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…

Evidence from Warren County, North Carolina suggests a three-variant distinction for negative forms (i.e., wasn't, weren't, and won't). Throughout the history of sociological investigation, two types of variant have been noted: a sociolinguistic and a linguistic. In Warren County, "won't" functions as both types. (Author/VWL)

Examines oral-questionnaire data to assess the tenability of the hypothesis that Africa's language-endangerment situation is characterized by replacement of minority vernaculars with indigenous majority languages. Questionnaire items attended to evaluation accorded minority vernacular as well as language choice in home and non-home settings.…

Offers an explanation for the gap in the paradigm of the verb "be" where amn't is expected to be found. The explanation is base on a combination of multiple-default inheritance and function-based morphology, as embodied in word grammar. (Author/VWL)

Brule and Isleno dialects of Spanish came to Louisiana from the Canary Islands simultaneously in the 18th century but have remained relatively isolated from each other and face extinction. Although they show common evidence of their origin, each has distinctive lexical, phonological, and syntactic features, some from contact with Acadian French or…

Argues that nonstandard dialect literature deserves more attention than it is currently getting in the classroom, even if this means additional skills on the part of teachers and students. Introduces some issues of multicultural pedagogy based on the author's experience of teaching Alice Walker's "Nineteen Fifty-Five." (TB)

Examined African Americans college students' perceptions of audiotaped people using: Black English (BE), Standard English (SE), and appropriate or inappropriate code switching (CS). Surveys indicated that participants rated SE and appropriate CS speakers more favorably than BE and inappropriate CS speakers, and they wanted to get to know and work…

Considers if American Ebonics is a different language from English or if it is a dialect of English. Discusses how American Ebonics relates to the larger Ebonics picture. Focuses on the grammatical patterns of Ebonics that diverge the most from standard English. Addresses pedagogical implications. (SC)

Conducts quantitative analysis of negative concord in Buckie, a relic dialect from the northeast of Scotland, and compares findings with varieties of English in North America. Results show Buckie has high rates of use of negative concord, as do all the dialects included in the study. Negative concord in other environments is found in certain…

Notes that secondary English teachers must negotiate between using standard professional discourse and the sub-discourse used within a particular school or school district. Suggests strategies to use to help future teachers negotiate between the two. (NH)

A study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschoolers in South Carolina. When dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of the children differed from that of the normative populations on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.…

Offers a survey of recent codification efforts of the Romani language, a stateless, non-territorial language with no written tradition. In a pragmatic corpus analysis, three action-oriented functions of Romani codification are identified: a communicative function, on emblematic function, and a mobilizing-rallying function. (Author/VWL)

This study examined changes in the complex syntax production of 85 African American preschoolers and the role of child (gender, age, African American English) and family (home environment) factors. Age, gender, and home environment effects were found for the amount of complex language used. African American English was not related to amount of…

Native speakers of a language are often unable to consciously perceive, and have altered neural responses to, phonemic contrasts not present in their language. This study examined whether speakers of dialects of the same language with different phoneme inventories also show measurably different neural responses to contrasts not present in their…

In this article, I review contact zone pedagogy from a perspective of discursive positioning and with attention to two assignments that ask basic writers to play with the conventions of academic language. The first requires them to translate a passage of academic prose into a slang of their choice; the second, to compose a parody of academic…