This article will focus on sociolinguistic aspects in Terry Pratchett's "The Wee Free Men." In particular we will deal with the interplay of standard and non-standard British English by which the writer highlights cultural stereotypes as well as narrative ones; creating a children's tale with a distinctively adult-like character set.…

The object of the present linguistic study is the linguistic phenomenon of gender as a grammatical category of the English noun. We witness an upsurge of interest to the problem nowadays in the context of the prescription of gender-fair English. Gender-fair (neutral) English language has gained support from major text-book publishers and academic…

Discusses the sociological process which results in Celtic speech communities persisting despite incorporation into the larger society of the United Kingdom. Looks at such factors as age, sex, occupation, religion, and political allegiance. Discusses the dynamics of Gaelic language maintenance in terms of Joshua Fishman's typology of diglossia and…

Despite individual differences, all bilinguals share the ability to act in their native language, in their second language, and to switch back and forth between the two languages they know (Van Hell, 1998). Chinese is the largest Asian American ethnic group in the United States. Their use of code-switching is an increasingly important issue in…

There is presently little world-wide interest in Micronesia. Attitudes toward the U.S. administration vary from the pro-American bid for Commonwealth status by the Marianas to the movement for independence in the Marshalls. The polarization of these attitudes from the northernmost to southernmost reaches of the territory seems to be in direct…

A survey of written and spoken Tennessee English was recently begun. Work is in progress on the first stage of the project, which involves the compilation of a bibliography. Data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will be examined in planning the survey itself. The next stage…

It seems highly likely that many of the features of Black American English can be traced back to the Afro-Portuguese Creole dialects that sprang up in the fifteenth century in Portuguese slave camps along the West African coast, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea area, the area of greatest concentration of activity during the slave trade. This…

As the field of sociolinguistics has emerged, its terminology, which like many other emerging disciplines contains many neologisms and new usages, has sometimes been called insensitive. This reaction may interfere with serious examination of the field's content. Areas of disagreement or dispute include terms used for the speech of black…

This study investigates the extent to which nonstandard forms of written English create for readers stereotypes of the writer's personality. To determine the extent to which nonstandard writing is apparent to speakers of standard and nonstandard English, and to what extent such writing represents a socioeconomic liability for the writer, two…

One of the most significant problems that linguists face in their attempts to describe Vernacular Black English (VBE) is the matter of fluctuating forms. It is consistently observed that speakers appear to fluctuate between a socially stigmatized variant and its presumed nonstigmatized counterpart. Fluctuations in VBE have often been viewed as a…

This paper reports on a preliminary quantitative study of syntactic constraints on code-switching within discourses in which no change in participants, setting or topic is evident. The goals of the study are to provide a syntactic description of the points at which switches from Spanish to English and English to Spanish are possible and to assess…

The characteristics of several nonstandard dialects of American English are presented in this paper in the form of an inventory of features. It has been compiled with the recognition that nonstandard dialects are governed by pronunciation and grammatical rules and that within the broad category of nonstandard dialects, regional and ethnic…

This paper traces the three major developmental strands that converged to contribute to the definition of the applied linguistics field in the Philippines: the institution and capacity-building work supported by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations; the forging of a vibrant consortium among three Filipino institutions of higher education to offer…

Educators are concerned with the dual needs of students: the need to read and write effectively and coherently, the need to use standard grammar and punctuation, and the need to communicate effectively using what is called standard English. Unless teachers devise methods to assist students from different backgrounds in becoming proficient, society…

This paper examines factors impacting the acquisition and use of the standard dialect by Australia's Aboriginal youth. It explains that acquisition of a second dialect has implications for the learner's cognitive-affective and sociocultural life and argues that preservation of an "insider" perspective (related to identity) is a key…