These papers on the subject of the Swiss German language examine the status and attitudes of the Swiss German speaker, the reaction of other linguistic communities to Swiss German, and the necessity and/or possibility of learning Swiss German. The following articles are included: (1) "Le 'Schwyzertutsch': ecran ou lien? (Is Swiss German a…

Language contact and the resulting interference has long been diagnosed as one of the primary forces behind language change. In cases of multilingual contact within geographically restricted areas, converging changes of the languages in contact have been uncovered and described. The geographic areas characterized by such linguistic situations came…

This annotated bibliography of recent studies on language variation presents abstracts which appeared in "Resources in Education" during the period September 1973 through December 1974. They include entries from several of the ERIC clearinghouses: Adult Education, Reading and Communication Skills, Languages and Linguistics, Early…

Reports on a sociolinguistic survey conducted in Tokyo, Japan, that explores the social factors that relate to the use of nonstandard expressions among younger people. Sex, media exposure, and friendship networks were found to influence language standardization. (25 references) (Author/OD)

Dialect writing in nineteenth-century America has been used as a source of evidence about popular American language and culture. Works employing dialect have been studied as documents embodying perceptions of the relation between character, role, and moral values on the one hand, and speech variety on the other. Critics have noticed the difference…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…

A discussion of the role of sociolinguistics in the treatment of communication disorders focuses on issues related to dialect and language variation. It begins with an examination of linguistic diversity and dynamic description of language, reporting on a study of speech and language pathologists' judgments of sentences in African American…

A collection of essays on linguistic variation in English that distinguishes communities and social groups from one another includes: "Standard English: Biography of a Symbol" (Shirley Brice Heath); "The Rise of Standard English" (Margaret Shaklee); "English Orthography" (Wayne O'Neil); "How Pablo Says 'Love' and…

This paper focuses on a language variation model that incorporates a number of concepts from linguistic and rhetorical studies. The model views language variation as a product of two correlating causes: one, the user and his or her personal, regional, and social dialect; and the other, the user's use of the language in terms of such discourse…

This study compares the ability of 37 Standard-English-speaking graduate students to comprehend Black English versions of a set of 45 utterances with the ability of 37 comparable students to comprehend Standard English versions of the same utterances. Of the two stimulus tapes used (consisting of 45 sentences each), one was recorded in Black…

The term "village English" has been used by a number of people to label the English used by Alaskan natives. The term appears in discussions of educational problems and often the phenomenon is cited as a significant reason for the lower than expected achievement of Alaskan school children. It is suggested that statements about…

Developments in the linguistic and non-linguistic scenes in the Philippines indicate the emergence of a dialect of English that should appropriately be labelled Philippine English. Filipinos paradoxically have emancipated themselves from American English by taking over the code for their own creative uses. Philippine English has become and will…

This paper suggests that new approaches are needed in the study of language standardization. One such approach is the consideration of standardization in terms of processes, i.e., in terms of series of related events, rather than as a group of unrelated discrete happenings. Borrowing is one recurring feature in language standardization, and in…

In a sociolinguistic study of the verb phrase in Southern White English, a pattern of change in progress was observed. The 14 variables studied showed that certain variants were increasing, others decreasing, and yet others stable across time within the community, and that each variable's change was progressing in a wave sensitive to age, social…

The rhyming practices of Sima Xiangru and Wang Bao, early and mid-western Han poets of the Shu area, reveal details about the finals of their languages. Comparisons are made of similarities and differences of their dialects to that of a later compatriot, Yang Xiong. (Author/CB)