Check out L2 research by e.g. Tracey Derwing and Murray Munro.  People 
with foreign accents can be rated low on intelligibility (a sort of 
irritation factor) while listeners may have understood them well enough to 
score as high on their understanding of the content as those who heard 
native speakers.

I was embarrassed on my first trip to Edinburgh by the fact that I 
couldn't grasp the name of a fellow who introduced himself to me in a pub. 
After a few repetitions I asked him how to spell his name. The answer? 
Gordon Fraser.  The fact that this is another dialect of my native 
language may or may not be relevant.  When I moved to Argentina I had 
trouble with the dialect, e.g. 'sh' for 'y'. When I ordered a pizza and 
the fellow asked me if it was 'para llevar' I was completely lost because 
it sounded like "shave-ar".  It took more than a month to reinterpret the 
voiceless fricative.

Bill Labov's NWAV talk on inter-dialect confusion a couple of years back 
was hilarious because often the confusions lead to bizarre 
misinterpretations.
ron

 ==============================================================================
Ron Smyth, Associate Professor
Psychology and Linguistics
University of Toronto
 ===========================================================================

On Sat, 3 Aug 2013, Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike) wrote:

> Beverly's report reminds me that when my (now) wife, Muriel Saville-Troike, was teaching at
>
> Texas A&M, she found that a group of students from Costa Rica were having trouble understanding
>
> their Texas instructors. She had the faculty members record their lectures and put them in the language
>
> lab, then had the students listen to them. I had a student from Nigeria with an M.A. from England tell
>
> me that for his first six weeks in Illinois, he was not able to understand one professor, though he sat
>
> in the front row to hear better, and suddenly one day he found that he was able to comprehend. (I
>
> must admit that when watching British comedies on PBS, I have to turn up the sound -- the old folk-
>
> notion of speaking louder may have some truth to it!).
>
>
>
> Thanks to John for initiating this discussion, which has been one of the best for some time. When
>
> Texas was integrating its schools in 1968, I worked with the Texas Education Agency on a project
>
> to educate white teachers ahead of class integration to prepare them for understanding the African
>
> American students they would be teaching (since intelligibility was asymmetrical, we did not have
>
> to prepare African American teachers the same way -- they just had to be disabused of their own
>
> misconceptions of AAE, which of course they had learned from whites). To prepare the white
>
> teachers, we recorded students from local schools and had teachers listen to the tapes, and even
>
> learn to transcribe them phonemically. (Before we started the project, we heard of one white
>
> teacher who found a girl in her classroom whose speech was intelligible to her, and used her as
>
> an interpreter for other students in the class whom she couldn't understand!)
>
>
>
>    Rudy Troike
>
>    University of Arizona
>
>    Tucson, Arizona
>
>    USA
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Flanigan, Beverly [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 10:16 AM
> Subject: Re: VAR-L Digest - 31 Jul 2013 to 1 Aug 2013 (#2013-111)
>
> I can add to what Richard said:  We have foreign students from all over the world who come to Ohio University to learn English and then do graduate studies, and they truly have problems understanding local non-university people in this small town on the western fringe of Appalachia.  I do not believe they come with preconceived notions of Appalachian or "country" or "hillbilly" folk (they usually know nothing about differences in speech that we're familiar with), so they don't have stereotyping attitudes at the outset.  Unfortunately, our Intensive English program, and I suspect most such programs, do almost nothing to teach dialect differences, and the new students continue to have trouble communicating with auto mechanics, grocery store clerks, etc.  Gass et al. (can't recall the other authors) published a very nice book some years back specifically for teaching English language learners about dialect differences, but I know it was never adopted here, despite my urging (!
 from the upstairs Linguistics department...).  In my grad classes, and even undergrad classes, I usually spent a week on AAE and several days on Appalachian English, not only for the sake of my foreign students but also for my usually urban and northern Americans.
>
> Beverly Flanigan
> Athens, Ohio
>
> ________________________________
> From: Variationist List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Rickford [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 12:07 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: VAR-L Digest - 31 Jul 2013 to 1 Aug 2013 (#2013-111)
>
> Thanks for the great references, Richard.  I knew of Gumperz' papers, but didn't think of them (except for the courtroom one) in connection with this issue.  The Eisenstein 1985 article seems very relevant, and I'm only frustrated that it's not available from our library online (LL online collections start from the 1990s).  Will have to go and pick that baby up in person.
>
> And I'll check out LL some more, as you suggest.
>
> And Bryan, I think what you're getting at is that there is an attitudinal and ideological component to intelligibility, but it's not the only or the whole thing.  Even with the most positive attitudes and the best will in the world, we come across "English" varieties that we just can't understand.  So we have to investigate both the "attitudinal" and the "narrowly linguistic" (unfamiliar phonology, grammar, lexicon) components of intelligibility.
>
> Also, one of our grad students, Annette D'Onofrio, referred me to a very relevant paper by SHiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar, "Why don't we believe non-native speakers?  The influence of accent on credibility"  (J of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010):  1093-6.  Basically it found that non-native accented speakers (mild and heavy accent) were both found less credible than native speakers when saying trivia statements like "A giraffe can go without water
> longer than a camel can."  But in a second version of the experiment, when people were explicitly told that "the experiment was about the effect of understanding speaker's speech on the likelihood that their statements would be believed" the credibility gap between the native and mildly accented non-native speaker was erased, but they heavily accented non native still got a significantly lower credibility.  How on earth can we reduce or remove that effect? It will take more than asking folks to read English with an Accent (although that might be helpful).
>
> J
> John R. Rickford
> J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities Dept of Linguistics, and by courtesy, Education
> Pritzker University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University
> Stanford, CA. 94305-2150
> www.johnrickford.com<http://www.johnrickford.com>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 1, 2013, at 4:01 PM, VAR-L automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>
>
> From: VAR-L automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Subject: VAR-L Digest - 31 Jul 2013 to 1 Aug 2013 (#2013-111)
> Date: August 1, 2013 4:01:58 PM PDT
> To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Variationist List <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
>
>
> There are 4 messages totaling 1005 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
> 1. Intelligibility of AAVE and other dialects by speakers of other varieties
>    (4)
>
>
>
> From: John Rickford <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Subject: Intelligibility of AAVE and other dialects by speakers of other varieties
> Date: August 1, 2013 12:31:27 AM PDT
>
>
> Here's a note/query about intelligibility of AAVE by non-AAVE speakers, and about inter-dialect comprehension more generally that I just sent to
> Language Log.  Since not everyone on this list reads LL, I'd appreciate feedback from you in this forum.
>
> Yesterday, a new blog from me about Rachel Jeantel's African American Vernacular English use in the Zimmerman trial/verdict was posted on Speakout/Truthout at: http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17894-race-credibility-communication-and-evidence-in-the-zimmerman-trial-and-beyond
>
> Readers of my Language Log blog of July 10 (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161)--written before the verdict was announced--may recall that I felt that despite its vernacular character, Jeantel's testimony would be understood by the jury, but that they might not relate to her.  Turns out I was both right and wrong.  They didn't relate to her, didn't even find her credible, but they (at least Juror B37) also found her difficult to understand.
>
> This case raises an interesting research question about the extent to which African American Vernacular English (and other social/regional dialects of English) are understood by speakers of Mainstream American English or Standard English.  We seem to have very little research evidence about this, apart from studies focused on individual grammatical or lexical features, like the study of stressed BIN that I mentioned in my blog, and studies of individual lexical items like cut-eye and suck-teeth (http://www.johnrickford.com/portals/45/documents/papers/Rickford-1976b-Cut-Eye-and-Suck-Teeth.pdf).
>
> Here's another bit of anecdotal evidence that makes me question the widespread assumption that people from other dialect backgrounds understand AAVE quite well.   Last weekend, my wife and I went to see Fruitvale Station --a powerful new film about the fatal shooting of handcuffed Oscar Grant, a young Black man who was "just trying to get home" on the train after New Year's Day midnight festivities in SFO  (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fruitvale_station/).  As the credits rolled at the end of this powerful movie, I heard an older white man across the aisle comment that "The acting was superb," to which his wife responded, "But I couldn't understand a word of the dialogue!"  To which I thought, "Not a word?!"  And I wondered to myself again how much of African American vernacular (especially if fluently spoken) Whites really understand.  We really don't know.  But think about the implications, if teachers, jurors, job interviewers and so on miss some or all of what stude!
 nts, witnesses, defendants, job seekers say!  This is an area crying out for research.
>
> Please let me know if you're aware of any good relevant research on this specific point (intelligibility of AAVE to non-AAVE users), or on intelligibility among speakers of other ethnic, social, and regional varieties, especially of English, but of other languages/dialects as well.  I'm as interested in the various methods people use to assess intelligibility reliably, as in their substantive results.  I'm aware of Labov's relevant stuff, e.g. the Gating Experiments from the Project on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension reported on in his 2010 Principles of Lx Change, vol. 3, as well as his older (1973) paper on "The Boundaries of Words and their Meanings."  And of Gary Simons'  1979 monograph on Language Variation and Limits to Communication.  What about other studies, especially recent ones, and ones that also take into account attitudes and ideologies and how those affect cross-dialect comprehension?
>
> Thanks!
>
> John R. Rickford
> J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities Dept of Linguistics, and by courtesy, Education
> Pritzker University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University
> Stanford, CA. 94305-2150
> www.johnrickford.com<http://www.johnrickford.com/>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
>
>
> From: "Cameron, Richard" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Subject: Re: Intelligibility of AAVE and other dialects by speakers of other varieties
> Date: August 1, 2013 6:00:40 AM PDT
>
>
> John,
>
>  You have raised a very important question. I have long sensed that
> camouflaged forms, for instance, are routinely misunderstood. The issue
> of cross-cultural misunderstandings, based on linguistic form, and more
> generally, issues of 'intelligibility' has long been a topic in applied
> linguistics.
>  For cross-cultural work, I highly recommend the work of John Gumperz as
> a starting point. See:
>
> Gumperz, J. 1982. Contextualization conventions. In his Discourse
> Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P. 130-152.
>
> Gumperz, J.1982. Fact and inference in courtroom testimony. In J. Gumperz.
> (Ed.) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
> P.163-195.
>
>  If you go to such journals as Language Learning, and type in the key
> word of "intelligibility" a large number of articles pop up from the
> search. Here is a relevant one:
>
> Eisenstein, M, & G. Verdi. 1985. The intelligibility of social dialects
> for working class adult learners of English. Language Learning.
> 35:287-298.
>
> Abstract:
> This study investigated the intelligibility of three English dialects for
> 113 working-class adult English learners in the New York metropolitan
> area. The relative intelligibility of standard English, New Yorkese, and
> black English for these students was rated based on comprehension of six
> tape-recorded contextualized monologues, two in each dialect. Learner
> proficiency was rated by cloze procedure, and most students were found to
> be at the intermediate level. Results showed that English comprehension
> was significantly affected by dialect. Interestingly, black English was
> the least intelligible of the three dialects considered in spite of the
> fact that this population had considerable contact with black English
> speakers. Also, learner judgments of the speakers on the tapes in terms of
> job status, friendliness, and appearance paralleled the relative
> comprehensibility of the speech samples.
>
> Other journals to consider for work on 'intelligibility' include:
> Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, Applied Linguistics,
> Bilingualism: Language & Cognition.
>
> - Richard Cameron
>
>
> On Thu, August 1, 2013 2:31 am, John Rickford wrote:
> Here's a note/query about intelligibility of AAVE by non-AAVE speakers,
> and about inter-dialect comprehension more generally that I just sent to
> Language Log.  Since not everyone on this list reads LL, I'd appreciate
> feedback from you in this forum.
>
> Yesterday, a new blog from me about Rachel Jeantel's African American
> Vernacular English use in the Zimmerman trial/verdict was posted on
> Speakout/Truthout at:
> http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17894-race-credibility-communication-and-evidence-in-the-zimmerman-trial-and-beyond
>
> Readers of my Language Log blog of July 10
> (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161)--written before the verdict
> was announced--may recall that I felt that despite its vernacular
> character, Jeantel's testimony would be understood by the jury, but that
> they might not relate to her.  Turns out I was both right and wrong.  They
> didn't relate to her, didn't even find her credible, but they (at least
> Juror B37) also found her difficult to understand.
>
> This case raises an interesting research question about the extent to
> which African American Vernacular English (and other social/regional
> dialects of English) are understood by speakers of Mainstream American
> English or Standard English.  We seem to have very little research
> evidence about this, apart from studies focused on individual grammatical
> or lexical features, like the study of stressed BIN that I mentioned in my
> blog, and studies of individual lexical items like cut-eye and suck-teeth
> (http://www.johnrickford.com/portals/45/documents/papers/Rickford-1976b-Cut-Eye-and-Suck-Teeth.pdf).
>
> Here's another bit of anecdotal evidence that makes me question the
> widespread assumption that people from other dialect backgrounds
> understand AAVE quite well.   Last weekend, my wife and I went to see
> Fruitvale Station --a powerful new film about the fatal shooting of
> handcuffed Oscar Grant, a young Black man who was "just trying to get
> home" on the train after New Year's Day midnight festivities in SFO
> (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fruitvale_station/).  As the credits
> rolled at the end of this powerful movie, I heard an older white man
> across the aisle comment that "The acting was superb," to which his wife
> responded, "But I couldn't understand a word of the dialogue!"  To which I
> thought, "Not a word?!"  And I wondered to myself again how much of
> African American vernacular (especially if fluently spoken) Whites really
> understand.  We really don't know.  But think about the implications, if
> teachers, jurors, job interviewers and so on miss some or all of what
> students, witnesses, defendants, job seekers say!  This is an area crying
> out for research.
>
> Please let me know if you're aware of any good relevant research on this
> specific point (intelligibility of AAVE to non-AAVE users), or on
> intelligibility among speakers of other ethnic, social, and regional
> varieties, especially of English, but of other languages/dialects as well.
> I'm as interested in the various methods people use to assess
> intelligibility reliably, as in their substantive results.  I'm aware of
> Labov's relevant stuff, e.g. the Gating Experiments from the Project on
> Cross-Dialectal Comprehension reported on in his 2010 Principles of Lx
> Change, vol. 3, as well as his older (1973) paper on "The Boundaries of
> Words and their Meanings."  And of Gary Simons'  1979 monograph on
> Language Variation and Limits to Communication.  What about other studies,
> especially recent ones, and ones that also take into account attitudes and
> ideologies and how those affect cross-dialect comprehension?
>
> Thanks!
>
> John R. Rickford
> J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities Dept of Linguistics, and by
> courtesy, Education
> Pritzker University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University
> Stanford, CA. 94305-2150
> www.johnrickford.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ########################################################################
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist
> sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
>
> ########################################################################
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
>
>
> From: Bryan James Gordon <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Intelligibility of AAVE and other dialects by speakers of other varieties
> Date: August 1, 2013 10:44:42 AM PDT
>
>
> I agree that the problem of interdialect intelligibility is underinvestigated and underappreciated, and I suspect that the situation is in large part a consequence of what Rickford points out - we have a tendency to focus on variables in isolation.
>
> However, I would be remiss if I did not through a critical wrench in the wheel. The fourth chapter of Rosina Lippi-Green's textbook English with an Accent, particularly the part beginning on p. 69, speaks directly to non-intelligibility-related explanations for reported unintelligibility. We like to criticise syntacticians for accepting grammaticality judgments at face value, and we ought to subject ourselves to the same scrutiny with respect to intelligibility judgments.
>
>
> 2013/8/1 Cameron, Richard <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> John,
>
>   You have raised a very important question. I have long sensed that
> camouflaged forms, for instance, are routinely misunderstood. The issue
> of cross-cultural misunderstandings, based on linguistic form, and more
> generally, issues of 'intelligibility' has long been a topic in applied
> linguistics.
>   For cross-cultural work, I highly recommend the work of John Gumperz as
> a starting point. See:
>
> Gumperz, J. 1982. Contextualization conventions. In his Discourse
> Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P. 130-152.
>
> Gumperz, J.1982. Fact and inference in courtroom testimony. In J. Gumperz.
> (Ed.) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
> P.163-195.
>
>   If you go to such journals as Language Learning, and type in the key
> word of "intelligibility" a large number of articles pop up from the
> search. Here is a relevant one:
>
> Eisenstein, M, & G. Verdi. 1985. The intelligibility of social dialects
> for working class adult learners of English. Language Learning.
> 35:287-298.
>
> Abstract:
> This study investigated the intelligibility of three English dialects for
> 113 working-class adult English learners in the New York metropolitan
> area. The relative intelligibility of standard English, New Yorkese, and
> black English for these students was rated based on comprehension of six
> tape-recorded contextualized monologues, two in each dialect. Learner
> proficiency was rated by cloze procedure, and most students were found to
> be at the intermediate level. Results showed that English comprehension
> was significantly affected by dialect. Interestingly, black English was
> the least intelligible of the three dialects considered in spite of the
> fact that this population had considerable contact with black English
> speakers. Also, learner judgments of the speakers on the tapes in terms of
> job status, friendliness, and appearance paralleled the relative
> comprehensibility of the speech samples.
>
> Other journals to consider for work on 'intelligibility' include:
> Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, Applied Linguistics,
> Bilingualism: Language & Cognition.
>
> - Richard Cameron
>
>
> On Thu, August 1, 2013 2:31 am, John Rickford wrote:
>> Here's a note/query about intelligibility of AAVE by non-AAVE speakers,
>> and about inter-dialect comprehension more generally that I just sent to
>> Language Log.  Since not everyone on this list reads LL, I'd appreciate
>> feedback from you in this forum.
>>
>> Yesterday, a new blog from me about Rachel Jeantel's African American
>> Vernacular English use in the Zimmerman trial/verdict was posted on
>> Speakout/Truthout at:
>> http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17894-race-credibility-communication-and-evidence-in-the-zimmerman-trial-and-beyond
>>
>> Readers of my Language Log blog of July 10
>> (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161)--written before the verdict
>> was announced--may recall that I felt that despite its vernacular
>> character, Jeantel's testimony would be understood by the jury, but that
>> they might not relate to her.  Turns out I was both right and wrong.  They
>> didn't relate to her, didn't even find her credible, but they (at least
>> Juror B37) also found her difficult to understand.
>>
>> This case raises an interesting research question about the extent to
>> which African American Vernacular English (and other social/regional
>> dialects of English) are understood by speakers of Mainstream American
>> English or Standard English.  We seem to have very little research
>> evidence about this, apart from studies focused on individual grammatical
>> or lexical features, like the study of stressed BIN that I mentioned in my
>> blog, and studies of individual lexical items like cut-eye and suck-teeth
>> (http://www.johnrickford.com/portals/45/documents/papers/Rickford-1976b-Cut-Eye-and-Suck-Teeth.pdf).
>>
>> Here's another bit of anecdotal evidence that makes me question the
>> widespread assumption that people from other dialect backgrounds
>> understand AAVE quite well.   Last weekend, my wife and I went to see
>> Fruitvale Station --a powerful new film about the fatal shooting of
>> handcuffed Oscar Grant, a young Black man who was "just trying to get
>> home" on the train after New Year's Day midnight festivities in SFO
>> (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fruitvale_station/).  As the credits
>> rolled at the end of this powerful movie, I heard an older white man
>> across the aisle comment that "The acting was superb," to which his wife
>> responded, "But I couldn't understand a word of the dialogue!"  To which I
>> thought, "Not a word?!"  And I wondered to myself again how much of
>> African American vernacular (especially if fluently spoken) Whites really
>> understand.  We really don't know.  But think about the implications, if
>> teachers, jurors, job interviewers and so on miss some or all of what
>> students, witnesses, defendants, job seekers say!  This is an area crying
>> out for research.
>>
>> Please let me know if you're aware of any good relevant research on this
>> specific point (intelligibility of AAVE to non-AAVE users), or on
>> intelligibility among speakers of other ethnic, social, and regional
>> varieties, especially of English, but of other languages/dialects as well.
>>  I'm as interested in the various methods people use to assess
>> intelligibility reliably, as in their substantive results.  I'm aware of
>> Labov's relevant stuff, e.g. the Gating Experiments from the Project on
>> Cross-Dialectal Comprehension reported on in his 2010 Principles of Lx
>> Change, vol. 3, as well as his older (1973) paper on "The Boundaries of
>> Words and their Meanings."  And of Gary Simons'  1979 monograph on
>> Language Variation and Limits to Communication.  What about other studies,
>> especially recent ones, and ones that also take into account attitudes and
>> ideologies and how those affect cross-dialect comprehension?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> John R. Rickford
>> J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities Dept of Linguistics, and by
>> courtesy, Education
>> Pritzker University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University
>> Stanford, CA. 94305-2150
>> www.johnrickford.com<http://www.johnrickford.com/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ########################################################################
>>
>> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist
>> sociolinguistics.
>>
>> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
>> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
>> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>>
>
> ########################################################################
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
>
>
> --
> ***********************************************************
> Bryan James Gordon, MA
> Joint PhD Program in Linguistics and Anthropology
> University of Arizona
> ***********************************************************
>
> ________________________________
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
>
>
> From: "Kephart, Ronald" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Intelligibility of AAVE and other dialects by speakers of other varieties
> Date: August 1, 2013 1:11:30 PM PDT
>
>
> Yes.  I've told this story several times, hopefully not here though.  Back when I was taking field methods, we had an in-class consultant from Nigeria who spoke Isoko, and that was the language we were working on.  He told us about a closely related language, Urhobo, spoken by some in the same region.  As he explained it, the speakers of Urhobo were the dominant or elite group, while Isoko speakers made up a group that considered itself exploited or dominated.  Anyway, he told us that Urhobo speakers insisted they could fully understand Isoko, but that Isoko speakers could not understand Urhobo.
>
> I've always felt (but never formally investigated) that white speakers of Accepted English who claim they can't understand Ebonics speakers really just don't "want" to understand them, or maybe assume they won't understand them, and so don't even try and kind of tune them out as "noise."  This would be sort of the reverse of the Urhobo-Isoko situation, I guess.
>
> The other thing is that in my classes, I often show students a few sentences in Ebonics and ask whether they know what they mean.  They generally don't.  This is getting back to looking at single grammatical or lexical items.  I think the ones that are most misleading are the ones that actually look like Accepted English, but have a different meaning.  My favorite example comes from English Creole in Carriacou (Grenada), from which I can get a sentence like 'They go in the store.'  Nobody ever correctly interprets that as 'they went into the store and haven't come out yet.'
>
> Interesting, and important, stuff.
>
> Ron
>
>
>
> From: Bryan James Gordon <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Date: Thursday, August 1, 2013 1:44 PM
> To: "[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Subject: Re: Intelligibility of AAVE and other dialects by speakers of other varieties
>
> However, I would be remiss if I did not through a critical wrench in the wheel. The fourth chapter of Rosina Lippi-Green's textbook English with an Accent, particularly the part beginning on p. 69, speaks directly to non-intelligibility-related explanations for reported unintelligibility. We like to criticise syntacticians for accepting grammaticality judgments at face value, and we ought to subject ourselves to the same scrutiny with respect to intelligibility judgments.
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
> ________________________________
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>
> ########################################################################
>
> The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
>
> To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
>

########################################################################

The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.

To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
[log in to unmask]

To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1