Language of the old southwest?

[Donald M. Lance]

AAllan at AOL.COM wrote:

> ... what we'd now call the "old South.") Any easy suggestions? If so, you
> could post the answer to the list, as well as sending it to E.O.
>
> ------------
> Dear Sir/ Mdm ( American Dialect Society )
>
> I am a student of Bielefeld University in Germany and I have to do a
> ...
> I am writing to You in order to recieve information about the dialect of
> the old south-west, which appears in Mark Twain, Longstreet and Poe
> works. I have tried to find this information in your homeweb but as I
> said,I could not find it....

> E.O
> e.onuns_noguer at uni-bielefeld.de

You will have to do the old-fashioned task of going to a library.  Look for TALL TALES OF
THE SOUTHWEST, edited by Franklin J. Meine, originally published by Knopf in 1930.  A new
edition of this book was published about ten years ago, but I don't have the
bibliographical information. In 1987 the University of Tennessee Press published THE TALL
TALES OF DAVY CROCKETT.  These demonstrate the dialect(s) rather than telling you
something about them.  You would have to analyze the texts, a job that is worth doing.

DMLance