This class examines the major forms of variation in present-day North American English (NAE), including phonological, morphological, and lexical variables; the historical evolution of NAE dialects, including variation and dialect diversity in earlier NAE records; and the relation of NAE dialects to those of the British Isles and the rest of the English-speaking world. We will survey the range of methods that have been used in the study NAE, from old-fashioned lexical inquiries, to the questionnaires of Hans Kurath, to the pioneering sociolinguistic fieldwork of William Labov and his colleagues in the 1960s, to the 1990s Telephone Survey and resulting Atlas of North American English.
Other topics to be discussed include the relation between traditional dialect geography and modern dialectology in the North American context; similarities and differences between the dialect geography of the Old and New Worlds; the peculiar situation and history of African American English; and the intersection of geography with other sociolinguistic variables, including social class, age, gender, and especially ethnicity and race. Finally, we will discuss the question of “General American” and “broadcast standard”, and the practical problems of describing and teaching a standard American English in the world today.
Selected bibliography
- Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English: Dialects and Variation. (Language in Society 24.) Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell.
- Teacher: Ronald Kim