[Corpora-List] Are there any piculiar features in Southern US ENglish?

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:
>
> Dear Corpora colleagues, Are there any piculiar features in Southern 
> US ENglish? First of all in its pronunciation. Do you think that GONE 
> WITH THE WIND can give some data on that? Looking forward to hearing 
> from you to yutamb at mail.ru <mailto:yutamb at mail.ru>  Yours sincerely 
> Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia
>
    Yuri, while the book may be able to tell us something about Southern 
English, its perspective is relatively limited.  I suggested to Kate the 
work of Walt Wolfram and his associates at North Carolina State 
University; they've done hundreds of hours of interviews, and hopefully 
some of that is available for corpus study.

    As I found when living in North Carolina, the diversity of features 
in even a small area can be astounding.  You can get a sense of this 
from the videos that Wolfram's group has posted to youTube.  They're all 
good, but I particularly recommend the "Ocracoke Brogue excerpt," 
"African American English," and the two "Lumbee English" videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NCLLP#g/u

    And that's just North Carolina!  If there were thirteen (or more, 
depending on how you count) linguists with the skills and resources that 
Wolfram has brought to North Carolina English, they could do the same 
for every other state in the South.  For the Civil War period, we have a 
corpus of letters to draw on:

http://etext.virginia.edu/civilwar/

    In comparison, Mitchell's book just tells us about the speech of 
upper class Atlantans and their slaves as she imagines it to have been 
forty years before her birth. It needs to be approached with the same 
skepticism required for analyzing any work of fiction.

-- 
				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
				grvsmth at panix.com


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