This volume, one of the most comprehensive studies of language change in any southern city, presents an in-depth examination of the linguistic patterns of the residents of Charleston, South Carolina, an area that claims one of the most distinctive dialects in American English. In the process of regionalization, Charleston has undergone a linguistic revolution unseen for any other dialect of English studied to date, in which the traditional dialect has been replaced with a very different type of linguistic system. The new system remains distinct from most other southern dialects. This study traces the retreat of the traditional features with a sample of one hundred speakers, aged eight to ninety, across social classes. The best-known features of the traditional dialect-a lack of distinction between /ihr/ and /ehr/, as in beer and bear, and ingliding and monophthongal long mid vowels /e:, o:/, as in take and goat-have now largely disappeared. Social class and age are important factors in the linguistics of the Charleston area. While some older Charlestonians still have the back and ingliding /ow/ vowel, as in goat and so, younger speakers, particularly those in the highest-status social group, show very advanced fronting of this vowel. This volume is organized chronologically, moving from traditional speech into the distinctively different linguistic style that has emerged.

Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Phonetic Symbols	p. xv
Charleston: A Historical Overview	p. 1
The Traditional Dialect	p. 9
The Traditional Dialect	p. 9
The Speech of William McTeer as an Illustration of the Traditional Dialect	p. 13
The Traditional Dialect and the Southern Shift	p. 25
Methods	p. 27
Retreat of the Traditional Features	p. 46
Retreat of the Traditional Features	p. 46
The Traditional Dialect and Gullah	p. 73
Postvocalic /r/ in Charleston	p. 79
Nearly Completed Mergers	p. 85
Merger of /ohr/ and /[characters not reproducible]hr/	p. 85
Merger of /iw/ and /uw/	p. 91
Merger of merry and Mary	p. 98
Merger of /ihr/ and /ehr/	p. 103
Mergers in Progress	p. 124
The Low-Back Merger	p. 124
The PIN-PEN Merger	p. 132
Merger of merry and marry	p. 141
Charleston and the Southern Shift	p. 149
/ay/-Monophthongization	p. 149
The Southern Shift beyond /ay/-Monophthongization	p. 159
The Fronting of Back Upgliding Vowels	p. 171
The Fronting of /uw/	p. 171
The Fronting of /ow/	p. 183
The Development of Nasal Systems for /[characters not reproducible]/ and /aw/	p. 204
Development of a Nasal System for Short-a	p. 204
Development of a Nasal System for /aw/	p. 220
Charleston and Its People	p. 226
Conclusions	p. 242
Charleston Word List	p. 257
Notes	p. 259
References	p. 263
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Phonological Variation and Change in the Dialect of Charleston, South Carolina

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