The value of teaching Standard English as the language of school and mainstream middle class culture is undisputed, yet Black English, as a non-standard English dialect, has great potential as an instructional tool in the composition classroom. The use of the black dialect can help expand black students' intellectual potential by de-stigmatizing…

Fieldwork with a Hydaburg resident yielded this descriptive paper, which focuses on Haida syntax, and especially predication. The verbal word in Haida is of three distinct types--active, stative, and neutral--the first two of which may occur in either SOV or OSV word order. Neutral verbal words are relatively rare and take active pronouns plus a…

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…

Natural and honest ways must be found to motivate disadvantaged students for second-dialect and second-language learning. Young children, actors, and foreigners seem to learn new dialects and languages easily because they have a strong motivation as a part of their environments. In order to motivate students, we must take into consideration the…

When teaching composition to speakers of Black English, instructors should be aware of the dominance of oral expression in black culture and base the writing program on developing the students' present language abilities. The social value placed by inner-city blacks on oral expression is evident in the varying verbal contests carried out when…

This book looks at the essential dynamics of language contact and linguistic assimilation from a current sociolinguistic perspective by focusing on the English of second generation Puerto Rican teen-agers in New York City. General sociolinguistic principles are extrapolated from the author's detailed investigation of several linguistic variables…

This paper summarizes a number of generalizations concerning the vowels used in a dialect of English spoken in northwest Arkansas. The generalizations are in the form of ordered rules in line with theories of generative grammar. The concept of an underlying system of diaphonemes is used, similar to that of Rudolph Troike. The primary focus is on…

Developed by the Oregon Elementary English Project, this curriculum unit focuses on variations in language and consists of fourteen lessons. Subjects discussed include (1) natural differences in people, including speech; (2) environmental factors causing differences in life styles; (3) differences in the English spoken by people in Australia,…

This study investigated how much of the Language Instruction Register (variation in language in different social situations) black-vernacular speaking children had acquired by grades one, three, and five. A sentence repetition task was devised which contained selected Language Instruction Register forms having black ghetto vernacular semantic…

The syntactical speech characteristics of black children living in depressed areas of an Eastern city were compared with the eight identified by Baratz, i.e., absence of "s" in the third person singular, zero copula, double negation and "ain't," zero past marker, zero possessive marker, zero plural marker, the substitution of "did" or "can" for…

RESEARCH ON ENGLISH PHONOLOGY IN NEW YORK CITY IS DESCRIBED. CURRENT LINGUISTIC THEORY IS CONSIDERED UNABLE TO ACCOUNT FOR MASSIVE "FREE VARIATION" IN THE PHONOLOGY OF THE SPEECH OF THAT AREA. ISOLATED WERE PHONOLOGICAL VARIABLES WHICH ARE ASSOCIATED WITH SOCIAL, STYLISTIC, ETHNIC, AND INDIVIDUAL FACTORS IN NEW YORK CITY. QUANTITATIVE…

When it is published in four or five years, the "Dictionary of American Regional English" (DARE) will be the official dictionary of the American Dialect Society. This dictionary will contain information concerning vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammatical forms which are restricted regionally or socially in American speech. One…

Results of a study are discussed which involved first grade black children who produced multiple instances of linguistic variables. The suggestion is made that the standard English "is" and "has" in certain constructions have been reanalyzed as nominal inflections. (RM)

Describes research in which 28 black parents and community people were polled as to their attitudes toward vernacular and standard Black English. Attitudes were assessed in four domains--school, home, community and playground--and in four channels--reading, speaking, writing and listening. Standard Black English was preferred in all domains and…

Forty-eight Black children, ages 4 to 9 years, who utilized features of Black English in their oral language, participated in a study which investigated selected linguistic features believed to be a function of age among children. (Author/MH)