Compares Chicano English and Anglo English speech in both linguistic and social terms. (CK)

A study examined what trained phoneticians do when they are presented with a transcription task to carry out without any knowledge of the dialect they are listening to and without any explicit phonological theory as a point of departure. The "best" tokens of three categories of potential assimilation (full, partial, and zero alveolar)…

Analyzes various apparently synonymous words for "friend" (e.g., "homes,""bro") as they are used by one former gang-member to persuade two current gang-members to stop "gangbanging." The article's analysis shows how the meanings of these disparate reference terms are made and remade through talk as…

Describes the social situations and attitudes of speakers of Dyirbal in addition to changing language identifications, and reports on Dyirbal contract in lexical and grammatical complexity as it has moved toward an inevitable extinction. (11 references) (GLR)

Speech samples were obtained from college student Miami-area Cuban informants in an attempt to test the hypothesis that a compensatory phonemic change takes place in certain Spanish dialects in which syllable-final and word-final /s/ appear optionally as zero. Vowel system, distinction (open versus closed), and length are looked at. (SCC)

A study of integration of English lexicon into the Spanish spoken in New Mexico considers formal English, formal Spanish and the informal mixture spoken by local Chicanos. (CK)

A study of 1970 U.S. Census language data made to determine Mexican American language loyalty points out that the census data are valuable only if the sociological variables involved are known. (CK)

The standard view of language attitudes in a creole continuum is that the creole is considered bad and the standard language is considered good. This standard view fits with the theory of decreolization by which such continua are thought to have come about. A study was carried out in Guyana in an effort to overcome the perceived limitations of the…

Information is presented in this paper regarding suprasegmental features of Black English thay may cause reading interference for some Black children. Much of the research concerning reading problems of many Afro-American students stresses the segmental differences of the phonology, the morphology, the syntax, and lexical selection between two…

The 74 studies cited in this selected, annotated bibliography represent major areas of research which may be useful to linguists. Structures Elicitation Techniques (SET) is a term used in contrast to naturalistic observational technique, and the methods referred to in the annotations as SETs are diverse but have in common the elicitation of…

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…

A presentation of evidence gathered in a study of a dying dialect of Scottish Gaelic that reduction in structure accompanies reduction in use. Recognition of distortion through unavoidable reliance on semi-speaker informants seems possible on the basis of internal or external evidence. More study is needed on the semi-speaker phenomenon. (AMH)