Old and New Ethnic Dialect Configuration in the American South

在国家科学基金会的支持下，沃尔特·沃尔夫拉姆博士和埃里克·托马斯博士将对美国南部两种不同语言情况下的语言变化进行为期三年的研究。一种涉及存在了几个世纪的孤立的语言变体，另一种涉及与最近移民群体有关的新语言变体的形成。第一项研究集中在北卡罗来纳州的奥克拉科克岛，这是一个独特的英语方言传统的发源地。在过去的十年里，在奥克拉科克建立了一个广泛的正式和非正式的方言意识项目，这是语言学家有史以来最集中和最持续的努力之一，目的是让一个小型语言社区了解其语言遗产。这项研究试图解决语言意识项目在语言变化中的作用，包括濒临灭绝的方言能否重振旗鼓的问题。第二项研究集中于大西洋中部南部一种新兴的英语，与最近出现的新的城市和农村拉美裔社区有关，这是南大西洋各州最近最戏剧性的人口变化之一。这一阶段的研究试图通过考察北卡罗来纳州不同地区情况下拉美裔英语的早期阶段，来解决新的种族方言是如何形成的问题。将在每个地点进行基于民族志的田野调查，包括一系列社会语言学访谈。对于奥克拉科克语言变化的研究，十多年前接受采访的对象将被重新采访，新一代青少年和青少年将接受采访，以实时和明显地比较语言变化。对新兴拉美裔社区居民的采访将代表农村和城市与盎格鲁美国人和非裔美国人语言社区的接触情况，以确定当地方言对这些新兴拉美裔变体的影响。这些研究旨在促进我们对语言接触、语言变化和新方言形成的基本原则的理解。这项研究将有助于公众理解美国社会中的语言多样性，并为与语言差异状况相关的国家语言争议提供一个重要的视角。关于双语和民族语言变体的全国性辩论表明，必须了解语言变体在社会中的作用。对于教育工作者、政策制定者和普通公众来说，迫切需要对语言差异与文化和种族的关系进行正式和非正式的教育。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Walt Wolfram and Dr. Erik Thomas will conduct three years of research on language change in two distinct language situations in the American South. One involves an isolated language variety that has existed for several centuries and one involves the formation of a new language variety associated with a recent immigrant group. The first study focuses on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, the home of a unique English dialect tradition. During the last decade, an extensive formal and informal dialect awareness program has been instituted on Ocracoke in one of the most concentrated and sustained efforts ever undertaken by linguists to inform a small speech community about its language heritage. The study seeks to address the role of language awareness programs on language change, including the question of whether dying dialects can be revitalized. The second study focuses on an incipient variety of English in the Mid-Atlantic South related to the recent emergence of new urban and rural Hispanic communities, one of the most dramatic recent demographic changes in the South Atlantic states. This phase of the study seeks to address the question of how new ethnic dialects are formed by examining the early stages of Hispanic English in different regional situations in North Carolina. Ethnographically based fieldwork will be conducted in each site, including a series of sociolinguistic interviews. For the study of language change in Ocracoke, subjects interviewed more than a decade ago will be re-interviewed and the new generation of adolescents and teenagers will be interviewed to compare language change in real and apparent time. Interviews with residents in emergent Hispanic communities will represent both rural and urban contact situations with Anglo American and African American speech communities to determine the effect of local dialects on these emergent Hispanic varieties. These studies seek to advance our understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie language contact, language change, and new dialect formation.This research will contribute to the public understanding of language diversity in American society and offer an important perspective on national language controversies associated with the status of language differences. National debates related to bilingualism and to ethnic language varieties indicate the essential need to understand the role of language variation in society. There is an urgent need for formal and informal education about the relation of language differences to culture and ethnicity--for educators, policy makers, and the general public.