If you need to hit a nail, what tool do you ask for? If you say "hammer," do you pronounce the "r"? Do you drop the "h"? Different people pronounce the same English words in different ways. People ...

The teaching profession in Britain, where I currently reside, has very largely heard the sociolinguistic music: The facts of linguistic diversity and language change are generally accepted, teachers ...

From the sharp vowels of the Northern Cities to the drawl of the Deep South, the nasal twang of the Upper Midwest, the ...

A new book on American English in the Midwest makes Chicago seem exotic. It’s certainly not the title: “Language Variation and Change in the American Midland: A New Look at `Heartland’ English” (John ...

In this article, I argue that at least in some subsets of grammar, non-standard dialects are indeed more natural than their standard counterparts. I present data from the new Freiburg English Dialect ...

A man I know recently spent several weeks visiting his native South Africa. Upon his return to the United States, he found himself one day passing through a certain section of Oakland. Everyone on the ...

TRAINS are a great place to meet people. Close proximity to a complete stranger for a finite period of time expands the horizons. Thus your correspondent found himself on the 17.02 train from ...

Later, I emigrated to the U.S. to teach linguistics at Wayne State University and began researching and teaching what academics call African American Vernacular English, or the everyday speech of ...

Immigration judges must determine whether individuals facing deportation who speak dialects of English also understand American English or need interpreters, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Wednesday in ...

Chinese students in an English class. Traditional English could one day become a family of languages, just as Latin once did Traditional English is set to fragment into a multitude of dialects as it ...