A formal reading of word groups and a same/different listening test revealed that Hungarian Americans in South Bend, Indiana, exhibit a continuum in a short front unrounded low vowel phoneme, showing important differences between the informant's perception and production. The Hungarian-American and metropolitan Hungarian data were compared to…

French Creoles are spoken in many different parts of the world, including the Indian Ocean, United States, Caribbean, and South America. These Kweyol speech communities are described, in the Kweyol Project, which examines Kweyol language issues and the establishment of a Kweyol Literacy Scheme. (Contains 15 references.) (LB)

Investigated the sociolinguistic variable of apical palatalization in Cairene Arabic, focusing on the roles of gender and social class in the distribution of palatalization. As in a number of other speech communities, women in Cairo seem to have been the innovators of this sound change. (27 references) (MDM)

Examined the attitudes of 169 Japanese university students toward varieties of spoken English. Results found that the students with more instrumental motivation were more positive toward nonnative English accents than those with less instrumental motivation, and that the students' familiarity with accents had an influence on their acceptance of…

Summarizes the main points presented in the 1989 book, "The Death of Black English" by R.R. Butlers (1989). Butler's book presents most important research of last 20 years and subjects the results to variation analysis. It is concluded that the history of linguistic assimilation points to the eventual disappearance of Black English in…

Reports on the application of the concept of social network to the process of language usage among Yoruba-speaking city dwellers in Ile-Ife, Southwestern Nigeria. The study focuses on phonetic/phonological variation within common spoken Yoruba. (41 references) (GLR)

Explores the relationship between cooperative behavior and public requests voiced in different Danish accents. Implications of the findings for applied settings are given, as are their relevance for studies in language attitudes. (51 references) (VWL)

Examines transcribed excerpts from a casual discussion according to sentence-level, textual/situational, and cultural structure. A brief comparison is made with a more formal written text to provide an additional background against which to illuminate the casual spoken discourse structure. (20 references)

The marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English is compared. Similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard…

Linguistic consequences of literacy in Somalia are examined in a review of the literature and through a study of five dimensions of variation among Somali registers and the expansion of linguistic variation in Somali resulting from the introduction of written registers. (36 references) (LB)

An approach to Greek diglossia is proposed, focusing on the differing social functions of the two coexisting Greek languages. Reasons for the success of the 1976 language reform abolishing diglossia, and the resulting revival of the argument questioning Demotic Greek, are examined and concluded to be attributed to a crisis of national identity.…

Compares studies of English-based creoles in Atlantic with work on pidgins and creoles in Pacific to examine the core of lexicon that cannot be traced to current standard English and historical relationship between languages. The lexical base of Pacific varieties was both English and English-based creoles of the Atlantic. Grammatical and lexical…

Researchers planning to use a Spanish translation of the Revised Behavior Problem Checklist with a primarily Puerto Rican population found that it had been designed for Cuban speakers of the language and, therefore, decided to develop a new translation. Suggests the need to be sensitive to the differences in vocabulary among Hispanic subcultures.…

Analysis of 238 variables pertaining to 170 polities indicated that linguistic heterogeneity could not independently predict either gross national product or civil strife, with the former primarily accounted for by modernization and industrialization variables, and the latter by long- and short-term deprivation and inadequate coercive power. (14…

A sociolinguistic analysis of pronunciation patterns of postnuclear occlusive consonants in northern peninsular Spanish resulted in (1) understanding of the vitality of the use of distinct allophonic variations; (2) characterization of sociolinguistic usage tendencies in relation to speakers' demographic characteristics; and (3) identification of…