Discussions of Negro non-standard English (or Black English) emphasizes the most socially stigmatizing features. It is clear, however, that within anglophonic black communities a diglossia situation occurs in which the high form is a speaking variety close to oratorical standard English. This paper explores how this high variety is learned in one Afro-American peasant community in the West Indies as an illustration of the social and ritual importance of certain codes. (diglossia, Creole languages, the formal teaching of speech varieties, oratory.)

Women use linguistic forms associated with the prestige standard more frequently than men. One reason for this is that working-class speech has favourable connotations for male speakers. Favourable attitudes to non-standard speech are not normally expressed, however, and emerge only in inaccurate self-evaluation test responses. Patterns of sex differentiation deviating from the norm indicate that a linguistic change is taking place: standard forms are introduced by middle-class women, non-standard forms by working-class men. (Sociolinguistic variation; linguistic change; women's and men's speech; contextual styles; social class; British English.)

The paper addresses itself to the study of the sociological correlates of speech behaviour among bilingual speakers of English and Swahili in Tanzania. Factors influencing language maintenance, code-switching and code-mixing are discussed. Four main phases of language acquisition are considered: the pre-primary school phase, the primary school phase, the secondary-school phase, and the post-secondary school phase.

Three languages with both varying and overlapping roles interact, creating a triglossia situation: first the vernacular or mother-tongue of each particular ethno-cultural group; secondly Swahili, the local lingua franca and national language; thirdly English, the predominant language of higher learning and to a certain extent of official and commercial business.

The paper also discusses the diglossia relationship between the vernacular and Swahili on the one hand and Swahili and English on the other. The developmental state of the languages is dealt with in terms of socially ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ codes.

Urban life tends to impose its own socio-cultural influences on the bilinguals. There is free shifting and mixing between Swahili and English interlocutors, topics and setting.

Lastly the paper raises questions of the sociological and linguistic consequences of the multilingual situation. (Multilingualism, diglossia; code-switching; code-mixing; Swahili; English, national language problems.)

Through the use of data collected among Slave Indians living in northern Canada, this paper explores a problem in ethnographic methodology: how to describe cultural rules such that contextual restrictions which operate upon them are identified and made explicit. Following a discussion of some of the ways in which the aims and assumptions of current sociolinguistic theory can be applied to this problem, a formal model is presented of Slave rules for travelling on the ice of frozen lakes and rivers. This model, which specifies the conditions under which a Slave hunter can be expected to cross an expanse of ice or avoid it, reveals the sensitivity of normative rules to variation in contextual features and illustrates both the value and feasibility of incorporating these features into ethnographic accounts. (Ethnographic methodology, sociolinguistics, formal analysis, Canadian Indians, language and environment.)

Assuming the ethnobiological classification evolves as a reflection of cultural development, data are presented which suggest an orderly and predictable temporal appearance of ethnobotanical nomenclatural categories. A general correspondence is seen to exist between the number of categories encoded at any point in time in a particular language's history and degree of sociocultural development. The principles of lexical marking are applied to ethnobiological nomenclature as a means of inferring relative age of the corresponding categories. (Ethnoscience, primitive classification, language universals, cultural evolution.)

Work of the Language Survey of Ethiopia is drawn on to illustrate that social surveys can contribute to scientific theories and methods as well as to policy making. Findings with regard to four general problems are indicated: a metric of linguistic distance (considered here in terms of selection of diagnostic traits for linguistic areas, subgrouping of related languages, and dialect variation within a language; measurement of basic cognate frequencies; and testing of mutual intelligibility, a typology of the processes of language spread (lingua franca, mother tongue, superposed variety); verbal deference behavior (in use of Amharic second person pronouns); and pidginization (Simplified Italian of Ethiopia). Some comparisons to findings in sociolinguistics research elsewhere are made. (Language surveys; measurement of linguistic distance; language spread; social meaning and mode of address; pidginization.)

Socialization is defined as the incorporation of a child into society on the basis of social and linguistic interaction. Central to this process is a child's advancement in communicative skills. As a child progresses in linguistic competence, the structure of interaction changes to accommodate his newfound skills, and underlying these changes are the Luo attitudes and beliefs on child-rearing, language acquisition, and the position of children in society. (Socialization; speech acquisition; social interaction; language attitudes.)

Hypercorrection is always a function of rule generalization, though the converse does not hold. It is therefore a sociolinguistic term, not definable in purely linguistic terms. What is generalized is not necessarily the original rule of the grammar. It may be an added rule symmetrical to it. These symmetrical rules are not necessarily ‘Last rules’, for their output may undergo further non-hypercorrect rules. (Hypercorrection, sociolinguistics, phonological theory, historical phonology.)

Three different regional pairs of jugular and facial motions used in Europe for habitual expression of approval and dissent are analyzed with reference to the iconic grounds of these three semiotic oppositions. (semiotics, face-to- face interaction, kinesics, European ethnology.)

Current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement in linguistics require attention to principles of methodology which consider sources of error and ways to eliminate them. The methodological assumptions and practices of various branches of linguistics are considered from the standpoint of the types of data gathered: texts, elicitations, intuitions and observations. Observations of the vernacular provide the most systematic basis for linguistic theory, but have been the most difficult kinds of data for linguists to obtain; techniques for solving the problems encountered are outlined. Intersubjective agreement is best reached by convergence of several kinds of data with complementary sources of error.

Psychopathological explanations oversimplify religious glossolalia. An analysis of the use of glossolalia reveals that the speaker manipulates linguistic variables with considerable delicacy in response to role, purpose of the speech act, and setting of the speech act. Examined from a cultural point of view, glossolalia is another ‘language’ in the Pentecostalists' linguistic repertoire. (Glossolalia, Pentecostalism, speech pathologies, paralinguistics, language of religion.)

This study examined some of the clues which teachers use to form attitudes toward students. Photographs, speech samples, drawings and compositions, obtained from Grade III boys, served as the stimulus materials. These were randomly combined and presented to student-teachers as examples of the personal characteristics and schoolwork of certain pupils. The student-teacher judges were asked to form subjective impressions of the pupils and to evaluate them on various characteristics using semantic differential scales. The results indicated that the voice and photograph cues significantly affected their judgments of the students' intelligence and personal characteristics.

A model for the description of bilingual speech is proposed which focuses on the linguistic and social constraints governing the speaker's selection of variables within a single complex linguistic repertoire. The model will be tested with field data from bilingual communities in India and Austria and results will be compared with relevant data on American English. The traditional dichotomy between bilingual and monolingual behavior is discarded and differences between the communities will be described in terms of the level of linguistic structure at which variables appear, the rules governing their co-occurrence and the social meanings they communicate. The goal is to contribute to our knowledge of the linguistic and social nature of code alternation to provide new insights into communication processes in ethnically diverse societies, and to lay the basis for improved educational strategies.