among black signers in Georgia. Some of the lexical and formational (phonological) variation observed in old and young signers is discussed. (Author/RM)

Presents a phonetic analysis of the diphthongs found in the French of Mauricie, Quebec. (AM)

Investigated African American Vernacular English dialect features in the midwestern community of Davenport, Iowa, and compared them to those reported by Pollock and Berni (1997) for Memphis, Tennessee--specifically productions of vocalic and postvocalic /r/ across African-American speakers from Davenport and Memphis. (Author/VWL)

Literature regarding Southwest Spanish suggests gender agreement with nouns is being lost. A study of recorded speech from 11 Spanish speakers in San Antonio (Texas) shows gender agreement is neither random nor largely nonstandard, suggesting gender marking is a rule still observed in this dialect. (Author/MSE)

The Pennsylvania German (PG) linguistic situation offers a unique insight into the mechanisms of language change, and specifically of syntactic change. Pennsylvania German consists of two primary varieties, (Plain (PPG) and Nonplain (NPG), a distinction based on the Anabaptist socioreligious affiliations of the former group that has produced two…

Describes the lexical characteristics of South African Indian English, focusing on its similarities with English in India, pidgins and creoles, and other expatriate Indian Englishes. (Author/CB)

This book examines linguistic variation and change. Section 1, "Sociohistorical Linguistics," includes: (1) "British Vernacular Dialects in the Formation of American English: The Case of East Anglian 'Do'"; (2) "'Short o' in East Anglia and New England"; and (3) "Sociohistorical Linguistics and Dialect Survival:…

This article explores the modalities of accommodation of two dialectophones [speakers of a dialect] in the Haut-Valais [this is a regional place name], one of whom has lived in Berne, Switzerland for more than 20 years, the other for several years. By exploiting the notion of repertoire, the study focused on the greater or lesser convergence…

Variation in the past-tense model of the verb "be" is widespread amongst English dialects, and is often considered to be the result of analogical levelling. Through an analysis of non-standard "was" in buckie English, a variety spoken in a small fishing town in northeast Scotland, this article shows that the historical record…

Examines factors common to the various dialects of the French employed in Africa and demonstrates how these factors (1) determine the uniqueness of these dialects with relation to standard French, and (2) the resemblance of these dialects to African French-based Creoles. (AM)

Argues that the mechanism of rule ordering, although sufficient to account for certain facts about linguistic change and variation, is not necessary. Different sequences of identical rules needed to account for dialectal facts in Catalan can be predicted by two independently motivated universal principles. (CHK)