Presents evidence that Detroit African Americans are participating in a recent sound change that is typically associated with some White but not African American varieties in the American South. Reports a leveling pattern in which /ai/ monothongization has expanded to the salient pre-voiceless context in Detroit African American English (AAE).…

Investigated African American Vernacular English dialect features in the midwestern community of Davenport, Iowa, and compared them to those reported by Pollock and Berni (1997) for Memphis, Tennessee--specifically productions of vocalic and postvocalic /r/ across African-American speakers from Davenport and Memphis. (Author/VWL)

The transcript of and guide to a two-cassette course designed to assist speakers of Black English in erasure of their accents includes an introduction on Black and Standard English usage, an explanation of the system used in this course, the pronunciation symbols used, and an explanation of how to change or eliminate trouble spots. The course is…

An investigation was conducted to test the assumption that Black English (BE) dialect interferes with reading. Data from 45 lower standard English (SE) speakers were collected and analyzed to measure racial group differences on auditory discrimination, oral reading, BE phonology usage, and silent reading comprehension. Dialect differences analyzed…

Originally appeared in Workpapers: Teaching English as a Second Language," Volume 5 (June 1971), Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, California. (VM)

The teacher working with second-dialect students requires knowledge of the phonology used by his students to deal, not primarily with their pronunciation problems, but, with their reading and writing problems. In language classrooms, priority should be given to the aspects of language used by children that identify them as nonstandard speakers.…

Through taped interviews, this study investigated the pronunciation of certain consonants in a rural, deep south county in the South Georgia-North Florida area. The informants came from three groups: lower socioeconomic status (LSES) second graders, LSES senior high students, and teachers in the public schools. Some of the findings showed that…

This paper points out some linguistic and stylistic features of Black English as spoken by children and discusses the occurrence of particular language patterns. Examples of distinct intonation patterns, paralinguistic effects, language rhythm, and other phonological features are all considered. A statistical survey of particular age-group usage…

A study investigated the degree to which the pronunciation of English words in the child's home environment affected the acquisition or discrimination of phonological and orthographic correspondences of standard written English. Subjects were low-socioeconomic-status, inner-city African American kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students, who…

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 issue includes the following articles: "Towards a Sociolinguistics of Style" (Alan Bell, Gary Johnson); "Engendering Identities: Pronoun Selection as an Indicator of Salient Intergroup Identities" (Miriam Meyerhoff); "A Majority Sound Change in a Minority Community" (Carmen Fought); "Addressing the Actuation…

This document attempts to make necessary information on linguistics available to teachers of disadvantaged children. Its first section discusses the three dimensions of language differences--historical, regional, and social--that account for usages frequently condemned without being understood. The second aims at providing a deeper understanding…

This study develops specific facts about the nature of the Black English "lingua franca" which formed on the American eastern seaboard in the last half of the eighteenth century. Accepting an assumption that American English of this period was levelling into a "koine," this investigation attempts to characterize the consonant loss and substitution…