This paper demonstrates that prior to the beginning of the prescriptive grammar movement in English, singular ‘they’ was both accepted and widespread. It is argued that the prescriptive grammarians' attack on singular ‘they’ was socially motivated, and the specific reasons for their attack are discussed. By analogy with socially motivated changes in second person pronouns in a variety of European languages, it is suggested that third person pronoun usage will be affected by the current feminist opposition to sex-indefinite ‘he’ – particularly since the well-established alternative, singular ‘they’, has remained widespread in spoken English throughout the two and a half centuries of its ‘official’ proscription. Finally, the implications of changes in third person singular, sex-indefinite pronouns for several issues of general interest within linguistics are explored. (Language change, sex roles and language, language attitudes, language planning, prescriptive grammar, pronouns.)

The simplified documents produced by the British and Rhodesian governments to explain the settlement proposals to Africans are compared in terms of syntactic complexity and lexical choice, and in terms of the audience to which addressed. (Multilingual societies, stylistic levels, receptive competence, English, Rhodesia.)

The distribution of raised, nasalized variants of /æ/ in such words as hat, bag, and back in the speech of many Illinoisans cannot be explained by geographical or historical processes; rather the correlations are nearly isomorphic between raised variants of /æ/ and the size of the community in which the speaker was raised. Generally, the higher the variants, the more urban the speaker's background. Raised variants of /æ/ are discussed as they relate to contemporary sound change, to urban distributions, and to phonological context. (Urban dialects, sound change, American English, Illinois.)

This paper examines language in a factory setting and shows that: (1) within a single building, different terms for the same thing may be found; (2) such alternation may be sufficiently stable to appear on ‘official’ forms, such as orders and inventories; (3) the major boundary is spatial, not social, in that it has to do with the major boundary between types of work; (4) operational links, proximity, and mobility between departments are major determinants of agreement and difference in usage within and across the two main sections of the factory. The data show lexical variability at a finer scale than has usually been considered in American dialectology, and show variation that appears independent of both region and class in its patterning. The data indicate a need for further investigation into sociolinguistic processes in occupational settings. (Dialectology, language change, lexical variability, sociology of work; American English (New Castle, Pennsylvania).)