Geolinguistics is the developing branch of human geography concerned with the relationship of languages and their physical and human settings. It investigates the socio-spatial context of language use and language choice, measures language distribution and variety, assesses the relative usefulness and availability of different languages from…

Both a theoretical framework and some practical suggestions are included in this book intended to help educators improve the teaching of writing to high school students who are native speakers of nonstandard English dialects. The first chapter includes a brief background on the problem of writing in American schools, with special focus on the…

A directory of collections of audio recordings of varieties of American English spoken in North America and including English-based creoles contains information about collections of any size, classified according to the primary state in the U.S. represented by the speakers in the sample and cross-referenced when more than one state is represented…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "A Question of Imperatives" (Tom Wachtel); "Contrastive Sociolinguistics--Some Methodological Considerations" (Karol Janicki); "How to Describe Phonological Variation" (Thomas Herok, Livia Tonelli); "Towards a Contrastive Pragmalinguistics" (Philip Riley); "The Perception…

A study of intercultural business communication problems compared three examples of direct marketing sales letters similar in function, format, content, and targeted recipient but originating in different cultures (India, England, and the United States) and companies. The letters were directed to a single prospective purchaser of "Who's…

One of a series of practitioner oriented texts designed to clarify important educational issues and improve classroom practice. This book examines difficulties in teaching Shakespearean language at the high school and undergraduate levels and provides practical exercises for students. The book begins with an overview of previous theory and…

The teaching activities presented in this document have been selected from a series of language study units prepared for teachers by the Queensland Language Development Project task force as part of the Studytalk project. They focus on inquiring into some of the varieties of language most accessible to teachers and students. In each of the three…

The issue discussed in this paper is how to test bilingual education teachers in order to be sure that they can teach bilingually in subject areas such as mathematics, science, or social studies. Four aspects of the question are discussed with reference to Spanish/English bilingual education, with the understanding that most questions raised are…

There is a great deal of knowledge required to send or receive a message of "no." The acquisition of communicative competence, i.e., the ability to interpret the full meaning of a message and the ability to properly formulate such messages, requires three levels of knowledge. These three levels are all needed in the interpretation of the…

The French of English speaking students of French as a second language is compared with "francais populaire" (FP) in order to determine similarities in their tendency toward simplified grammar and morphology. Simplifying characteristics that are typical of FP were obtained from French working class sources, while simplification patterns…

The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate that the fields of linguistics, dialectology, language education, and early reading would be well served by a word book of the Black English vernacular. Chapters are devoted to discussion of the social significance of a lexicon of Black English vernacular, the terminology of sex and lovemaking, religion…

Addressing the common misconception that Japan is a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and monolingual society, this article focuses on several areas of sociolinguistic concern. It discusses: (1) the bimodalism of the Japanese deaf population between Japanese Sign Language as native language and Japanese Spoken Language as acquired second language; (2)…

The semantic change which has occurred in an Austrian community over the past seventy-five years is examined. The study is based on a comparison of an 1897 word list, sound inventory, and phonograph recording with 1973 recordings of sixty informants from four age groups and five socioeconomic strata. In Inmst, the development from an…

This study focused on one of the suggested causes of the poor academic performance evident among many black, lower socioeconomic status children, namely teachers' attitudes toward Black English. There is considerable empirical evidence to suggest that speakers of Black English are evaluated as inferior to speakers of Standard English by their…

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that the use of swear words by women elicits more negative perceptions of the speaker than the use of the same words by men. Subjects (undergraduates) read vignettes describing fictitious clients' initial interviews at a mental health center. One described a forty-year old teacher troubled by…