Does Southern speech suck?

[Alice Faber]

RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>One of my colleagues sent me the following inquiry. Can anyone help? I am
>momentarily (?) stumped.
>
>>  One of my students wants to look at negative attitudes
>>  towards Southern speech for her next writing project but,
>>  although we can
>>  find plenty of linguistic analyses of it, we cannot find any emotional
>>  editorials either declaiming or supporting Southern speech. Any hints
>>  you could give us?

I don't think you'd find a lot of editorials explicitly on this
topic. However, you might find throwaway comments about southern
speech in articles about the Bubbaization of US politics during the
Clinton administration. I remember a lot of such articles when
Clinton was first running, and some of them included comments about
linguistic forms. Another place to look is for criticisms of Dan
Rather's folksy (or pseudo-folksy?) expressions.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber                                             faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203) 865-8963