Raised, nasalized variants of /ae/ in such words as hat and back in the speech of many Illinoisans are found to correlate with the size of the community in which the speaker was raised. Generally, the higher the variants, the more urban the speaker was raised. (Author/RM)

The 25 communities that were chosen for the Indiana portion of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States project were selected in part to provide coverage of an area but in some instances because of their early settlement, location on a migration route, or geographical features. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire which contained…

A COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF SPOKEN WORDS AND PHRASES WAS OBTAINED IN 1959 FROM THE RESPONSES OF 33 NATIVE INFORMANTS FROM 23 COUNTIES IN TENNESSEE, GEORGIA, MISSISSIPPI, AND ALABAMA. INFORMANTS WERE ASKED TO IDENTIFY PICTURES, AND THEIR RESPONSES WERE RECORDED ON TAPE AND TRANSCRIBED. A COMPUTER WAS UTILIZED TO PRODUCE LISTINGS OF PARTICULAR SPEECH…

Students of English around the world are commonly taught according to one of two models, "British" English, and "American" English. Indeed, there is a persistent popular myth (present in many linguistics and second-language texts) that a single "Midwestern" variety of American English exists. The usage of the term…

Examines the system of relative markers in early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings. Found a higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial than in nonadverbial relatives. The lack of "wh"-relatives found, as well as this frequency of zero subject relatives, is interpreted as evidence that African American…

Reviews the current state of World English. Subjects addressed include standard accents and dialects, prejudicial attitudes toward nonstandard "local" usages, the use of English as the language of diplomacy, American influences on the language, and the fracturing of English in non-English-speaking countries around the world. (17 references) (JL)

Many black students speak a nonprestige dialect called black English, which places them at a disadvantage academically and socially. This monograph describes the features of black English, defines its use, discusses several theories of its origin, and offers some methods for teaching black students standard spoken usage as another style of speech.…

In the transmission of a language from one generation to another, the specific role of the family is not clear. There is evidence that in cities parents have less influence on a child's vernacular than playmates do; in rural areas, members of the nuclear family might be the major source of language change and stability, if the people with whom…

THIS BOOK PROVIDES A COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION OF DIALECTOLOGY AS A DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND OF MAJOR ASPECTS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH DIALECTS. THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS DEFINE WHAT DIALECTS ARE AND HOW REGIONAL AND SOCIAL DIALECTS DIFFER FROM ONE ANOTHER IN TERMS OF PRONUNCIATION, VOCABULARY, AND GRAMMAR. CHAPTER 3 NOTES THE PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT…

This study examines the pronunciation characteristics of Negro and white children from different socio-economic classes in Gainesville, Florida. As expected, there are significant differences between the white and Negro children. However, all of the Negroes and the higher whites produce both "General American" and "Southern" dialect…

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 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…

What has been labelled mainstream dialectology has been criticized soundly on theoretical grounds, yet mainstream dialectologists have responded with the assertion that their critics have not been intimately familiar with dialect methodology and are therefore not qualified to criticize. Claiming that while theoretical issues are far from being…

In the last 15 years or so, Malaysian English has begun to come into its own as a dialect peculiar to its own region and yet intelligible on the whole to English speakers everywhere. There is evidence that English is undergoing a transitional stage in Malaysia; use of English is progressively reduced as use of Bahasa Malaysia is increased. The…