The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom conversations about diverse dialects of English can provide a useful foundation for critical language and literacy instruction for students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other stigmatized dialects. This article describes a weeklong unit on language variety that…

Linguistically, political discourses have generally been discussed within qualitative approaches (e.g., Blackledge, 2005; Chilton, 2004; Chomsky, 2004; van Dijk, 2005; Wodak, 2002). This paper presents tools to design a quantitative research relating political speech with sociolinguistic variables. Notions such as Accommodation Theory (Giles &…

Communication is one of the keywords of the global age. The ever-increasing use of English as a World language has clearly meant that British RP and American Standard English (GA) are no longer seen as the models that learners aspire to. With the global spread of English, three major related questions come to our mind: (a) diversity and…

Much has been written about the necessity of having a standard variety for a particular language. There has also been a great deal of literature on the emergence of a particular variety to be the standard language for a multidialectal language community. This report attempts to look at the various types of choice of a standard language or the…

This paper focuses on the idea that the study of language standards and standard languages must make reference to a different level of consciousness from that associated with the sort of naive language production in which the question of standards does not arise. Consciousness of language refers to the activity of reflecting upon the use of…

The Diola-Fogny of Senegal, West Africa, socially intuit with the meta-linguistic terms "big" and "thin" the tense/lax vowel contrast that is basic to their phonology. The two terms are primarily used to identify speech variation among individuals and groups. (Author/RM)

Examines language in a factory. Results include the following: (1) within a building, different terms for the same thing may be found; (2) the major boundary is spatial, between types of work; and (3) operational links, proximity and mobility between departments are major determinants of agreement and difference in usage. (Author/RM)

This is a survey of the evolution of Quebec French over the last twenty years away from anglicizations and toward a modernization which has a tendency to lessen the gap between it and International French. Examples are given of recent "refrancizations"; and reasons for, and obstacles to, this phenomenon are discussed. (Text is in…

A varieties grammar (VG) attempts to provide a unifying apparatus for various kinds of language varieties: diatopic, diastratic, and diatypic. The notion of "family grammar" appears to be especially useful in that process since it permits the postulation of a supergrammar for the whole family as well as that of subgrammars for the individual…

Makes an analogy between the formation of a Creole and the language acquisition process in a child. (AM)

Argues that the term "Castilian" should replace "Spanish" to denote the Castilian form of the language. "Spanish" may then be a more inclusive term, enbracing all the dialects of the language. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

This study of language use among secondary school students calls into question the hypothesis of social class difference. (DD)

This study assesses and characterizes lexical relationships among the major urban Syro-Lebanese varieties of Arabic. To achieve this quantitative analysis of degrees of similarity or differentiation, an analytical procedure based on lexical compatibility was developed. Secondarily, a classification of these varieties is presented as a by-product…

Shows that a phonological description that recognizes the functional variety of phonological rules is more illuminating than one in which data are handled merely as the output of a set of completely undifferentiated processes. Emphasizes the value of distinguishing motivated and unmotivated processes in phonology. (Author/RM)

The latest (July, 1976) edition of the "Concise Oxford Dictionary" is seen as "prescriptive," and of limited use to foreigners, since it lacks an international phonetic transcription. It is questioned whether sufficient treatment is given to new words, scientific words, non-British English, obscene language, change of meaning, and obsolescence.…