San Antonio College Library

Examines sociolinguistic questions and the dynamic state of American English, a language rich in regional variety, strong in global impact, and steeped in cultural controversy. Episode one discusses linguistic dialect zones, the tension between prescriptivism and descriptivism, the impact of dialect on grapholect, the northern cities vowel shift, the roots of African-American English, minority linguistic profiling, biases against nonstandard speech,...

"We all live in the same country, so why do we sound do different? It's a matter of where you are on the map. Why didn't the southern accent exist until after the Civil War? How did California athletes end up coining so many new words? Why do we have so many different words for the same things -- like pop versus soda? Will one particularly strong accent cause New York to break up and create a 51st state? "--Website

A dictionary providing romanized spelling and English equivalents for Arabic words, focusing on the spoken Arabic of the Persian Gulf states.

The vocabulary of Texas, and of the Southwest, has a character that sets it apart from all others. It is to a large extent an amalgamation. Many words were brought from the East, particularly from the plantation states: words like tote, snap beans, y'all and chittlins.

Combines personal reflections, historical allusions, and traveler's observations about the author's encounters with language and its users throughout the English-speaking world. David Crystal has been described by The Times Higher Education Supplement as a "latter-day Samuel Johnson." Now in a delightfully decisive journey through the groves and thickets of the English language, he combines personal reflections, historical allusions, and traveler'...