Contents

Part 1

1. English as it exists today …………………………………………………………5

2. Dialects vs. variety/variation ……………………………………………………..5

3. English in America ……………………………………………………………….7

   1. Canadian English ………………………………………………………….8

   2. Regional varieties of Canadian English ……………………………….......9

   3. Regional varieties of English in the USA ………………………………..10

4. Social variations of American English ………………………………………….11

5. Ethnic varieties of American English …………………………………………...12

   1. Native American English ………………………………………………...13

   2. Spanish-influenced English ………………………………………………13

   3. Black English …………………………………………………………….14

6. Male-Female differences ………………………………………………………..15

   1. Approaches to the explanation of cross-sex differences …………………16

   2. Differences encoded in language ………………………………………..18

   3. How to avoid sexist language ……………………………………………20

7. British English and American English: Differences in pronunciation ………….21

   1. Differences in phonetic inventory ………………………………………..21

   2. Differences in quality of the phonemes ……………………….................22

   3. Phonotactic differences …………………………………………………..23

   4. Divergent patterns of phoneme use in sets of words ……………………..24

   5. Stress and intonation ……………………………………………………..25

8. British English and American English: Differences in morphology ……………26

   1. Differences in the verb …………………………………………………...26

   2. Differences in the noun and pronoun …………………………………….28

   3. Differences in the preposition and the adverb ……………………………28

9. British English and American English: Differences in lexis ……………………30

10. British English and American English: Spelling and punctuation differences …31

Part 2

Exercises ……………………………………………………………………………….38

Part 3

Recommended Literature ………………………………………………………………50

Glossary ………………………………………………………………………………..52