A survey of written and spoken Tennessee English was recently begun. Work is in progress on the first stage of the project, which involves the compilation of a bibliography. Data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will be examined in planning the survey itself. The next stage…

"Gastarbeiterdeutsch" includes varieties of German spoken by the many foreign workers employed in low-paid, less desirable jobs in Germany. It is characterized by reduction and simplification of syntactic and semantic forms. Study of this dialect reveals patterns of natural language acquisition necessary for communication, useful in classroom…

One of the most significant problems that linguists face in their attempts to describe Vernacular Black English (VBE) is the matter of fluctuating forms. It is consistently observed that speakers appear to fluctuate between a socially stigmatized variant and its presumed nonstigmatized counterpart. Fluctuations in VBE have often been viewed as a…

Sociolinguistics is characterized by a concern for viewing language variation and for seeing language in real social contexts. It has a high potential for relationship and application to other fields such as education, sociology, and psychology. Sociolinguistics try to study the speech of a community, and instead of studying the presence or…

Research has demonstrated that many linguistic features correlate with social stratification of speakers and that these features often serve as social identifiers that trigger language stereotypes. An experiment was conducted to verify these findings with regard to Portuguese ethnic groups. Judges from four Portuguese-speaking ethnic groups…

The writer introduces the idea of sociolinguistic competence, the ability of a speaker to produce and recognize an infinite number of inter-idiolectal code switches, and discusses two methods of dealing with such language variations: frequency analysis and implicational analysis. In frequency analysis, the method used by sociolinguists such as…

This article examines several major sociological characteristics of the Caribbean region in a study of pidginization and creolization. Three major conditions which may have affected the ways that Creole languages develop are discussed. They include: (1) the relative proportion of Africans, Europeans, and other groups now present in specific…

Results of a study documenting the Mexican American's unique Spanish dialectal expressions used in the barrios of San Antonio, Texas, and its surrounding areas are presented. The expressions included are those which were not recorded in the "Diccionario de la Real Academia Espanola" (19th Edition) or which were recorded therein but with…

This paper focusses on sex contrasts in language as revealed in recent sociolinguistic research. While there are relatively few differences in subjective language identifications and judgments, there are several clear differences in objective language data. In the Detroit Language Study, women show a greater "sensitivity" to multiple…

This study was designed to investigate, describe, and compare the intonation patterns of Black English and Standard English speaking children in a reading (formal) and free discourse (informal) situation. Black English was defined as the linguistic code of the subjects sampled from the inner city black poverty area schools, and Standard English as…

The recent work by sociolinguists is more accurate for consideration of urban dialects than is the analysis provided in the "Linguistic Atlas" materials. The sociolinguists' work shows that the use of nonstandard phonological and grammatical features varies according to one's socioeconomic status, ethnic background, speech context, age,…

Many English language arts teachers consider the nonstandard English of their students as being "slovenly or nonverbal or inexact or lazy." These same teachers often have been trained in the "false assumptions of a single universally accepted norm of English." These positions, the author states, are both fallacious and…

Analyzes an Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to mixed audience. Dialect alternants signal switching between contrasting styles in both. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings, and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and…

The Swedish address system is in a state of rapid change. Consequently, Swedes are now more than ever sensitive to the seeming lack of generally accepted rules of usage. This paper attempts to codify the rules for usage of the personal pronouns "du" and "ni." In so doing, it finds that "du" may be used to express…

Language development in disadvantaged children and the research related to this area are the subjects of this issue of the IRCD Bulletin. The first part discusses the functions of the various components of language and the effects of language deprivation on disadvantaged youngsters. The educational approaches to teaching language fundamentals…