9 - Enclave dialect communities in the South

Summary

Introduction

Contrary to the popular stereotype, there is great dialect diversity within the speech folkways of the regional South. No situation is more reflective of this diversity than the so-called dialect enclave, in which a speech community has been historically disconnected from the wider sociospatial, dominant population groups in the region. There are a number of these situations in the Mid-Atlantic and South, located in areas that range from the islands off of the Atlantic coast to the inland highland regions of Appalachia. Although such dialect situations have always been of interest to dialectologists, their significance seems to have heightened over the past couple of decades.

Dialect enclaves have now been considered as a primary database for the reconstruction of prominent vernacular varieties in the United States, based on the assumption that linguistic change will be conservative and that these dialects will remain relatively immune to changes diffusing throughout the wider population. Enclave varieties of English might thus provide a window into the earlier structure of evolving vernacular varieties such as Appalachian Vernacular English (Montgomery 1989b; Montgomery and Hall forthcoming) and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) (Poplack 1999; Poplack and Sankoff 1987; Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, 1991, 2000). In fact, transplant enclave communities of African Americans have provided essential spoken-language evidence for revising the historical reconstruction of AAVE over the past couple of decades.

Another reason for the recent interest in dialect enclaves is related to the moribund status of some of these varieties.