Reviews two books, "American Earlier Black English," by Edgar W. Schneider, and "The Death of Black English," by Ronald Butters, that capture the essence of the renewed controversy on the reemergence of the historical issue and a new dispute over the current development of Vernacular Black English. (36 references) (JL)

The relativistic viewpoint of the sociolinguist emphasizes the fully systematic but different nature of nonstandard dialects. In this paper, the author takes issue with various views that currently enjoy popularity in a number of disciplines but which violate basic linguistic and sociolinguistic premises about the nature of language. These views…

Discusses the applicability of the notion of structured variability in language to contrastive analysis. (Author/AM)

This book looks at the essential dynamics of language contact and linguistic assimilation from a current sociolinguistic perspective by focusing on the English of second generation Puerto Rican teen-agers in New York City. General sociolinguistic principles are extrapolated from the author's detailed investigation of several linguistic variables…

In the past, social lectologists have not considered their work as contrastive linguistics. One reason is that sociolects of a language differ quantitatively; differences lie in the frequency patterns with which certain forms occur in each lect. Contrastive linguistics deals with standard or idealized languages, while sociolects are often…

A discussion of the role of sociolinguistics in the treatment of communication disorders focuses on issues related to dialect and language variation. It begins with an examination of linguistic diversity and dynamic description of language, reporting on a study of speech and language pathologists' judgments of sentences in African American…

Speech pathology and linguistics have, as sciences, experienced a parallel development over the past fifty years. Although these disciplines have traditionally been separated, they have common areas of concern, and there are indications of a growing interest on the part of speech pathologists in such linguistic subfields as sociolinguistics,…

This paper examines and evaluates 11 ERIC documents dealing with the manner and extent to which nonstandard dialects differ from standard English. The relative importance of each document to the issue is implicit in the comments concerning that article. The author presents and explains the deficit and difference models of explicating language…