Linguistic Diversity in the South : Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology

This volume brings together work by linguists and linguistic anthropologists not only on southern varieties of English, but also on other languages spoken in the region.

The contributors, who often draw from their own involvement in language maintenance or linguistic heritage movements, engage several of the fields' most pressing issues as they relate to the southern speech communities: tension between linguistic scholarship and linguistic activism; discourse genres; language contact; language ideology; and the relationship between language shift, language maintenance, and cultural reproduction.

Acknowledging the role of immigration and settlement in shaping southern linguistic and cultural diversity, the volume covers a range of Native American, African American, and Euro-American speech communities.

One essay explores the implementation of "dialect awareness programs" and the ethics of the relationship between researchers and North Carolina's Lumbee and Ocracoke communities. Another essay focuses on a single Appalachian community to explore the interplay between linguistic variables commonly associated with Appalachian speech and others commonly associated with African American speech