Investigates the range of Creole and standard English tense-aspect markers used by men and women at two age levels in the Islands of Tobago in the Southern Caribbean. People aged 70 and over and people aged 16-21 were compared on critical social variables and interviews were designed to tap their full range of communicative competence. (Author/VWL)

Evaluated attitudinal and affective responses toward accented English based on variation in role identity and intelligibility. American English was preferred; intelligible foreign accents resulted in more positive attitudes and affective responses compared to foreign accents that were unintelligible. Friends were viewed more positively compared to…

Discusses English pronunciation features in the anglophone countries of East and Southern Africa. Focus is on restructuring of the STRUT vowel to /a/,/i/, and /e/ epenthesis, and short tone groups.(Author/VWL)

Analysis of the speech habits of Spanish language instructors at the University of Southern California revealed that native Spanish speakers, as well as near-native Spanish speakers, sometimes produce labiodental [v] as an allophonic variant of Spanish /b/. Quantitative analysis by the VARBRUL statistical program indicated that linguistic, social,…

Reports the results of an investigation of the variable use of the definite and indefinite articles by 18 Chinese learners of English. A referential communication task was used to elicit samples of the speech of these learners. Analysis shows an overall rate of 78% suppliance of articles in contexts where a native speaker would use a definite or…

Describes some of the inequities and obstacles faced by speakers of creoles termed "nonstandard" or minority dialects in formal education. Outlines proposals for dealing with these problems and describes initiatives that have already been taken--such as developing resources for teachers, running public awareness campaigns and using the students'…

Various acoustic measures of speaking rate were calculated for 40 adult speakers of New Zealand English (NZE). These measures were then compared to a group of 40 adult speakers of American English (AE). Results of the analysis identified significantly faster overall speaking rate and articulation rate for the NZE group compared to the AE group. No…

The academic literature on issues related to the Philippine English language and literature is substantial. This bibliography surveys relevant work on such related fields as the sociology of language and language planning, Bilingualism, bilingual education, and languages in education, language attitudes, code-switching and code-mixing, Philippine…

This paper reexamines the debate over the emergence of Black South African English (BSAE) as a variety of English that is institutionalized with distinct properties. It focuses on the tense logic in Bantu languages and discourse markers that chiefly account for uniquely BSAE features. Through an indepth analysis of these linguistic properties, the…

Learning a second dialect entails learning new schemas, and in some cases learning a whole new set of language schemas as well as cultural schemas. Most Australian Aboriginal children live in a bicultural and bidialectal context. They are exposed, to a greater or lesser extent, to the discourse of Australian English and internalise some of its…

English language business-related documents around the world contain purposeful spelling differences that reflect two standards, American English and British English. Given the importance of culturally acceptable spelling, the need to be aware of and sensitive to cultural differences, and strong reactions to variation in spelling, it is important…

This article discusses, from an African perspective, the two dimensions associable with the question of the globalisation of communication: the promotion of the learning of some international languages (the quantitative dimension) and the teaching and learning of communication skills (the qualitative dimension). It suggests that the time is ripe…

The objective of this response article is to think through some of what I see as the far-reaching implications of a recent paper by Eric Hauser (2005) entitled "Coding 'corrective recasts': the maintenance of meaning and more fundamental problems". Hauser makes a compelling, empirically-backed case for his contention that, contrary to widespread…

Moroccan Arabic has two competing syntactic constructions for possessive marking: a synthetic one and an analytic one. The distribution of these constructions is investigated in semi-spontaneous narratives (frog stories) from four Moroccan cities and from the diaspora community in the Netherlands. This distribution is found to depend very much on…

This article examines the current usage of terms of address in the Western Ukrainian variety of the Ukrainian language. It investigates the use of pronominal ("ty"--intimate form; ["Vy"--polite, distant form) and nominal forms of address (such as first name, father's name, surname, title, "pan/pani" (Mr/Mrs), "tovarys" (Comrade) etc.) in Western…