The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

The syntax of 14 child speakers of African American English (AAE) with and without language disorders were compared. Findings suggested that shared features between AAE and Standard American English may be more diagnostically salient than features not shared when identifying children of AAE language backgrounds with language disorders. (DB)

No evidence was found to indicate that grammatical reading interference is an important factor in the poor reading achievement of Black youngsters. (JH)

Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, in the section on language of his book "The Myth of the Negro Past" (1941), gives one of the first scientific orientations to the study of black speech in the United States. His basic contribution was to establish the following main points: (1) that the black people in the New World came from regions…

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

The dangers and misuses of literary dialect as a source of information for linguistic evaluation are analyzed. "Literary dialect" is used to refer to writing in which the main purpose is the artful construction of a narrative, where the dialect representation is apt to be concerned more with giving an artful impression of a dialect than…

On the basis of a study of the language of 22 black children in a rural county of northern Florida, the author states that apart from geographical dialects, there are two "genera" of English: Black (BE) and White (WE). Within each of these genera there are two varieties: Educated and Uneducated. These are further defined by…

Identifiable relational entities in the Auxiliary (Aux) structure of Nonstandard Negro English (NNE) enter into different sets of relationship from identifiable relational entities in the Aux structure of Standard English (SE). Specifically, there is an absence of "have + en" structures; there is no agreement between subjects and verbal forms…

Representative research studies of the interference of Vernacular Black English (VBE) on beginning reading of VBE speakers at the phonological, grammatical, and lexical and content levels are examined. The following conclusions emerge: (1) phonological interference in learning to read has not been established; (2) VBE does not clearly interfere…

The Black English tests for students attempt to provide a complete picture of a Black child's language proficiency, including the child's relative proficiency in the standard and vernaculary forms of speech. Three different tests, which can be taken separately, are included in this manual. The "Discrimination Test" measures the ability to…

Several focal points for southwestern American Indian English research are proposed. This variation is used on reservations or in urban Indian enclaves when the "Indianness" of the discussion or participants needs formal linguistic marking. One research goal is to demonstrate that tribal varieties of Indian English actually exist.…

A detailed study is reported of the linguistic adaptation of a white girl in a predominantly black school in Camden, New Jersey. The girl is a cultural heroine in the area, having earned the admiration of both blacks, and Puerto Ricans by her ability in fighting, dancing, talking, and dealing with the opposite sex. Subjective reaction tests show…

Chapters in this book include the following: "Dickens as Sociolinguist: Dialect in 'David Copperfield'" (Patricia Poussa); "Contemporary Irish Writing and a Model of Speech Realism (John M. Kirk); "Dialect and Accent in Jim Cartwright's Play "Road" as Seen Through Erving Goffman's Theory on Footing" (Marion Fields); "The Representation of…

In recent years a considerable amount of interest has developed in language variability and in the educational problems connected with it. This volume is a report of linguistic research on the variable language behavior in a community of American English speakers, specifically on some aspects of tense marking in Black English. The following topics…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…