Dear Jed,
Walt Wolfram's work at North Carolina State University is unsurpassed on
history and systematicity of southern dialects. See some of his stuff at 
http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/bios/wolfram.htm

Further, and i don't have the exact cite here, but I believe the
American Dialect Society recently came out with a special volume on
Southern American English, so that's worth checking into.

My own work in teacher education and code-switching is available through
the NCTE -- see either my NCTE consultant website or my CNU faculty
website for articles and a link to my recent book on Code-switching.

Wolfram has a whole middle school curriculum he's co-constructed with
Jeffrey Reaser, his former grad student who is now on faculty with NCSU.

For further south, you might try Bethany Dumas's work -- she's worked on
the languages of the Ozark Mountains. I believe she's at U. Tennessee,
Knoxville.

Have at it!

Cheers,

Rebecca Wheeler


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of English
Christopher Newport University
Newport News, VA 23606

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http://www.faculty.users.cnu.edu/rwheeler/
http://www.ncte.org/profdev/onsite/consultants/wheeler

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

----- Original Message -----
From: "John E. Dews-Alexander" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, July 10, 2006 8:51 pm
Subject: Sources for History of Southern American English

> Hi again, ATEGers!
>      I already have a question for you! Perhaps I should have sent 
> this to a dialectology listserv, but I trust this group to have 
> more than one person who knows this subject matter better than most.
>     I'm working on a project over the summer that I want to use 
> with local secondary schools (11th and 12th graders) here in north 
> Alabama to initiate conversations about language variety, dialects, 
> etc. I want to eventually convey the idea of what many of these 
> students speak (Southern American English, African American 
> English, Chicano English, etc) is in no way bad, lazy or any other 
> prescriptive nonsense, but just different varieties of English with 
> their own structures and rich histories. Basically, I need a way to 
> quickly debunk their own insecurities about their language 
> competence and get them thinking descriptively (this part of a 
> larger project to teach grammar within this context).
>     The best way I've found to break down language myths is to 
> expose them for what they are using 1) examples of systematicity 
> within dialects and 2) tidbits of historical linguistic accounts of 
> the language variety in question.
>    Systematicity I'm comfortable with, but historical linguistics 
> is a relatively new field for me. Thanks to lots of great, easily 
> accessible materials on African American English and Chicano 
> English, I've had no problems pulling together some highlights of 
> the language history, the processes of sound and syntactic change, 
> etc. However, with Southern American English, I'm having more of a 
> problem. 
>     I want to be able to tell the students where their language 
> variety comes from, where their non-standard grammatical features 
> can be traced to, etc. I've got a couple of leads on the Scots-
> Irish immigrants, especially in north Alabama, but my searches 
> aren't turning up much.
>    Is there a particular author(s) that someone can recommend for 
> this topic or some particular works? Herb, based on your posts, I 
> thought you might have some ideas of what I should be looking for 
> to unravel the history of Southern American English. Is there a 
> standard work to consult?
>    I would be glad to provide more specific examples of the kind 
> of questions I have, but I thought it might be easier to start out 
> with just a broad question and see if any references come up.
>    Thanks for any help you can provide! 
>       Jed
> 
>         	
> ---------------------------------
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