ABSTRACT
M ainstream American English (MAE, also called Standard American English orSAE) is regarded as the standard of language use for American English speakers.The syntactic, semantic, and phonological rules of MAE, for both writing and speaking, have been the focus of countless trade books, textbooks, and research studies. These rules are thus well understood for adults and to a slightly lesser extent for children as well. It is important to realize from the outset, however, that despite all of the attention to this standard, in purely linguistic terms there is no single, standard variety of English (Wolfram, Temple Adger, & Christian, 1999). Rather, there is a form of English that has been defined socially to be the “correct” form of English by individuals from a particular social and economic group (Wolfram et al., 1999). It is the linguistic system supported by this power group that is regarded as mainstream.
