Discussing World Englishes, outlines a basic developmental scentrio, and suggests that speech communities typically undergo five consecutive phases in this process--foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation. Describes the sociolinguistic characteristics of each one. The framework is…

Reviews two books, "American Earlier Black English," by Edgar W. Schneider, and "The Death of Black English," by Ronald Butters, that capture the essence of the renewed controversy on the reemergence of the historical issue and a new dispute over the current development of Vernacular Black English. (36 references) (JL)

Examines several longstanding, isolated biracial sociolinguistic situations in the coastal and Appalachian regions of North Carolina: a core community of African Americans and two case studies of isolated speakers. Compares diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for speakers representing different generations of African American and…

Eight general principles are postulated by which immigrants adapt dialectologically to their new surroundings, based mainly on results of a developmental study of six Canadian youngsters in two families who moved to southern England, with supporting evidence from several other studies. (52 references) (Author/LB)

Research supported by the Ford Foundation and the American Association of University Women. (DD)

The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. The Konkani-Kannada bilingual situation is described and an explanatory account of the syntactic change is given. (Author/CLK)