The paper examines interpretive aspects of English non-uniformity among fifth and sixth grade Native Americans at Laguna Elementary School, Laguna, New Mexico. Speaker assessments of instances of uninflected "be" are ordered to form an implicational scale. The variability in the students' assessment pattern is compared to previous inter-ethnic…

This report discusses the results of a study of children's spelling errors to determine whether vernacular black English (VBE) speakers and standard English speakers (SE) infer different underlying phonological representations according to their respective dialects. Subjects included two groups of beginning second graders from schools in two…

Designed for the individualized instruction of non-mainstream (non-standard) dialect bearing students from middle school through secondary, this instructional packet attempts to develop flexibility in language whereby the dialect bearer will be able to assimilate the mainstream (standard) forms and phonology into his own idiolect without…

Fifty residents of Houston, Texas, were surveyed to determine whether or not factors concerning their background affected their word choice, grammatical usage, and pronunciation. Each informant answered a questionnaire consisting of one page of background data and two pages of questions about his daily speech. In correlating the participants'…

This is a reflection on certain aspects of sociolinguistic and linguistic problems of French in West Africa, particularly in Senegal and the Ivory Coast. The sociolinguistic section discusses the role French has played in Africa and still plays vis-a-vis African languages and English. Conditions in which French is used and attitudes both of…

The speech of 23 people in a rural Texas community was studied. The population of the area was over 90 percent white Anglo-Protestant. The subjects varied from illiterate to college educated and ranged in age from 17 to 60 years. Seventeen dialect features were chosen as illustrative of the variations in the use of linguistic forms for people of…

The dangers and misuses of literary dialect as a source of information for linguistic evaluation are analyzed. "Literary dialect" is used to refer to writing in which the main purpose is the artful construction of a narrative, where the dialect representation is apt to be concerned more with giving an artful impression of a dialect than…

The competence of school-aged, black children in standard English (SE) grammatical forms, specifically, six verb structures that distinguish Black English from SE, is the focus of this study. The subjects were 198 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade black children who attend four Title I schools in the New York City metropolitan area.…

A review of the literature on Black English was made to determine what information is available and to assess the credibility of the information. The review covered the years from 1865 through the first half of 1975. More than 75 documents were identified as potentially informative in the area of investigation. The linguistic features of Black…

The present volume deals specifically with language contact, dialect contact, and standardization. The scope of the documentation is defined by the policy that the research was to be done exclusively from primary sources. Five hundred ten titles, selected from 71 monographs, journals, and periodicals published in China and parts of Southeast Asia…

Societal differences among ethnic groups and other geographically remote bodies of peoples within a culture are often caused by dialectal variation. The social and educational implications of societal division by such linguistic differentiation are discussed in this article. The author touches on concepts relating to dialectology, paralanguage,…

The purpose of this study was to discover the effect of the introduction of nonstandard English dialect and lexicon in the classroom and to test the hypotheses that students exposed to oral material in dialect and lexicon would comprehend more, would have greater verbal recall, and would be more flexible and fluent in assigning titles to oral…

Through taped interviews, this study investigated the pronunciation of certain consonants in a rural, deep south county in the South Georgia-North Florida area. The informants came from three groups: lower socioeconomic status (LSES) second graders, LSES senior high students, and teachers in the public schools. Some of the findings showed that…

Improvement of communication skills for junior college students is a valid goal, but traditional methods defeat it. A sociolinguistic approach maintains the goal but alters the methods, choosing to teach the skills in the context of relevant material: language against the backdrop of society, Teaching language sociolinguistically means including…

One rich cultural beginning embedded in contemporary Chicano literature is the language(s) of the literature. In this respect, Chicano literature and sociolinguistics are concomitants: the use of sociolinguistics increases the understanding of the use of the language(s) found in the literature: of the contextual references made about language(s):…