Describes an investigation of the nature of English dialect acquisition among bilingual Puerto Ricans. Subjects were in the sixth grade of a school in the Puerto Rican community in North Philadelphia. Results show that subjects can socially classify linguistic variants from two competing systems and use them appropriately. (Author/RM)

Discusses the major language shift in Singapore from the familial use of varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin towards the languages of education, English and Mandarin. An ethnographic study is presented of a Singaporean Chinese family that has moved from Cantonese to English, and the underlying pressures leading to this shift are examined. (19…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 26 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) comparison of achievement test scores between bilingually and nonbilingually instructed Cherokee Indians; (2) issues related to the social phenomenon of black…