Old and New Ethnic Dialect Configuration in the American South

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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.