American English : Dialects and Variation

by Wolfram, Walt; Schilling-Estes, Natalie

• ISBN13: 9781405112666
• ISBN10: 1405112662
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-02
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This book provides a very readable, up-to-date description of language variation in American English, covering regional, ethnic, and gender-based differences. contains new chapters on social and ethnic dialects, including a separate chapter on African American English and more comprehensive discussions of Latino, Native American, Cajun English, and other varieties, includes samples from a wider array of US regions features updated chapters as well as pedagogy such as new exercises, a phonetic symbols key, and a section on the notion of speech community accessibly written for the wide variety of students that enrol in a course on dialects, ranging from students with no background in linguistics to those who may wish to specialize in sociolinguistics

Author Biography

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University, and author or co-author of 17 books and over 250 articles, including The Development of African American English (with Erik Thomas, Blackwell 2002) and American Voices (edited with Ben Ward, Blackwell 2006).

Natalie Schilling-Estes is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is co-author of Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue (with Walt Wolfram, 1997) and co-editor of The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (with J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill, Blackwell 2002).

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface	p. ix
Preface	p. x
Phonetic Symbols	p. xiv
Dialects, Standards, and Vernaculars	p. 1
Defining Dialect	p. 2
Dialect: The Popular Viewpoint	p. 2
Dialect Myths and Reality	p. 7
Standards and Vernaculars	p. 9
Vernacular Dialects	p. 14
Labeling Vernacular Dialects	p. 17
Why Study Dialects?	p. 19
A Tradition of Study	p. 23
Further Reading	p. 26
Why Dialects?	p. 28
Sociohistorical Explanation	p. 29
Settlement	p. 29
Migration	p. 30
Geographical factors	p. 31
Language contact	p. 32
Economic ecology	p. 34
Social stratification	p. 35
Social interaction, social practices, and speech communities	p. 36
Group and individual identity	p. 41
Linguistic Explanation	p. 43
Rule extension	p. 46
Analogy	p. 47
Transparency and grammaticalization	p. 51
Pronunciation phenomena	p. 54
Words and word meanings	p. 60
The Final Product	p. 62
Further Reading	p. 63
Levels of Dialect	p. 64
Lexical Differences	p. 64
Slang	p. 70
Phonological Differences	p. 74
Grammatical Differences	p. 85
Language Use and Pragmatics	p. 93
Further Reading	p. 101
Dialects in the United States: Past, Present, and Future	p. 103
The First English(es) in America	p. 104
Earlier American English: The Colonial Period	p. 114
American English Extended	p. 118
The Westward Expansion of English	p. 122
The Present and Future State of American English	p. 124
Further Reading	p. 132
Regional Dialects	p. 134
Eliciting Regional Dialect Forms	p. 135
Mapping Regional Variants	p. 138
The Distribution of Dialect Forms	p. 140
Dialect Diffusion	p. 153
Perceptual Dialectology	p. 159
Region and Place	p. 163
Further Reading	p. 165
Social and Ethnic Dialects	p. 167
Defining Class	p. 168
Beyond Social Class	p. 170
The Patterning of Social Differences in Language	p. 172
Linguistic Constraints on Variability	p. 177
The Social Evaluation of Linguistic Features	p. 182
Social Class and Language Change	p. 188
Ethnicity	p. 190
Latino English	p. 194
Chicano English	p. 196
The range of Latino English	p. 200
Cajun English	p. 202
Lumbee English	p. 206
Further Reading	p. 209
African American English	p. 211
The Status of European American and African American Vernaculars	p. 213
The Origin and Early Development of AAE	p. 219
The Contemporary Development of AAE	p. 224
Conclusion	p. 230
Further Reading	p. 232
Gender and Language Variation	p. 234
Gender-based Patterns of Variation as Reported in Dialect Surveys	p. 237
Explaining General Patterns	p. 241
Localized Expressions of Gender Relations	p. 243
Communities of Practice: Linking the Local and the Global	p. 245
Language-use-based Approaches: The "Female Deficit" Approach	p. 248
The "Cultural Difference" Approach	p. 253
The "Dominance" Approach	p. 255
Further Implications	p. 256
Talking about Men and Women	p. 257
Generic he and man	p. 258
Family names and addresses	p. 259
Relationships of association	p. 260
Labeling	p. 260
The Question of Language Reform	p. 262
Further Reading	p. 264
Dialects and Style	p. 266
Types of Style Shifting	p. 266
Attention to Speech	p. 271
The patterning of stylistic variation across social groups	p. 272
Limitations of the attention to speech approach	p. 276
Audience Design	p. 279
The effects of audience on speech style	p. 281
Limitations of the audience design approach	p. 283
Newer approaches to audience design	p. 285
Speaker Design Approaches	p. 286
Further Considerations	p. 290
Further Reading	p. 291
On the Applications of Dialect Study	p. 294
Applied Dialectology	p. 294
Dialects and Testing	p. 296
Language achievement	p. 297
Speech and language development tests	p. 301
Predicting dialect interference	p. 303
Testing Language	p. 304
Using language to access information	p. 305
The testing situation	p. 308
The language diagnostician	p. 310
Teaching Standard English	p. 312
What standard?	p. 312
Approaches to standard English	p. 316
Can standard English be taught?	p. 318
Further Reading	p. 327
Dialect Awareness: Extending Application	p. 329
Dialects and Reading	p. 329
Dialect readers	p. 333
Dialect Influence in Written Language	p. 335
Written Dialect	p. 339
Proactive Dialect Awareness Programs	p. 344
A Curriculum on Dialects	p. 346
Community-based Dialect Awareness Programs	p. 354
Scrutinizing Community Partnerships	p. 356
Further Reading	p. 359
An Inventory of Distinguishing Dialect Features	p. 361
Glossary	p. 385
References	p. 410
Index	p. 432
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