Heard on The Judges: localisms

[Doug Harris]

And not just the rural _south_: It's amazingly common in Central NY -- from the
Southern Tier (bordering PA) north toward Syracuse and Elmira and east nearly
as far as Albany. (The latter is often pronounced ALLbanny. The latter syllable
rhymes with nanny.)
dh

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----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: RonButters at AOL.COM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Received: 1/22/2009 9:01:19 AM
Subject: Heard on The Judges: localisms


>I'm pretty sure that this is a feature of rural speech in areas of the upper
>South among whites as well.

>In a message dated 1/22/09 1:46:53 PM, bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
>writes:


>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Twenty-year-old black youth from Houston:
>> >
>> > "Yes, your honor. That's why I come out her (i.e. 'here')."
>> >
>> > ("Local" in the sense that, AFAIK, this shift of -air, -ear, -ere,
>> > etc. to [-^r] is, so far, peculiar to BE and, again, AFAIK, it began
>> > in Saint Louis about fifteen years ago and was spread around by such
>> > Saint Louis hip-hoppers as Nelly, Li'l John, Chingy, et al. One of my
>> > favorite songs has the eye-dialect title, I'm Hurr, I'm Thurr, I'm
>> > Errwhurr. I assume that initial err- is influenced by "er(r)," the
>> > standard spelling of onomatopoetic [^(r)].)
>>
>> At the ADS annual meeting, Cara Shousterman of NYU presented a paper
>> on the 'urr' variable, suggesting a historical distribution not
>> limited to the St. Louis region (though StL has certainly become the
>> culturally salient "home" to the variable in the hiphop era). Here's
>> the abstract:
>>
>> ---
>> http://www.americandialect.org/American-Dialect-Society-2009-Meeting-Abstract
>> s.pdf
>> Cara Shousterman (New York University)
>> Diachrony and AAE: sound change outside of the mainstream
>> This is a diachronic study of what is known as the 'urr' variable,
>> whereby in some African American communities front vowels centralize
>> when followed by /r/. For example, the words here and hair can merge
>> with her, and are spelled in popular
>> references as "hurr" or "herre". Results indicate that the 'urr'
>> variable is a fairly recent innovation in AAE spoken in DC, Maryland,
>> St. Louis, and Memphis. This shows that not only are there regional
>> differences in AAE, but also that African Americans are participating
>> in sound changes separate from those found in "mainstream" European
>> American dialects.
>> ---
>>
>> Shousterman and some fellow NYUers also presented an LSA paper (which
>> I missed) covering more recent developments in the spread of the
>> variable to other AAE dialects via Nelly et al.:
>>
>> ---
>> Renée Blake (New York University), Sonya Fix (New York University),
>> Cara Shousterman (New York University): Vowel centralization before
>> /r/ in two AAE dialects: A case of regional variation
>> ---
>>
>> Not sure where Houston fits into this.
>>
>>
>> --Ben Zimmer
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>




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