The writer introduces the idea of sociolinguistic competence, the ability of a speaker to produce and recognize an infinite number of inter-idiolectal code switches, and discusses two methods of dealing with such language variations: frequency analysis and implicational analysis. In frequency analysis, the method used by sociolinguists such as…

Ways in which negation varies in two dialects of French, called "standard" and "colloquial" are investigated. The two dialects under consideration are representative of an extensive scale of styles, often overlapping and varying according to social status, education, contextual situation, age, and geographical area. Although the great majority of…

This study was conducted to examine certain social factors, such as sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic group, as they influence the speech of a sample of black and white children, aged 10-12, from a lower socioeconomic group in Albany, New York. The tapes of the interviews were analyzed to determine the usage of the nonstandard forms of four…

The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of a sample of black teachers toward the use of dialect reading materials for teaching beginning reading skills to black children. An interview-questionnaire method was used to gather data about the attitudes toward dialect-specific materials, using a sample of 90 black teachers in the Lansing…

Reported here is the work of two linguists, William Labov and Paul Cohen, and of two black researchers who know the culture of the inner city, Clarence Robins and John Lewis. Together they explore certain aspects of Black English vernacular (BEV) and certain political and cultural aspects of the black community. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) deals with…

Since the early sixties, the need has existed for linguistic description of the language of the inner city. This dissertation was written to meet this need. Data were collected over a period of two years using the field methods of anthropological linguistics as adapted to an urban situation. Analysis in terms of the data yields a description that…

A representative group of black American novels was examined to discover the extent to which black dialect has been employed by black novelists, to determine the validity of the dialect used, to show a relationship between their representation of dialect and the era in which they lived, and to compare linguistic studies of black dialect with their…

A group of 46 students from a remedial English workshop at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College were subjects in a study to determine whether linguistically oriented teaching methods more effectively corrected writing errors of black dialect speakers than traditional teaching methods (using "The MacMillan Handbook"). An effort was…

This study presents an analysis of the speech of twenty-five informants, who were born in eastern Kentucky or southern West Virginia. Six of them were interviewed in Kentucky, where they still live; the others now live in Chicago, in an area known as Uptown. The phonological data is described in terms similar to the Chomsky-Halle feature analysis…

Traces the history of sociolinguistic studies in West Germany from the early nineteenth century with Humboldt and reports on the state and purposes of sociolinguistic studies in present-day Federal Republic of Germany. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden (Text is in German.) (TL)

Research conducted in the Italian town of Pescasseroli revealed that cultural changes had provoked various changes in the local dialect. This dialect had been greatly transfored in the last 15 years by the modification or disappearance of old cultural models and the intrusion of new ones. (CFM)

Written in Spanish, the article focuses on the sociolinguistic characteristics of Chicano Spanish and a method for emphasizing the morphosyntactic component in dialect studies. The term dialect is applied to the language used in the Southwest. The term sub-dialect is utilized to indicate local variations within the Southwest. (NQ)

Enormous numbers of Spanish words are used by speakers of Tlaxcalan Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico. The major function of the language is to support the speakers' self-identification. As speakers feel it more beneficial to improve their Spanish, relexification is contributing to the death of the language. (AMH)

Suggests some reasons why the exploration and description of language function is often an untidy exercise but, none-the-less very rewarding and rich in implication for English teaching. (Author/RK)

The proposition that education affects dialect to a significant degree is examined. The findings leave doubt whether an educational differential is adequate to explain the maintenance of dialect differences between ethnic groups. (Author/RM)