This book is a talking tour of American English. Short easy-to-read essays explicate the key features that make American speech so expressive and distinct. The tour begins in the South, home of the most easily recognized of American dialects, travels north the New England, then west to the Midwest, and on to the far west and Alaska and Hawaii. In…

Explores the implications of requirements in England's National Curriculum for English to develop students' ability to write standard English. Examines the use of nonstandard dialect grammar in students' writing. Finds that similar dialectical constructs are used in four regions and that they are used more frequently in speech than in writing.…

This 65-item bibliography presents newspaper articles, books, magazine articles, articles from scholarly journals, and documents available online that deal with Black English (Ebonics). Materials in the bibliography were published between 1973 and 1997, with many items published in 1996 or 1997. (RS)

This paper suggests an explicit way of integrating sociolectal and dialectal facts in the overall description of a language. Phonetic, morphological, syntactic and semantic units of the whole language are defined. (CK)

Dialectically different students can more easily be taught expository writing and reading skills if the teacher approaches the students' language and culture with a positive attitude, makes use of the students' cultural experiences, and selects reading materials with which students can relate to. (EH)

Sketches the history of usage of the dialect; the meager results of a survey of schools offering programs in Flemish tend to confirm that it receives little consideration, and that there is difficulty even in defining dialectal limits. Bilingual preoccupations tend toward the development of Dutch. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Before creating a linguistic map of Mexican dialects, it is necessary to determine the dialect regions of the country. An extensive questionnaire must be written and distributed to collect data from a representative sample of the population for an accurate picture of the language. (CK) (Text in Spanish.)

Defines black dialect and traces its history; explores the myths of the linguistically underdeveloped black child; discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of black dialect and its relation to teaching black children to read; summarizes some of the implications for teacher attitudes and our educational system as a whole. (EH)

In the early 1940's, a group of Mexican American youths called Pachucos emerged in the United States. This paper discusses the attitudes of some writers of the time and their creation of a criminal stereotype of the Pachuco, his origins, the racial basis of the zoot-suit riots, and the basic origin and composition of his slang, Calo. (Author/NQ)

A study polled Alsatian students to examine attitudes toward the Alsatian dialect and changes as students became older, more educated and more proficient in French. Use of Alsatian with family and friends becomes less frequent by age 15 with increased command of French. (CHK)

THIS FINAL REPORT PROVIDES A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DIALECTAL PROBLEMS INVOLVED IN THE PREPARATION OF "INTRODUCTION TO THE DACCA DIALECT OF BENGAL." (SEE ED 012 047.) THE AUTHOR PRESENTS HIS JUSTIFICATION FOR BASING THESE TEACHING MATERIALS ON A MODIFIED FORM OF BENGALI AS SPOKEN IN EAST PAKISTAN, WHICH IS DISTINGUISHED FROM STANDARD…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the grammatical features of their dialect on the reading comprehension of speakers of a black nonstandard dialect of English. Subjects were 119 fifth grade speakers of black English (BE) in 13 classes in three semirural school districts of a southern state. An oral test in standard English…

This monograph on Gowda Kannada presents a description of the phonology, morphophonemics, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, interjections, noun derivations, verbs, clitics, and verb stem alternants. The author, in the Introduction and throughout the work, has pointed out some of the important differences between this dialect of Kannada and…

Because of the diversity of Arabic dialects (Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Algerian, Moroccan, Libyan, Sudanese, Saudi Arabian, Palestinian, and Egyptian), and the fact that Arabic writing allows for a wide range of different pronunciations, the question faced by students is where to begin. It is instructive to consider how this problem is dealt with…

Two purposes guided this study: (1) to investigate the effects of modeling on the verbalizations of lower-class, black, preschool children; and (2) to investigate the relationships between the dialect employed by the model and children's language production. As subjects, 72 black, preschool children in lower-class neighborhood day care centers of…