When Algeria opened its markets to foreign investment starting from the early 2000s, a technological boom occurred, including the expansion of mobile phone use. New technologies have had a considerable impact on the Algerian diglossic situation, in recent decades, and have contributed in the democratisation of the local dialects, which are being…

Teacher education programs have established gatekeepers, especially for women of color. For these women, finding an ally in their endeavor to become educators is paramount. This paper will discuss the work of a teacher educator who espouses critical race feminism (CRF) as a means of fighting against a curriculum of oppression in teacher education.…

This paper considers the real mother tongues of Singapore, namely the Chinese "dialects" and Singlish, the linguistic varieties which, respectively, arrived with the original immigrants to the rapidly developing British colony, and evolved in the dynamic multilingual ecology over the decades. Curiously these mother tongues have been…

Historical and contemporary perceptions of the African American child are based on his or her relationship to his family in general and to his or her mother in particular. This article critically reviews flawed premises constructed by outsiders looking into the African American family. These premises have shaped the education and social place…

Thirty years after its publication, Geneva Smitherman's seminal work, "Talkin and Testifyin" continues to influence scholars, policymakers and practitioners. This article takes a look at Smitherman's work by first providing an overview of the sociolinguistic theoretical foundations that led to its publication. This is followed by a reception…

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how an instructor's accent influences students' learning achievement. Furthermore, this study also explored how students' accent preference may affect their learning. Unlike native voices, accented voices were not natural to the native speakers; therefore, it required more cognitive resources for…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Many questions accompany the recognition of different dialects, including questions concerning the origin of the speaker, the reasons why people speak the way they do, and which way of speaking is correct. Stronq feelings may accompany the recognition of dialects, and assessments and classifications of people may be made based on how they speak.…

After a brief history of influences on the standardization of Russian since the Revolution, the descriptive and normalizing role of specific reference works of grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and morphology is discussed. Concluding remarks point out a problem caused by a lack of coordination of standardization efforts and the mounting demands for…

The object of this catalogue is to make available basic information on the tape archive of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Canberra, Australia). The collection consists mainly of tape recordings of Australian aboriginal languages and music. Other tapes contain descriptions of aboriginal customs, myths of the various tribes told in…

An investigation is reported which was designed to determine to what extent second generation male West Indians have accommodated to local white speech norms in the city of Cardiff. (RM)

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…

The structure of a computer assisted instruction (CAI) system designed to teach various straight-talk production skills, which are primarily defined in terms of syntactic features, is described. Project Straight Talk (PST) uses the terms "straight" talk and "everyday" talk to refer, respectively, to standard and non-standard dialects. PST teaches…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO INVESTIGATE THE INFLUENCE OF PHONETIC, SYNTACTIC, AND SEMANTIC DIALECT DIFFERENCES ON COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PERSONS FROM DIFFERENT DIALECT COMMUNITIES. THE THREE HYPOTHESES UPON WHICH THE STUDY WAS BASED STATED THAT PHONETIC, SYNTACTIC, AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF DIALECT DIFFERENCES WOULD EACH CONTRIBUTE TO…