"A lot of Negroes," says the Ford Foundation's Edward Meade, "speak with such a thick dialect that they cannot be understood by other Americans." In the simple interests of comprehensibility, Ford and others in the past three years have undertaken, Professor Higgins style, to add pure Huntley-Brinkley speech to thousands of Negroes brought up on Amos 'n' Andy accents.
Regional speech patterns vary, but many Negroes-and whites living in similar circumstances of cultural isolation-speak a nonstandard English (linguists call it "dialectolalia") with common characteristics. They may slur words as in "sawrat" (it's...
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