Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community

Abstract

This article investigates an external variable critical to the understanding of sociolinguistic variation in a rural, tri-ethnic community in the Southern United States. Cultural identity, the orientation of the speaker to the community, was first observed in variationist work by Labov (1963) but has not been regularly analyzed as have sex, age, and ethnicity. Cultural identity is postulated as a speaker's orientation to the local and larger regional cultures, and in Warren County, North Carolina, this orientation correlates strongly with vernacular variants of present and past tense be. For copula absence (e.g. They O real nice people), was regularization (e.g. We was going), and past tense wont (e.g. We wont gonna go), the cultural identity of the speaker had statistically significant effects on language variation. To understand language variation in this community, the interactions of cultural identity and other external variables must be considered.