American education has always considered the non-standard or sub-standard form of speech used by children to be an imperfect copy of standard English. The defects of this approach have now become a matter of urgent concern in the face of the tremendous educational problems of the urban ghettos. This paper reverses the usual focus and looks…

Volume I of this report (AL 001 821) is a general description of the project, background and related research, the methods employed, and a linguistic analysis of the structural differences in grammar and phonology between non-standard Negro English (NNE) and Standard English (SE). Volume II is directed to a wider range of readers and deals with…