An outgrowth of the Language Variety in the South III symposium, New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches comprises forty-five original essays on a range of topics regarding the languages and dialects of the American South. Book jacket.

Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess the use and meaning of language in the South, a region rich in dialects and variants, this comprehensive edited collection reflects the cutting-edge research presented at the fourth decennial meeting of Language Variety in the South in 2014. Focusing on the ongoing changes and surprising continuities associated with the contemporary South, the contributors use innovative methodologies to pave new pathways for understanding the social dynamics that shape the language in the South today. Along with the editors, contributors to the volume include Agnes Bolonyai, Katie Carmichael, Phillip M. Carter, Becky Childs, Danica Cullinan, Nathalie Dajko, Catherine Evans Davies, Robin Dodsworth, Hartwell S. Francis, Kirk Hazen, Anne H. Charity Hudley, Neal Hutcheson, Alex Hyler, Mary Kohn, Christian Koops, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Sonja L. Lanehart, Andrew Lynch, Ayesha M. Malik, Christine Mallinson, Jim Michnowicz, Caroline Myrick, Michael D. Picone, Dennis R. Preston, Paul E. Reed, Joel Schneier, James Shepherd, Erik R. Thomas, Sonya Trawick, and Tracey L. Weldon.

Top linguists from diverse fields address language varieties in the South. Language Variety in the South Revisited is a comprehensive collection of new research on southern United States English by foremost scholars of regional language variation. Like its predecessor, Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (The University of Alabama Press, 1986), this book includes current research into African American vernacular English, but it greatly expands the scope of investigation and offers an extensive assessment of the field. The volume encompasses studies of contact involving African and European languages; analysis of discourse, pragmatic, lexical, phonological, and syntactic features; and evaluations of methods of collecting and examining data. The 38 essays not only offer a wealth of information about southern language varieties but also serve as models for regional linguistic investigation.

This volume provides a systematic comparative treatment of urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, examining the emergence and development of these dialects in major cities in sub-Saharan Africa and North-Western Europe. The book’s focus on contemporary urban settings sheds light on the new language practices and mixed ways of speaking resulting from large-scale migration and the intense contact that occurs between new and existing languages and dialects in these contexts. In comparing these new patterns of language variation and change between cities in both Africa and Europe, the volume affords us a unique opportunity to examine commonalities in linguistic phenomena as well as sociolinguistic differences in societally multilingual settings and settings dominated by a strong monolingual habitus. These comparisons are reinforced by a consistent chapter structure, with each chapter presenting the linguistic and social context of the region, information on available data (including corpora), sociolinguistic and structural findings, a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, and its stability over time. The discussion in the book is further enriched by short commentaries from researchers contributing different theoretical and geographical perspectives. Taken as a whole, the book offers new insights into migration-based linguistic diversity and patterns of language variation and change, making this ideal reading for students and scholars in general linguistics and language structure, sociolinguistics, creole studies, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, language education and discourse analysis.

This monograph takes up recent advances in social network methods in sociology, together with data on economic segregation, in order to build a quantitative analysis of the class and network effects implicated in vowel change in a Southern American city. Studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban spaces have uncovered durable patterns of linguistic difference, such as the maintenance of blue collar/white collar distinctions in the case of stable linguistic variables. But the underlying interactional origins of these patterns, and the interactional reasons for their durability, are not well understood, due in part to the near-absence of large-scale network investigation. This book undertakes a sociolinguistic network analysis of data from the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews collected form natives of Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2008-2017. Acoustic analysis of the corpus shows the rapid, ongoing retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift and increasing participation in national vowel changes. The social distribution of these trends is explored via standard social factors such as occupation as well as innovative network variables, including a measure of nestedness in the community network. The book aims to pursue new network-based questions about sociolinguistic variation that can be applied to other corpora, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics as well as those interested in further understanding how existing quantitative network methods from sociological research might be applied to sociolinguistic data.

An examination of Spanglish, Portuñol, and Judeo-Spanish literatures that builds on sociolinguistic understandings of the intersections of language, nation, and identity to develop the theoretical frameworks of “linguistic labor” and “literary doulas.” Connecting the metaphor of labor to the human life cycle, Remy Attig introduces the notion of literary doulas. These doulas accompany a community as a body of literature is born (akin to the doula as midwife), or, in the case of Judeo-Spanish, writes the language as a form of linguistic palliative care for a community whose historical language is facing imminent death (the death doula). Presenting three case studies of Spanglish, Portuñol, and Judeo-Spanish, the first part of Linguistic Labor and Literary Doulas places the emergence of these languages in their respective geographies and contexts. Attig discusses the work of authors and literary doulas, including Susana Chávez-Silverman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Fabián Severo, and Matilda Koén-Sarano. The framework of linguistic labor relates the creation of a literary corpus in an undervalued or stigmatized language context to other forms of domestic or gendered labor, often the responsibility of women and queer people. In the second part of the book, Attig places these literatures and theories in discussion with emerging scholarship in translinguistics, queer theories, and translation studies. By applying the notion of translinguistics to useful case studies that challenge traditional understandings of the frontiers between languages, Linguistic Labor and Literary Doulas models productive ways that we can discuss real-world linguistic practices as valuable aspects of culture and identity.

This volume connects the latest research on language acquisition across the lifespan with the explanation of language change in specific sociohistorical settings. This conversation benefits from recent advances in two areas: on the one hand, the study of how learners of various ages and in various sociolinguistic contexts acquire language variation; on the other, historical sociolinguistics as the field that focuses on the study of historical patterns of language variation and change. The overarching rationale for this interdisciplinary dialogue is that all forms of language change start and spread as the result of individual acts of acquisition throughout the speakers’ lives. The thirteen chapters in this book are authored by an international group of both established and emerging scholars. They encompass theoretical overviews of specific research areas within the broader realm of the acquisition of language variation, as well as case studies applying these theoretical advances to the exploration of language change in a wide range of sociohistorical contexts in the Americas, Oceania, and Asia. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers in the area of language acquisition, language variation and language change, especially those working on interdisciplinary and crosslinguistic connections among these areas.