A course to make students aware of the patterns of the different dialects of American English is offered by the Dade County Public Schools. Designed to foster tolerance for other ways of speaking, the quinmester program helps students to determine their own dialect and to compare it with alternative forms of speech. The course content includes a…

Presents examples of vocabulary items and expressions which can be found in Canada, particularly in Quebec, and which would be misunderstood, or not understood at all, by the average Frenchman. (AM)

Misinformation and ambiguity as features of social communication in Northern Thai villages are examined. The questions of how well Northern Thai villagers understand each others' verbal communications, and how accurate their statements actually are, are considered. (Author/RM)

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 author notes the problems arising from the dichotomy between literary Arabic and the spoken varieties. The thousand-year-old system of teaching literary Arabic, the archaic elements of grammar, and the writing system are discussed. The written history of the literary language is presented in three stages--(1) the pre-Islamic classical, (2) the…

This document provides a description of the Chien-yang dialect of Chinese along with a comparative description of the Chien-ou dialect and a discussion of the entire Min dialect family. The Min dialects are considered with respect to geography (including maps), internal subgrouping, numbers of speakers, and mutual intelligibility. The main part of…

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…

The present volume deals specifically with language contact, dialect contact, and standardization. The scope of the documentation is defined by the policy that the research was to be done exclusively from primary sources. Five hundred ten titles, selected from 71 monographs, journals, and periodicals published in China and parts of Southeast Asia…

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…

Yugoslavia, a country with a population of about 20,000,000, has as official languages Macedonian, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian. The latter is the cause of much controversy, for while Croatian and Serbian indisputably have a common linguistic base, the political and economic tensions between the two "nationalities" augment disagreement…

The purpose of this booklet is to describe the major differences between the Levantine (Palestinian and Lebanese) and Egyptian (Cairene) dialects of Arabic, with some references to other geographical varieties of these dialects. It is designed to provide help to persons who have learned either one dialect or the other and need to transfer to the…

A dialect survey of the transition between two major Indo-Aryan languages in Nepal, Bhojpuri and Maithili, was conducted focusing on both the linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of the various languages and dialects. The purpose of the study was to find out where and how this transition occurred between the pure Bhojpuri-speaking area and the…

The Pacific area is generally acknowledged to manifest great linguistic diversity. Such diversity is generally assumed to be dysfunctional, an obstacle to efficient functioning of society. Such diversity must, however, have its functions at least in the circumstances in which it arose. It is also generally assumed that such diversity is the result…

Uses Weinreich's (1953) partition of bilingualism to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. Using standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht, subjects performed an auditory lexical decision task. (30 references) (Author/CK)

This is an introductory study of the mutual intelligibility among the various dialects and languages in the Manitowinini family. Specific languages considered include Powhatan, Lenape, Natick, Otchipwe, and Nanticoke. The goal of the study is not merely to comprehend inter-tribal relations better, but also to discover the actual…