American Voices How Dialects Differ from coast to coast_01 docx

AMERICAN VOICESHow Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast Edited by Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward... First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pu

American Voices

AMERICAN VOICES

How Dialects Differ from

Coast to Coast

Edited by Walt Wolfram

and Ben Ward

Editorial material and organization © 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd blackwell publishing

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9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

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The right of Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward to be identified as the Authors of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the

UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the

UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission

of the publisher.

First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

American voices : how dialects differ from coast to coast / edited by Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-2108-8 (alk paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-2108-4 (alk paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-2109-5 (pbk : alk paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-2109-2 (pbk : alk paper) 1 English language— Dialects—United States 2 English language—Variation—United

States 3 English language—Dialects—Canada 4 English language— Dialects—Caribbean Area I Wolfram, Walt, 1941– II Ward, Ben, 1962– PE2841.A77 2006

427′.973—dc22

2005017255

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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List of Illustrations ix

1 Language Evolution or Dying Traditions?

The State of American Dialects 1

Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes

Part I The South

2 Sounds of the South 11

Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery

3 Defining Appalachian English 17

Kirk Hazen and Ellen Fluharty

4 If These Hills Could Talk (Smoky Mountains) 22

Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs, Bridget Anderson,

and Neal Hutcheson

5 Doing the Charleston (South Carolina) 29

Maciej Baranowski

6 The Lone Star State of Speech (Texas) 36

Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery

7 Speaking the Big Easy (New Orleans, LA) 42

Connie Eble

8 Sounds of Ole Man River (Memphis, TN) 49

Valerie Fridland

Part II The North

9 Yakking with the Yankees (New England) 57

Julie Roberts, Naomi Nagy, and Charles Boberg

10 Beantown Babble (Boston, MA) 63

Jim Fitzpatrick

11 Mainely English 70

Jane S Smith

12 Steel Town Speak (Pittsburgh, PA) 77

Barbara Johnstone and Scott Kiesling

13 New York Tawk (New York City, NY) 82

Part III The Midwest

16 An Introduction to Midwest English 101

19 Different Ways of Talking in the Buckeye State (Ohio) 118

Beverly Olson Flanigan

20 Spirited Speech (St Louis, MO) 124

Thomas E Murray

21 Saying Ya to the Yoopers (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) 130

Beth Simon

Part IV The West

22 Getting Real in the Golden State (California) 139

Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton

23 Desert Dialect (Utah) 144

David Bowie and Wendy Morkel

24 Dialects in the Mist (Portland, OR) 149

29 Islands of Diversity (Bahamas) 183

Walt Wolfram, Becky Childs, Jeffrey Reaser, and Benjamin Torbert

30 Dialects in Danger (Outer Banks, NC) 189

Part VI Sociocultural Dialects

34 Bridging the Great Divide (African American English) 217

John Baugh

35 When Linguistic Worlds Collide (African American English) 225

Walt Wolfram and Benjamin Torbert

36 Talkin’ with mi Gente (Chicano English) 233

Carmen Fought

37 Stirring the Linguistic Gumbo (Cajun English) 238

Megan E Melançon

38 From the Brickhouse to the Swamp

(Lumbee Vernacular English) 244

List of Illustrations

1 Dialect areas of the United States, based on telephone

2 A group of Confederate soldiers awaits orders during

the re-enactment of a Civil War battle 11

3 A farmer hoes beans in the mountains 17

4 A creek running through the Great Smoky Mountain

5 Historic building in Charleston, South Carolina 29

6 A traditional Texas welcome 36

7 Bourbon Street, New Orleans during Mardi Gras 42

8 Paddle steamer docked on the Mississippi River 49

9 A row of houses on Martha’s Vineyard 57

10 Boston street scene 63

11 The joys of eating Maine lobster 70

12 Downtown Pittsburgh from the West End overlook 77

13 New York contemplating the Hudson River 82

14 Professionals in Philadelphia 8815.1 Urban life on Toronto’s Yonge Street 9315.2 The literacy gap 96

16 Hiding in a wheatfield 10117.1 A typical barn in the cornbelt 10617.2 The pattern of vowel changes known as the Northern

19.2 Traditional dialect boundaries based on the Linguistic

Atlas of the United States 120

20 St Louis skyline and Gateway Arch 124

21 Ice fishing is a popular pastime among the “Yoopers” of

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 130

22 Soaking up the rays in southern California 139

23 The chapel at Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Utah 144

24 Fishing on the banks of the Willamette River,

Portland, Oregon 149

25 Monument Valley, Arizona 156

26 Place of Refuge, located on the Big Island, Hawai’i 165

27 Women preparing crayfish, Jamaica 172

28 South Carolina river basin 178

29 Governor’s Island, Bahamas 183

30 Ocracoke Island 189

31 Fisherman, Smith Island, Maryland 196

32 Excavations have proven that the Vikings were

the earliest European visitors to Newfoundland 203

33 Edinburgh, Tristan da Cunha 210

34 Young man in the city 217

35 Boy in a field 225

36 Time out on the railroad tracks 233

37 Boaters at the mouth of Bayou Cane, Louisiana 238

39 Young Orthodox Jews 251

40 An Amish buggy in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania 258

The collection of dialect profiles that led to American Voices began

inno-cently But it was hardly by accident In fact, it developed from a sharedvision by the co-editors of this volume In 1997, publisher Ben Wardlaunched a magazine dedicated to bringing language issues to the atten-tion of allied service professionals and to the American public in an at-tractive, readable format Linguists sometimes talk about the need to make

language issues more accessible to the general public; the editors of

Lan-guage Magazine made it happen It was a bold venture, premised on the

assumption that many people were curious about language apart from thehighly specialized field of linguistics If the development and distribution

of Language Magazine over the last several years is any indication, the

assumption of interest was more than justified

Meanwhile, Walt Wolfram’s sociolinguistic research over several ades taught him that just about everyone is curious about dialects Afterall, one can hardly avoid noticing and wondering about language differ-ences in daily interactions with people from all walks of life The problem,however, is bridging the chasm between highly technical, microscopicallydetailed studies of language variation and popular, broad-based levels ofinterest With all due respect to linguists, they often have a way of trans-forming inherently interesting subject matter into jargon-laced presenta-tions that are comprehensible only to the few thousand professionallinguists in the world This collection of articles is intended to do better Itattempts to translate the detailed research of professional dialectologistsinto readable descriptions for those who are curious about language dif-ferences but have neither the background nor the desire to be professionallinguists We systematically attempt to cover (for the most part) a range ofNorth American English dialect communities, including both well-known

and rarely recognized cases in which speakers may not even be thought tospeak a dialect By selecting our dialect profiles in this way, we hope toconvince readers that everyone really does speak a dialect – and that theyare all of interest We also attempt to cover a few major socioculturalvarieties, though our focus is on regional space rather than social place.

Chapters in the book, all of which appeared originally in Language

Maga-zine, are not intended to be read in sequence since they are independent

articles that do not build on each other; in fact, we would suggest that thereader choose articles on the basis of interest and curiosity

The idea for this collection was born in 2000 when Ben Ward contacted

Walt Wolfram about writing an article for Language Magazine on the

unique Ocracoke dialect spoken on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.Though Wolfram was quite happy to do so, he wondered if it might bemore appropriate to write a more general article on the state of Americandialects, and suggested that this might be followed up by an ongoing series

of articles highlighting some of the notable dialects of North AmericanEnglish – and slightly beyond The seed was planted Germination andcultivation of the idea was another matter Who would write these art-icles? Could linguists actually write trade articles without resorting tothe jargon that so frequently typified their technical descriptions? Wouldthey consider this a worthy venture given their active research lives? Wehope that the articles that appear in this collection answer these questionssatisfactorily

Prominent dialect researchers on particular American English dialectswere contacted to see if they would accept the challenge of writing uptheir sophisticated research for a broad-based audience Amazingly, prac-tically everyone accepted, despite the fact that the presentation was a jour-nalistic challenge The incentive was simply the offer to tell their story in

a way that might be comprehensible to their friends, family, and linguist colleagues and students The reward was seeing their story attrac-tively presented in a glossy magazine format with cool images and rapidturn-around time in publication The response has been one of the high-lights of our publishing careers The most eminent scholars in the fieldwrote their dialect stories and, in the process, also subjected themselves toediting decisions on behalf of the audience Happily, the authors greatlyexceeded our expectations A great debt of thanks goes to each of theauthors, not only for their splendid contributions in terms of content andpresentation but also for being such good sports in accommodating theeditorial process sometimes necessary to ensure readability and compara-bility Thanks also to Sarah Coleman and Tami Kaplan at Blackwell for

encouraging us in this project, even though it was slightly different fromthe usual book project We hope that the collection will be of interest both

to the leisure reader interested in language differences and to grad students in courses on the English language, American dialects, andsociolinguistics

under-For convenience, the articles are arranged in broad-based sections thatmay stretch traditional notions of region A section is also devoted toisland dialects, a favorite breeding ground for distinct language mainten-ance and development, and another section is devoted to some promin-ent sociocultural varieties Admittedly, the collection does not include all

of the dialects that might have been covered, and we can image the readerasking, “But what about the X dialect?” In most cases, this is probably avalid concern, and we can only apologize for our sins of omission Wefully recognize that there are many other regional and social dialects ofNorth America beyond those described here To a large extent, coveragewas dictated by the availability of active researchers to write about thedialects they were researching, with an eye toward regional and ethnicrepresentation Since we follow a case study format, it is bound to excludemany situations worthy of inclusion Perhaps our oversights will inspirethe description of other worthy dialect cases so that we can produce asecond volume in the future

If nothing else, we hope that readers will understand that Americandialects are alive and well – and that they remain every bit as interestingtoday as they were during their presumed heyday, whenever that wassupposed to have been In fact, our point is that dialects are not artifacts

of the past, but ongoing, contemporary social statements about peopleand place We also hope that some of the excitement that inspires dialecto-logists and sociolinguists to devote their entire lives to the description of

a speech community will rub off on the reader If these descriptions dothat, then we will have succeeded beyond our imagination Dialects aresuch fun – and such an essential part of who we are and what America is.Don’t believe the myth that dialects in American society are dying!

Walt WolframWilliam C Friday Distinguished Professor

North Carolina State University

Ben Ward, EditorLanguage Magazine

Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes 1

1

Language Evolution or Dying

Traditions? The State of

American Dialects

Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes

Atlantic Provinces

NYC Mid-Atlantic

W Pa

Inland North Inland

North

WNE ENE

Inland South Charleston

Florid Texas South

The North

The Midland

The South The West

Canada

1 Dialect areas of the United States, based on telephone survey data (from Labov, Ash, and

Boberg 2005) © 2005 by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg from Atlas of North American English (New York/Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter).

Most people find dialects intriguing At the same time, they have lots ofquestions about them and often have strong opinions as well Probablythe most common question we encounter about the condition of Amer-ican dialects is, “Are American dialects dying, due to television and the

2 Language Evolution or Dying Traditions?

mobility of the American population?” Certainly, media, transportation,and technology have radically compressed the geography of the UnitedStates and altered American lifestyles over the last century So what effects

do these significant changes have on America English dialects? What aboutthe future of American dialects as English assumes a global role?

Basic Dialects of American English

The methodical collection of data on regional dialect variation in Americabegan in earnest in the 1930s when the Linguistic Atlas of the UnitedStates and Canada was launched and dialectologists began conductinglarge-scale surveys of regional dialect differences This effort was buoyed

in the 1960s through an extensive national survey that has now led to the

publication of the first four volumes of the six-volume Dictionary of

American Regional English (Cassidy and Hall 1985, 1991, 1996, 2002),

the premier reference work on regional American English dialectology.These surveys focused on the regional vocabulary of older lifetimeresidents of rural areas and so captured a picture of dialect differences asthey existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries The resultwas a number of useful dialect maps of the primary and secondary dialectareas of the mainland US, including the one featured at the beginning ofthe chapter

To a large extent, traditional dialect divisions in the US reflect ences first established in Colonial America by people from different parts

differ-of the British Isles These differences were cemented in early culturalhubs such as Richmond, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston and laterdiffused outward as English speakers moved inland But do these differ-ences still hold at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after a century

of demographic shifts, economic growth, and sociocultural change? LinguistWilliam Labov and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania arecurrently conducting an extensive telephone survey of dialect pronunci-ations throughout the US Though still ongoing, his survey reaffirms thepersistence of the same major dialect boundaries that were established inearlier studies However, Labov’s research reveals more than the meremaintenance of fundamental dialect boundaries; it shows that in someways the major dialects of the US are actually becoming more differentfrom one another rather than more alike

Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes 3

In large Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, andBuffalo, certain vowel pronunciations are changing in ways that distance

them from Southern vowels For example, the augh sound of a word like

caught is now pronounced more like the vowel of cot Meanwhile, a word

like lock sounds something like lack, while tack sounds a little like tech At

the same time, Southern vowels are changing in different ways For

exam-ple, red sounds something like raid, and fish sounds almost like feesh So

much for the presumed homogenization of Northern and Southern speech

Changing Trends in Dialects

The continuity and enhancement of basic dialect boundaries during acentury of demographic and social change is certainly a feature story, butthere are some sidebars that point to change in the dialects of AmericanEnglish as well Several factors have had a significant impact on the reposi-tioning of American English dialects at the turn of the millennium Theseinclude changing patterns of immigration and language contact withinthe US, shifting patterns of interregional movement within the US, andexpanded transportation and communication networks To go along withthese demographic and technological developments, changes in social struc-ture and cultural values have affected the development of dialects

Language Contact

One factor that has always contributed to the distinctive flavor ofAmerican English is the influence of other languages, from the earliestNative American influences on the vocabulary of general American Eng-

lish (raccoon, moccasin, pecan, etc.), to the later influence of Scandinavian

languages on the pronunciations of the Upper Midwest, to the influence

of African languages on Ebonics But the languages influencing AmericanEnglish change as the cultural mix changes

The languages of more recent immigrant populations from Asia anddifferent areas of the Hispanic world are now affecting English just asvarious European languages have done throughout the history of the US.Furthermore, new ethnic varieties of English are arising from morerecent language contact situations For example, there are various types of