Compares controversies surrounding actions by school boards in Hawaii and Oakland, California, to promote student fluency in standard English. Public reactions to these actions demonstrated general lack of understanding about languages and nonstandard dialects. Myths and characterizations about Hawaiian Creole English and African American…

The marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English is compared. Similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard…

To make teachers more aware of certain linguistic skills possessed by black children, why they are important, and how they might be capitalized upon in the classroom, this report examines the manipulation of figurative devices within the black community. The discussion focuses on seven forms of communicative devices prevalent in black language:…

This paper begins with a discussion of the assumptions basic to the study of both language and social dialects: verbal systems are arbitrary, all languages or dialects are adequate as communicative systems, they are systematic and ordered and learned in the context of the community. A survey of current work and findings in dialect studies follows.…

The writer, who feels that the chief differences between Black English (BE) and White English (WE) are phonological and not syntactic, reports on a sociolinguistically oriented examination of that variety of English spoken by children in rural Northern Florida (CBE/Fla). Twenty-two black children between the ages of nine and 12 were taped…

Earlier version of this article read at the Conference on Continuities and Discontinuities in Afro-American Societies and Cultures, Mona, Jamaica, April 2-4, 1970. Special issue on Black Dialect: Historical and Descriptive Issues'' edited by William A. Stewart. (RS)

Edited version of a speech given at the Conference on the Language Component in the Training of Teachers of English and Reading held in April 1966, in Washington, D.C. by the Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Council of Teachers of English. (DS)

Discusses the use of second language teaching methods in teaching English to urban Negro children. This article appears in "The Florida FL Reporter special anthology issue, "Linguistic-Cultural Differences and American Education, and has been reprinted from R. Shuy, ed. "Social Dialects and Language Learning (1965). (FWB)

Undertakes a critical language analysis of the Oakland Unified School District's 1996 resolution on Ebonics, focusing on the form, content, and function of the resolution's explicit text semantics as distinct from the public statements made about it. Discusses how the resolution frames Ebonics as a non-English-related system. (Author/SLD)

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…

A study of one speaker's intuitions about and performance in Black English is presented with relation to Saussure's "langue-parole" dichotomy. Native speakers of a language have intuitions about the static synchronic entities although the data of their speaking is variable and panchronic. These entities are in a diglossic relationship to each…

ALTHOUGH AMERICAN EDUCATORS ARE GRADUALLY REALIZING THAT SOME CHILDREN SHOULD BE TAUGHT STANDARD ENGLISH AS A SEPARATE, SECOND DIALECT, REMEDIAL ENGLISH PROGRAMS STILL DO NOT REFLECT STRUCTURAL OBSERVATIONS ON LANGUAGE VARIATION AMONG THE DISADVANTAGED. THERE IS A LACK OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN LINGUISTS, TEACHERS, AND COMMUNITY LEADERS, AND THE…

The relativistic viewpoint of the sociolinguist emphasizes the fully systematic but different nature of nonstandard dialects. In this paper, the author takes issue with various views that currently enjoy popularity in a number of disciplines but which violate basic linguistic and sociolinguistic premises about the nature of language. These views…

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…