Discusses an interview focusing on important topics relevant to sociolinguistics and language minorities. Points out that one topic, ethnicity, is among many of the urban phenomena central to the study of linguistics as well as ethnic minorities and that a discussion of sociolinguistics and language minorities entails discussion of racism,…

Examines a pattern of end-of-word deletion in Faetar, a Francoprovencal dialect spoken in southern Italy, and considers synchronic variants. The article uses the word "deletion" as a synchronic description of the fact that speakers do not always phonetically produce everything in the input form. Optimality Theory accounts for such…

Introduces this special issue of the journal and presents results from comparative research into the principles constraining learner varieties (interlanguages) in use. Articles analyze the oral production of complex verbal tasks in second language Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian. (Author/VWL)

Examines writing in Lithuanian, a language that has received little scholarly attention in the West and particularly the variety of Lithuanian used by the Lithuanian immigrant community in the United States. Examines articles from both Lithuanian and American Lithuanian newspapers to see how the written American variety differs from native norms…

Discusses the style repertoire in the context of Hindi literature, the functions of code mixing varieties in Hindi literary works, and the implications for sociolinguistics of such investigations from linguistic and stylistic perspectives. Hindi poetry from the last three decades is examined to determine the effects of language mixing involving…

Increasingly, in response to demand, colleges are offering Spanish courses for Hispanic-American students with little formal training in their native language. The federal government is providing some support. Courses focus on grammar, spelling, and Hispanic culture. Controversy exists over the kind of Spanish (vernacular vs. standard usage)…

Discusses the major language shift in Singapore from the familial use of varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin towards the languages of education, English and Mandarin. An ethnographic study is presented of a Singaporean Chinese family that has moved from Cantonese to English, and the underlying pressures leading to this shift are examined. (19…

In a sociohistorical variation analysis of verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English, corpus-based comparisons focus on several extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of forms over successive periods of time. Contrary to customary theories of "colonial lag," the rate of change was faster…

Language variation within one "ethnic" group, Israelis of Middle Eastern origins, is examined. Focus is on evidence of systematic patterns in the use of three pronunciations for (r), demonstrating that subconscious sociolinguistic pressures on members of the minority community influence them to assimilate while still retaining…

Examines two methods of differentially classifying language-delayed children as either specifically language impaired (SLI) or developmental-lag language impaired. Results indicated significant differences in classification between the two methods of defining SLI, as well as substantial changes in classification over time using either method. (47…

Critiques the idea that standard British or American English is the only model for second language instruction, arguing that successful English language teaching in nonnative contexts, such as in India, must address the relationship between the forms that English manifests and its speakers' perception of reality and the nature of their cultural…

Examination of the simultaneous communication for two secondary and two elementary school teachers showed high exact and essential equivalence between signed and spoken portions of utterances (92 percent). Although over 90 percent of the utterances contained at least one morpheme mismatch between English and signed main verbs, subjects,…

An analysis of the responses of 83 English language instructors and 251 college students to a survey regarding their attitudes toward Malaysian English, a still-evolving derivative of Standard British English, showed that younger persons had much more tolerance for Malaysian English, which could be accepted as a legitimate…

Analysis of the phonological influence of English on Yoruba found such influences as violation of phonotactic constraints, assimilation of English sounds with those of Yoruba sounds, irregular phoneme correspondences, and resistance to new syllable types. (19 references) (Author/CB)

This article examines differences between language deficits and language differences, with emphasis on African American students from lower socioeconomic levels, and considers intervention with this population in terms of why it should occur, when it should occur, and how it should be structured. An appendix summarizes dialectical features of…