Japan is taking her place as a bastion of apparent linguistic stability. The basic concept used in this paper is "language correction." The assumption is that generative rules of language produce inadequate communicative acts that may be corrected through corrective rules. Japan in the last century has passed through a number of…

This article discusses comprehension problems encountered by students of French as a second language as a result of the mismatch between the standard language they learn in classrooms and the language used by native speakers. (CLK)

A review of recent language research regarding the black English vernacular (BEV) considers new developments involving (1) the grammars of elderly and young speakers; (2) indications that BEV is not decreolizing but is actually diverging from white speech; and (3) the effect of contemporary developments on differences between black and white…

This book is a talking tour of American English. Short easy-to-read essays explicate the key features that make American speech so expressive and distinct. The tour begins in the South, home of the most easily recognized of American dialects, travels north the New England, then west to the Midwest, and on to the far west and Alaska and Hawaii. In…

Analyzes the devoicing of voiced fricatives in Southern Standard Dutch (spoken in Belgium) and Northern Standard Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands) based on archived recordings of radio broadcasts from 1935-93. Findings reveal a divergence between the two language varieties in the pronunciation of voiced fricatives in this period. (54 references)…

Raises three questions concerning the present state of second-language acquisition research: (1) What has it achieved for language teaching? (2) How close is a theory of second-language acquisition? (3) What is its status within the chorus of disciplines that deal with language? (Author/JL)

Presents results from study of language attitudes and linguistic behavior among adolescents of both sexes in a rural community in Denmark. Study concludes that traditional pattern of boys/men speaking in a significantly more non-standard way than girls/women is reproduced in present context, and in qualitative attitude-questionnaire male…

A study combining qualitative and quantitative research methods (a direct survey) investigated the attitudes of 75 working class individuals in Glasgow, Scotland toward differences in the speech of older or younger people and in the speech of the opposite sex. Results indicate that dialect lexis loss was neither as thorough nor as abrupt as older…

The language development processes of decreolization and second language acquisition are compared. The decreolization of Guyanese creole negation and the acquisition of the English negative by an adult Spanish speaker are described. Each process is seen as a series of internal changes on a continuum of developmental stages which bring speakers…

This annotated bibliography of recent studies on language variation presents abstracts which appeared in "Resources in Education" during the period September 1973 through December 1974. They include entries from several of the ERIC clearinghouses: Adult Education, Reading and Communication Skills, Languages and Linguistics, Early…

The term "Regional Standard English" should refer to any kind of English spoken by educated individuals in a particular region. Vernacular is spoken by individuals with little education. Sociolinguistics as a field embraces ethnography of communication, social coding, societal analysis, social-psychological analysis and anthropoloty, all…

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)

Investigates (1) how Malaysian linguists perceive and categorize sub-varieties of Malaysian English, as spoken by select speakers, along the lectal continuum; and (2) whether "gatekeepers" regard the same select speakers acceptable for delivering business presentations to different audiences. Discussion sheds light on what is and is not…

A study investigated how four anglophone Caribbean students enrolled in an American college perceive their own language and writing in standard English, the morphosyntactic and semantic features that emerge when they write in standard English, and the extent to which discourse features revealed in their writing are attributable to Creole…

This paper offers a historical and sociolinguistic interrogation of Taiwanese to demonstrate the significance of language continuum in relation to identity formation. To this end, Taiwanese is discussed as a particular variety of language. Literacy practices in the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) are contrasted with the precolonial and…