Provides an overview of the language situation in Botswana. Describes the language profile of the country, including the number of languages and dialects spoken, the number of speakers of each language, and the various roles each language plays in society. (Author/VWL)

Presents a database of the world's languages categorized in terms of their number of mother tongue speakers and their distribution. The database was created by going through the book, "Ethnologue: Languages of the World," page-by-page, analyzing individual language entries, collating them, and cross-checking them between countries. The…

Presents evidence that Detroit African Americans are participating in a recent sound change that is typically associated with some White but not African American varieties in the American South. Reports a leveling pattern in which /ai/ monothongization has expanded to the salient pre-voiceless context in Detroit African American English (AAE).…

Analyzes outgroup linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics that appeared on the Internet in the wake of the Oakland School Board resolution on improving the African-American students English skills. Shows that Mock Ebonics is a system of graphemic, phonetic, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic strategies for representing an outgroup's belief in…

This quasi-experimental study was conducted to assess and address the instructional needs of students who use a nonstandard English dialect for subject-verb agreement in their writing. Fifty-four students of diverse ethnicities in remedial English courses were divided into control and experimental groups. The researchers used four different…

This article explores the interaction between racial and ethnic identity, racial centrality, and giftedness and then uses an expectancy-value motivation model as a framework for understanding how the interplay among racial identity, centrality, and giftedness contributes to the motivation of African American gifted students. The analysis begins by…

Studies the writing achievement of 28 11-year olds attending an urban Newcastle upon Tyne (England) school and their ability to conform to standard English writing conventions. Finds the influence of a nonstandard dialect (Tyneside) to be minor. Observes writing difficulties are frequently related to mastering the writing system itself rather than…

In this article, Paris explores the deep linguistic and cultural ways in which youth in a multiethnic urban high school employ linguistic features of African American Language (AAL) across ethnic lines. The author also discusses how knowledge about the use of AAL in multiethnic contexts might be applied to language and literacy education and how…

A study examined the personal linguistic range of registers held by low socioeconomic black students to see if they differed from those of middle income children and to what degree this correlated to school achievement. The study used a modified version of both analytic induction and constant comparison. Subjects attended a Title 1 magnet school…

Materials concerning dialects and language variation are presented here as background information for a workshop on English dialect differences in elementary and secondary schools. Articles and essays include: "Grammatical, Phonological and Language Use Differences across Cultures" (Walt Wolfram); "A Linguistic Description of Social Dialects"…

To determine the effects of race and dialect in communication effectiveness, a study integrated research in referential communication with work on standard and black English, creating three hypotheses: that decoding within-race or within-dialect would be more effective than decoding across race or dialect, that decoding within any dialect would be…

Foreign Workers' German (FWG) refers to the acquired German language skills of workers from various countries who were recruited to West Germany between 1955 and 1973 to fill menial, undesirable jobs. Contact between these workers and native German speakers was limited because of the nature of the foreigners' work, the tendency toward residential…

One of the central problems in teaching dialectally divergent students to read is the teacher's own lack of awareness of the nature of dialects. Teachers with some linguistics background will be more sensitive to language variation, and will therefore be better able to recognize divergent dialects and to separate learning problems relating to…

The present study is an experiment to investigate the effect which the availability of detailed information on aspects of language distribution may have upon the understanding of processes contributing to language shift. It is an attempt to remedy the deficiencies of official census statistics by an experimental field investigation. Two sections…

These papers on the subject of the Swiss German language examine the status and attitudes of the Swiss German speaker, the reaction of other linguistic communities to Swiss German, and the necessity and/or possibility of learning Swiss German. The following articles are included: (1) "Le 'Schwyzertutsch': ecran ou lien? (Is Swiss German a…