Despite many folklore and cultural history projects seeking to identify the formative immigrant groups of Appalachia and their contributions, there has yet to be a systematic effort to connect Appalachian English to regional varieties of British English. This paper examines 40 grammatical features characteristic of Appalachian speech and…

The first version of this Compilation was prepared in 1951 as a convenience to American scholars and others planning surveys of dialects of English who wished to know the kinds of questions that had proved useful for providing comparable data on pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and meanings. It was also intended to be a reference work to…

The author reviews the lexical, grammatical, and phonological criteria claimed in support of the hypothesis that there is a "Midland" dialect. He finds the claim to be "an unsubstantiable artifact of word geography" and discusses the inadequacies of this method. While he is "not questioning the existence of a subdialect corresponding to what has…

The 25 communities that were chosen for the Indiana portion of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States project were selected in part to provide coverage of an area but in some instances because of their early settlement, location on a migration route, or geographical features. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire which contained…

A COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF SPOKEN WORDS AND PHRASES WAS OBTAINED IN 1959 FROM THE RESPONSES OF 33 NATIVE INFORMANTS FROM 23 COUNTIES IN TENNESSEE, GEORGIA, MISSISSIPPI, AND ALABAMA. INFORMANTS WERE ASKED TO IDENTIFY PICTURES, AND THEIR RESPONSES WERE RECORDED ON TAPE AND TRANSCRIBED. A COMPUTER WAS UTILIZED TO PRODUCE LISTINGS OF PARTICULAR SPEECH…

This work seeks to fill important gaps existing in the study of Peninsular Arabic, especially that of the United Arab Emirates. It presents an explicit outline of the structure of Gulf Arabic, based on the dialect of Abu Dhabi. It is intended for students and teachers of Gulf Arabic, for linguists and dialectologists, and for other individuals who…

Drawing on phonological, grammatical, and usage data collected during personal interviews and taped sessions, this paper seeks to determine whether and how persons of Finnish descent, collectively or individually by generation, constitute dialect islands within the local dialect area (Marquette, Michigan), and their effect upon one another. The…

Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, in the section on language of his book "The Myth of the Negro Past" (1941), gives one of the first scientific orientations to the study of black speech in the United States. His basic contribution was to establish the following main points: (1) that the black people in the New World came from regions…

Spanish spoken in Mexico City is influenced considerably more by indigenous dialects than by archaic or present usage of peninsular Spanish. Six areas in particular fall under this influence: (1) the phoneme "s", treated as a palative and fricative sound, (2) voiced "s", which is dental alveolar and affricate, (3) "t"…

Discusses the Puerto Rican dialect and its peculiar placement of subject pronouns. Notes the linguistic variety in the dialect as well as its use of verbs connotating mental and communicative activity and constructions of relativity. These distinctions give rise to the functional hypothesis to account for the peculiarities of Spanish in the…

The aim of the research reported here was to describe dialect diversity in Appalachia (Monroe and Mercer Counties, West Virginia) and to examine the possible effect of this diversity on education. The present volume contains the first two parts of the report, the third being submitted separately. The first part includes chapters 1-5, the second…

Fifty residents of Houston, Texas, were surveyed to determine whether or not factors concerning their background affected their word choice, grammatical usage, and pronunciation. Each informant answered a questionnaire consisting of one page of background data and two pages of questions about his daily speech. In correlating the participants'…

Seven everyday topics are discussed in Basa Djarkarta, a dialect of Malay spoken in Djarkarta by over three million people. The purpose of the reading text, part of the basic course in Indonesian for official United States military personnel, is to acquaint students with this increasingly popular dialect in addition to Bahasa Indonesian, the…

THIS BOOK PROVIDES A COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION OF DIALECTOLOGY AS A DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND OF MAJOR ASPECTS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH DIALECTS. THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS DEFINE WHAT DIALECTS ARE AND HOW REGIONAL AND SOCIAL DIALECTS DIFFER FROM ONE ANOTHER IN TERMS OF PRONUNCIATION, VOCABULARY, AND GRAMMAR. CHAPTER 3 NOTES THE PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT…

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…