English in the southern united states

x Contents 8 Vowel shifting in the southern states   126 9 Enclave dialect communities in the South   141 10 Urbanization and the evolution of Southern American English      159 11 The Englishes of southern Louisiana   173 12 Features and uses of southern style   189 References Index 208 233 Notes on the contributors John Algeo is Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia. He is the author, co-author, or editor of several books including the third, fourth, and fifth editions of The Origins and Development of the English Language (with Thomas Pyles) and volume 6 of the Cambridge History of the English Language. He has been a Fulbright Research Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of London and was Editor of American Speech for ten years. He is a Past-President of the American Dialect Society. Guy Bailey is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas – San Antonio. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nine books and monographs, including African-American English: Structure, History and Use (1998, with Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, and John Baugh) and has been author or co-author of over sixty journal articles on African-American Vernacular English, Southern English, creole Englishes, sociolinguistics, and dialectology Cynthia Goldin Bernstein is Professor of English at the University of Memphis. She is the author of articles in American Speech, Journal of English Linguistics, SECOL Review, editor or co-editor of three books including Language Variety in the South Revisited (1997, with Thomas Nunnally and Robin Sabino) and Windows on Southern Speech (in progress). Her articles and book chapters cover both linguistic and literary topics. Patricia Cukor-Avila is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Texas. She is co-editor of The Emergence of Black English: Texts and Commentary (1991, with Guy Bailey and Natalie Maynor). In addition to her articles on sociolinguistics, she has written articles and given conference presentations on bilingualism and language acquisition. George T. Dorrill is Associate Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is the author of Black and White Speech in the Southern United States: Evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (1987) and of several articles on the phonology of southern speech. He is a xi xii Notes on the contributors former assistant editor of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States and is co-author of articles during the early stages (1970s) of compilation and publication of fieldwork for that project. Connie Eble is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and has been Editor of American Speech, quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society since 1996. She published Slang and Sociability: InGroup Language Among College Students (1996) and is the leading authority on college slang in the United States. Crawford Feagin was mostly recently Visiting Professor at the University of Zurich and was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria). She is the co-editor or author of five books including Towards a Social Science of Language: I Variation and Change in Language and II: Social Interaction and Discourse Structure (1996, 1997, with Gregory Guy, Deborah Schiffrin, and John Baugh), and Development and Diversity: Linguistic Variation across Time and Space (1990, with Jerold A. Edmondson and Peter M¨uhlha¨usler). Barbara Johnstone is Professor of English and Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. She works at the interdisciplinary intersection of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and critical theory and is the author of five books including Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics (2000), The Linguistic Individual (1996), and Stories, Community, and Place (1990). She is also the author of a book on Arabic discourse and has written numerous research articles and book chapters about narrative, repetition, self-expression and regional variation. Salikoko S. Mufwene is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He has held visiting professorships at the Universit´e de Lyon III, the University of the West Indies, the National University of Singapore, and Harvard University. He is the author of The Ecology of Language Evolution (2001), co-author of Creolization of Language and Culture (2001, with Robert Chaudenson – main author); and editor of Africanisms in Afro-American Language (1993), Topics in African Linguistics (1993, with Lioba Moshi); and African-American English: Structure, History, and Use (1998, with John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh). Edgar W. Schneider is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, after previous appointments in Bamberg, Georgia, and Berlin. He has written and edited several books (including American Earlier Black English, 1989; Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data, 1996; Focus on the USA, 1996; Englishes Around the World, 1997; Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, 2000) and has published widely on the dialectology, sociolinguistics, history, semantics, and varieties of English. Jan Tillery is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas – San Antonio. She is the author or co-author of articles on southern speech and the methodology of sociolinguistics including “The nationalization of a southernism” (2000, with Guy Bailey, Journal of English Linguistics) and “The Rutledge Notes on the contributors xiii effect: the impact of interviewers of survey results in linguistics” (1999, with Guy Bailey, American Speech). Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. He has pioneered research on a wide range of American vernacular dialects, including many southern varieties, and has authored or co-authored sixteen books including American English: Dialects and Variation (1998), Language Variation in School and Community (1999), and a seminal descriptive linguistic book on African-American Vernacular English: A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech (1969). He is the author of over two hundred articles on a broad range of sociolinguistic topics. Laura Wright is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Cambridge, and works on the history of English from documentary sources, particularly the history of the London dialect. In 2000 she published an edited volume (The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts) reopening the question of how standard English came about. Most recently Wright has been transcribing sixteenth-century testimonies from London’s Bridewell, from whence speakers were transported to Virginia and the Caribbean plantations, and eighteenth-century documents from the island of St. Helena, which contain testimonies from both the white employees of the East India Company who lived there, and their black slaves. Acknowledgments The editors gratefully acknowledge Coastal Carolina University’s support of this project through the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts, especially the encouragement and resources of Charles Joyner, director of the Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies. We also appreciate the able and willing assistance of Geoffrey Parsons, Patricia Bennett, and Lori Ard in the University’s Office of International Programs, whose friendship, expertise, and technology eased our way in producing a final, edited version of this manuscript. We are indebted to the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL), which has provided and continues to provide a fertile ground for the exploration of all aspects of Southern English. The idea for this volume emerged during discussions at a SECOL conference; all of the people involved in the writing and editing of this book have contributed significantly to that organization and have gained much from its conferences and publications. Special thanks to SECOL members Thomas Nunnally, Greta Little, and Connie Eble who provided advice in the early stages of this project. It has been a pleasure to work with Katharina Brett, Senior Commissioning Editor in Language and Linguistics at Cambridge University Press. She is remarkably effective and efficient, and this volume has profited from her suggestions and keen insights. Above all, we’d like to thank the authors for their enthusiastic response to the invitation to write a chapter for this book, for their carefully considered contributions, and for their invaluable and timely editorial advice at each stage of the process. It has truly been a privilege to be in partnership with this fine group of linguists, scholars, and writers. The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. xiv Introduction The English of the southern United States may be the most studied regional variety of any language. Though there has been no comprehensive bibliography on the topic since Michael Montgomery and James McMillan’s (1989) admirable annotated compilation with over 3,500 entries, it is safe to say that the number of articles, monographs, and books on Southern English approaches or exceeds 4,000, with no abatement in sight. What is the allure of this variety of English? Perhaps its rich internal diversity, perhaps its distinctiveness among regional varieties in the United States, perhaps the folkloric appeal of southern culture in general. Whatever attracts so many to Southern English, Michael Montgomery stands in the vanguard of the myriad scholars who have explored the language and culture of the South. Michael is the quintessential linguist. As author, collaborator, corpus linguist, editor, field researcher, lexicographer, mentor, writer and recipient of grants, he has set a standard for leadership and achievement as a scholar. References in the ensuing chapters to over thirty of his works are not for honorific purposes; his imprint is found in virtually every research area within the study of Southern English. Inspired by Michael Montgomery’s life and work, the authors and editors of English in the Southern United States have undertaken the challenge of creating a volume to capture the past and present of Southern English, to bring our field of research to an even broader community, and to serve as a small platform for launching future research in southern studies. We have endeavored to enrich the climate of ongoing and future inquiry by exploring central themes, issues, and topics in the study of Southern English. Throughout the volume, previous and new data on iconic linguistic features and cultural origins of this diverse regional variety are investigated. Finally, an extensive bibliography provides an additional resource to facilitate further research. Since this is, then, both an upto-date scholarly text and an introduction (and invitation) to the field, we have organized the contributions in chapters which stand independently but are also arranged in a sequence that might prove useful for instructional purposes. John Algeo opens the volume with an outline of the principal cultural elements of the linguistic heredity of the southern United States. He first, however, 1