English in the Southern United States (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: English in the southern United States ed. by Stephen J. Nagle, Sara L. Sanders Mark J. Elson English in the southern United States. Ed. by Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders. (Studies in English language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 244. ISBN 0521822645. $65 (Hb). This book presents twelve papers treating various aspects of American English as spoken in the southeastern part of the United States. The areas treated with authors and their contributions are: (i) origin and external history: John Algeo (‘The origins of Southern American English’), Edgar Schneider (‘Shakespeare in the coves and hollows? Toward a history of Southern English’), and Salikoko Mufwene (‘The shared ancestry of African-American and American-White Southern Englishes: Some speculations dictated by history’); (ii) linguistic history: Laura Wright (‘Eight grammatical features of southern United States speech present in early modern London prison narratives’), Patricia Cukor-Avila (‘The complex grammatical history of African-American and white vernacularsin the South’), and Crawford Feagin (‘Vowel shifting in the southern states’); (iii) present-day structure: Cynthia Bernstein (‘Grammatical features of southern speech: yall, might could and fixin to’) and George Dorrill (‘Sounding southern: A look at the phonology of English in the South’); (iv) dialectology and sociolinguistics: Walt Wolfram (‘Enclave dialect communities in the South’), Connie Eble (‘The Englishes of southern Louisiana’), Jan Tillery with Guy Bailey (‘Urbanization and the evolution of Southern American English’), and Barbara Johnstone (‘Features and uses of southern style’). The volume includes an introduction and concludes with a list of references. The contributions are uniformly of high quality, each adding, in its own way, to our growing understanding of what may be ‘the most studied regional variety of any language’ (1). The contributions on origin, external history, and linguistic history are, not surprisingly, the most speculative. They focus on, and suggest revisions to, existing theories attempting to trace the evolution of SAE (Southern American English) and, in this context, they identify those linguistic systems and sociolinguistic circumstances that seem likely to have given rise to it. The emphasis is on diversity, beginning with Alger’s reminder that ‘[S]southern American English is not a thing or a single entity’ (7) and his enumeration, in support of this claim, of the various language components which can be identified in its evolution. In this vein, Schneider criticizes the view of some that SAE can be viewed wholly or exclusively as a retention of older British dialectal forms. Wright enumerates eight grammatical features of SAE she has found in an archive of early modern London prison narratives, showing that the features in question (e.g. invariant be) could have been imported from England, rather than being the result of loan translation from African languages. Mufwene discusses the role of African-American Vernacular English in the evolution of SAE, and disputes the strong form of the creole hypothesis as well as J. L. Dillard’s claim of a widespread koiné. Cukor-Avila continues the discussion of the relationship between African-American and Southern White Vernacular English. The remaining papers convincingly, albeit of necessity on a small scale, remind the reader of the amount of fieldwork and analysis of data yet to be done in areas not directly connected to origins and history. Each may be viewed as confirmation of Algeo’s reference to diversity in SAE. Three of the papers, those by Bernstein, Dorrill, and Feagin, chart various features of contemporary SAE that oppose it to non-Southern American English, while the other four discuss aspects of diversity within SAE. Together, these papers give a relatively complete presentation of the important issues in the history of SAE, and they provide many essential facts relating to its structure in clear, accessible language. This volume, therefore, is suitable not only for advanced courses in the dialectology of American English and in the history and structure of SAE, but also for introductory classes. Mark J. Elson University of Virginia Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America