While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers…

The author situates language education policy and scholarship on Academic English within the broader historical context of standard language ideology, the view that the language variety of socio-economic elites is intrinsically more complex than other varieties. It is argued that the current predominant focus on the nature of school language gives…

As an example leading toward a social grammar of language, three emotions are analyzed in English and Yoruba. Certain communication features in English that lie in intonation and stress require a change of grammar in Yoruba and that these changes are subject to further categorization through status and solidarity. (Author/RM)

Examines the role of the educational and socioeconomic levels of the speakers in advancing linguistic change. The study reviews three grammatical phenomena found at distinct stages of change. Individuals at the lower socioeconomic and educational strata of society embrace innovations in language more readily than their affluent and educated…

The aim of the research reported here was to describe dialect diversity in Appalachia (Monroe and Mercer Counties, West Virginia) and to examine the possible effect of this diversity on education. The present volume contains the first two parts of the report, the third being submitted separately. The first part includes chapters 1-5, the second…

A study compared language patterns in a group of 100 residents of Ottawa and 240 residents of Vancouver, categorized by sex, age (under or over 40), and socioeconomic status. The informants provided tape-recorded interviews of an hour or more in response to similarly-conducted questionnaires designed to elicit tokens for a large number of…

This is a study of linguistic variability among social levels in West Germany and of the problems associated with doing such an analysis. The data, ordered according to sex and social levels, were collected from young children retelling narratives heard on tapes. The report represents a comprehensive study of the children's syntactic performance…

Papers from an international conference on the interaction of languages and dialects in contact are presented in this volume. Papers include: "Quelques reflexions sur la variation linguistique"; "The Investigation of 'Language Continuum' and 'Diglossia': A Macrological Case Study and Theoretical Model"; "A Survey of…