6 - Remnant dialects in the coastal United States

Summary

Introduction

Along the southern and mid-Atlantic coasts of the United States, there are a number of remnant dialect communities, that is, longstanding communities of speakers who have been geographically or culturally isolated from surrounding populations for extended periods of time. These include island communities in the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland and Virginia, the barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, and the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as inland communities which have been physically or socioculturally isolated from neighbouring communities. Given the relatively early habitation of some of these areas by English-speaking colonists and subsequent periods of separation from other groups, these situations provide ideal settings for considering the nature of the development and maintenance of transported dialects in relative isolation.

Our recent research on remnant dialect communities has included a sample of island communities populated primarily by Anglo-Americans on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997; Wolfram, Hazen and Schilling-Estes 1999) and in the Chesapeake Bay (Schilling-Estes 1997, 2002; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999). In addition, we have investigated communities involved in long-standing interethnic contact situations, including contact between African Americans and Anglo-Americans in mainland Hyde County adjacent to the Outer Banks of North Carolina (Green 1998; Wolfram, Thomas and Green 2000; Wolfram and Thomas 2002), and tri-ethnic contact involving African Americans, Lumbee Native Americans and Anglo-Americans in Robeson County, in the Coastal Plains region of North Carolina (Wolfram 1996; Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998; Dannenberg 1999, 2002; Wolfram and Dannenberg 1999; Wolfram, Dannenberg, Knick and Oxendine 2002; Schilling-Estes 1999, 2000a).