Language in the USA Part 3 ppt

African American English 87 characterize the speech of some African Americans is “sounding Black.” It is not quite clear which features lead listeners to conclude that a speaker “sounds black,” but some listeners feel that they can make this determination. This is not anew issue. In 1972 in a paper entitled “‘Sounding’ Black or ‘Sounding’ White,” Rickford raised the question of what specific features were used to identify black and white speech and found the more varied intonation of black speech most significant. More recently, the issue of identifying a person’s race on the basis of voice quality or speech patterns has been addressed in the media. In 1995, during a widely publicized court case, one of the attorneys was accused of suggesting that race could be determined by one’s voice. The following excerpt (Margolick 1995) is from The New York Times article reporting the relevant portion of the trial: But on cross examination, Christopher A. Darden, a prosecutor, contended that in statements to friends, Mr. Heidstra had identified the two people as a young white man and an older black one, and even identified Mr. Simpson as one of the speakers. “I know it was O.J. It had to be him,” Mr. Darden said Mr. Heidstra told a friend. Mr. Heidstra dismissed the suggestion that he had identified the speakers by their age or race as “absurd,” insisting he could not have told whether they were “white or brown or yellow.” When Mr. Darden pushed him, Mr. Cochran rose angrily to object Simply by suggesting that someone’s race can be gleaned from the sound and timbre of his voice, Mr. Darden opened up once more the volcanic issue of race . . . John Baugh is conducting research on linguistic profiling and has found that listeners respond unfavorably to him when he uses his “black voice” (see Baugh 1999). In aNational Public Radio (NPR) interview (Smith 2001), Baugh explained that he had conducted a series of experiments that involved making telephone calls to inquire about the availability of apartments. As he produced the fol- lowing introductory statement, he modified the sound of his voice and manner of speaking: “Hello, I’m calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.” Tovia Smith, the NPR reporter, expanded on Baugh’s comments about his experiment: After more than a hundred calls, Baugh found that his black voice got less than half as many calls back as his white voice. His more recent study suggests that more than 80 percent of people correctly infer a person’s race just from hearing them count to 20. In real conversation, it’s even easier to tell. Shawna Smith, of the National Fair Housing Alliance, says she sees linguistic profiling all the time in housing, insurance, mortgages and employment. More and more research is being conducted on rhythmic and intonational patterns of AAE to determine the extent to which speakers use such patterns uniquely as well as the role they play in identifying a person’s race. 88 lisa green Representations of AAE in film While questions about the validity of AAE, that is, whether it follows set rules or exists at all, are addressed frequently in educational and linguistic research, there is no question that certain linguistic patterns are associated with the speech of African Americans. In this section, we consider the representation of language used by African American characters in film. (For discussion of the representation of African American language in fiction and other literary genres, see chapter 23 of this volume.) One strategy filmmakers employ to represent blackness could be called “figu- rative blackface,” which differs from literal blackface in minstrelsy. In minstrel shows, actors literally went through a process of making up their faces with black paint and their lips with red lipstick. They also used exaggerated language and body features such as bulging lips and eyes that matched the blackened faces to create grotesque characters. Figurative blackface and minstrel devices are used in the 1998 film Bulworth, starring Warren Beatty and Halle Berry. The film is the story of Bulworth, a white senator, who is transformed into a politician concerned about the plight of people in inner cities. After being introduced to inner city life by a streetwise African American girl named Nina, Bulworth is taken in by the “culture.” He enjoys the nightclub environment with Nina, dancing, smoking marijuana, eating barbecued ribs, and acting as a disc jockey. It appears that the denouement of the experience is his rhyming. In searching for Nina in the many rooms of the nightclub, he chants: What I really want to know is where did little Nina go I’m looking here, I’m looking there, but I can’t find her anywhere Nina, Nina, has anybody seen her? At the point when he sees her, he sings, “Nina, Nina, where you bina?” In this scene, Bulworth puts on figurative blackface as a means of simulating “black culture.” The film appears to be a modern day minstrel show in which Bulworth uses minstrel devices such as cool talk, rhyming, body language, and types of clothing that are intended to mirror the image of black males in the inner city. Figurative blackface is used in Bulworth,but figurative blackface and literal blacking up occur in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,a2000 film about racism in tele- vision. Throughout the film, the white senior vice president of the entertainment division of a television network puts on figurative blackface as he uses current slang and “keeps it real” in other ways. The literal blacking up occurs in Mantan: the New Millennium Minstrel Show, the minstrel television show within Bamboo- zled. The stars of Mantan are Mantan and his dumb-witted sidekick Sleep n Eat. (See Green 2002 for more discussion of blackface in Bamboozled.) Sentence patterns can also be used as markers of black images in film. The verbal marker be that indicates habitual recurrences is used in the 1994 film Fresh, about the coming of age of a streetwise African American adolescent and African American English 89 his struggles in the inner city. In addition to drugs and violence, language is used to create images of the urban ghetto. In the film, African American characters of all age groups use features associated with AAE. The verbal marker be seems to be strongly associated with the language of adolescent males, and it occurs often in the speech of African American and Latino characters (especially adolescent and teenage males), as in these examples: 4. Why you come home so late? You know Aunt Frances be getting worried when you come home so late. All his phones be tapped, man. My grandma be cooking at home. But I know she still be going back there sometime for like her clothes and stuff she be keeping over there. These be constructions communicate that an activity (getting worried, cooking at home, keeping stuff over there) happens from time to time or that something is in a certain state (phones are tapped) from time to time. They are used in line with the meaning and rules specified for the marker in AAE. Other uses of this be are ungrammatical, however, as with these examples from Fresh: 5. a. Michael:Idon’t want nobody be touching this board. Michael’s female cousin:You don’t own this house. You ain’t hardly ever be here, so you don’t tell us what to do. b. Nikki say James tired of he be so small time, wanna be moving bigger. The line spoken by Michael in 5a would be a grammatical sentence of AAE if to were inserted before be (I don’t want nobody to be touching this board), and 5b would be grammatical with being instead of he be (James say he tired of being so small time). Film viewers have an idea of the meaning intended by these lines, but the actual utterances are ungrammatical: they do not follow the syntactic rules of AAE. The recurrence of be in the film suggests how strongly the marker is associated with the inner city life and language the film depicts, although ungrammatical uses like those in (5) perhaps indicate that the screenwriter is not fully aware of AAE’s regularities and restrictions. Habitual be and other AAE patterns are used by characters in The Best Man. The representation of AAE in this 1999 film is interesting, especially compared to the representation in Fresh,inwhich habitual be is closely connected to inner city life. In The Best Man, habitual be is not used by all the African American male young adult characters. Lance and Quentin, the more skilled language users, who also happen to be college educated, use the marker. Over the past forty years, research on AAE has been addressed from a num- ber of angles, including historical origins, rules of use, expressive language use, and education. Researchers are continuing to study this linguistic variety by con- sidering its representation in literature, film, and hip hop. One important point is that AAE is characterized by well-defined rules. (See Green 2002 for further 90 lisa green commentary on the rules of use of AAE.) The sentences and general descriptions in the table 5-1 are examples of the linguistic patterns that occur in AAE. Acknowledgments This chapter is based on Green (2002), a book-length treatment of topics discussed here. Suggestions for further reading and exploration Wolfram and Thomas (2002) provide a general history of African American English. Rickford (1998), Rickford and Rickford (2000), and Edwards and Winford (1991) discuss the creolist view. Dunn (1976) and DeBose and Faraclas (1993) are good sources for the substratist view. For the Anglicist or dialectologist view, see Poplack (2000); for the founder principle view Mufwene (2000); for the settler principle view Winford (1997, 1998). Good sources of information about intonation in AAE are Foreman (1999), Green (2002), and Tarone (1973). Note also the representation of AAE in films such as The Brothers, Do the Right Thing, Imitation of Life, and Set it Off, some of which have explicit content. References Bamboozled. 2000. New Line Productions, Inc. Baugh, John. 1983. Black Street Speech: its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baugh, John. 1999. “Linguistic Perceptions in Black and White: Racial Identification Based on Speech.” In Baugh’s Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pp. 135–47. The Best Man. 1999. Universal Pictures. Bulworth. 1998. Twentieth Century Fox. DeBose, Charles and Nicholas Faraclas. 1993. “An Africanist Approach to the Linguistic Study of Black English: Getting to the Roots of the Tense–Aspect–Modality and Copula Systems in Afro-American.” In Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Pp. 364–87. Dunn, Ernest F. 1976. “Black-Southern White Dialect Controversy.” In Black English: a Sem- inar, eds. Deborah S. Harrison and Tom Trabasso. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pp. 105–22. Edwards, Walter and Donald Winford, eds. 1991. Verb Phrase Patterns in Black English and Creole. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Feagin, Crawford. 1979. Variation and Change in Alabama English: a Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community.Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Foreman, Christina G. 1999. “Identification of African American English Dialect from Prosodic Cues.” In Salsa VII, Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Symposium about Language and Society, eds. Nisha Merchant Goss, Amanda Doran, and Anastasia Coles. Texas Linguistic Forum 43: 57–66. Fresh. 1994. Miramax Films. Green, Lisa. 2002. African American English: a Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. Margolick, David. 1995. “Simpson Witness Saw a White Car,” The New York Times, July 13. African American English 91 Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2000. “Some Sociohistorical Inferences about the Development of African American English.” In Poplack, ed. Pp. 233–63. Poplack, Shana, ed. 2000. The English History of African American English.New York: Blackwell. Rickford, John R. 1972. “‘Sounding’ Black or ‘Sounding’ White: a Preliminary Acoustic Investigation of a Folk-Hypothesis,” ms., University of Pennsylvania. 1998. “The Creole Origin of African American Vernacular English: Evidence from Copula Absence.” In African American English: Structure, History and Use, eds. Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh. New York: Routledge. Pp. 154–200. Rickford, John R. and Russell J. Rickford. 2000. Spoken Soul: the Story of Black English.New York: John Wiley and Sons. Smith, Tovia. 2001. “Scientific Research that’s Being Used to Support Claims of Linguistic Profiling.” National Public Radio, Morning Edition. September 5, 2001. Tarone, Elaine. 1973. “Aspects of Intonation in Black English,” American Speech 48: 29–36. Williams, Robert, ed. 1975. Ebonics: the True Language of Black Folks. St. Louis: Institute of Black Studies. Winford, Donald. 1997. “On the Origins of African American English – a Creolist Perspective Part I: The Sociohistorical Background,” Diachronica 14: 305–44. 1998. “On the Origins of African American English–aCreolist Perspective Part II: Linguistic Features,” Diachronica 15: 99–154. Wolfram, Walt and Erik Thomas. 2002. The Development of African American English: Evidence from an Isolated Community. Malden MA: Blackwell. Discography Black Star. 1997. “Thieves in the Night.” Rawkus. 6 The Dictionary of American Regional English JOAN HOUSTON HALL Editors' introduction This chapter provides an introduction to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) by its Chief Editor, who has been associated with the project since 1975. Associate Editor for many years, Joan Houston Hall became Chief Editor of DARE in 2000, when Frederic G. Cassidy, the founding Director and Chief Editor, died. DARE is one of the most comprehen- sive and accessible public resources on variation in American dialects, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 1965 and 1970 in more than 1,000 communities across the USA, and sup- plemented by the evidence of thousands of literary and other sources. Four of a projected six volumes have appeared to date, with completed entries running through Sk The chapter describes several aspects of the fieldwork for DARE, including its extensive questionnaire (with 1,687 to 1,847 questions), and the way in which responses were electron- ically tabulated and analyzed, with the results indicated on DARE maps whose dimensions were proportional to the population density in each state. This chapter complements chapter 3 on regional dialects in that it shows how the 1940s distribution of variant words (like darning needle and other words for ‘dragonfly’ discussed in chapter 3) had spread west and otherwise changed (or not) in the intervening years. One of the conclusions of this chapter is similar to that of William Labov (cited in chapter 3): despite greater mobility and the influence of mass media, American English has not become homogenized, but shows striking regional variation. Drawing on DARE entries and its companion indexes, this chapter also discusses the social dialects for which the dictionary shows clear evidence, based on age, gender, race/ethnicity, and education. In this respect it also complements chapter 4 on social dialects. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of what DARE tells us about the creativity of American folk language (note belly-washer, goose-drownder, and many other expressions for a ‘heavy rain’) and its colorful variant terms for plants and animals. It also notes the rich uses to which DARE can be put in the classroom, and the ways in which its resources (including audiotapes currently available, and a CD-ROM yet to be released) might be mined by other researchers. The Dictionary of American Regional English – usually called DARE –isalong- term project dedicated to recording the differences in our language as they occur in various parts of the country and among speakers of different social groups. Most Americans have a general awareness of the differences in pronunciation from New England to the South and to the West, and know that people in various parts of the country have different names for such things as a submarine sandwich 92 The Dictionary of American Regional English 93 (it’s usually a hero in New York City, a grinder in New England, and a hoagie in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, among other names). But many people have also been surprised, on occasion, to discover that one of their own words, phrases, or pronunciations is unfamiliar to others. We tend to think of “dialects” as belonging to other folks but not to us. DARE illustrates the tremendous variety of regional patterns found throughout the country, showing that all of us have linguistic features characteristic of regional speech; we are all speakers of dialects. In southern Wisconsin, for instance, where DARE is being produced, people like to think of themselves as not having “an accent.” But we say ‘crick’ for creek and have what some people think of as “funny” vowels in words like boat.Wetend to use many words that are characteristic of a broad dialect region designated as “North,” but we also share features with people in a smaller region designated as “North Central” (made up of the states of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin). Sometimes we use words commonly found in the region called “Upper Midwest” (Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota). And sometimes the terms we use are found almost solely in Wisconsin (e.g., Berliner ‘a jelly doughnut’ or flowage ‘a lake formed by the damming of a river’). So, like it or not, we speak a dialect in Wisconsin. And of course the same is true of people in every other part of the country as well. While it has become popular in recent years to claim that American English is being “homogenized” because of our increasingly mobile society and our love affair with radio, television, and the Internet, the findings in DARE demonstrate that there are still thousands of words, phrases, pronunciations, and even gram- matical constructions that vary from one place to another. Such variant terms may be restricted to a region as small as a city or as large as most of the country; they may be used by one generation but not another; they may characterize the speech of rural people but not urbanites; or they may represent the usage of a particular ethnic group: as long as they are not found throughout the country, in standard use by people of all social groups, they are legitimate terms for treatment in DARE. One of the unique features of DARE is that it is based in part on a survey of lifelong residents of more than a thousand communities across the country – from Anchorage, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, and from Hauula, Hawaii, to Allagash, Maine. These people answered an extensive questionnaire, providing comparable responses for more than 1,600 questions and allowing us to map their responses to see which ones are regionally distributed. In addition to the oral data, DARE also draws on the evidence gathered through a massive reading program. The DARE bibliography currently has nearly 10,000 entries, with sources as diverse as government documents, newspapers, diaries, histories, regional novels, poems, plays, and collections of dialect materials, as well as ephemeral sources such as posters, billboards, newsletters, restaurant menus, and conversations. To date, four of the projected five volumes of DARE entries have been pub- lished. Volume I, including extensive introductory materials and the letters A–C, appeared in 1985; Volume II, including D–H, in 1991; Volume III, with the letters I–O, in 1996; and Volume IV, including P through the middle of S, in 2002. 94 joan houston hall The planning for Volume V calls for publication about five or six years after Volume IV. A sixth volume will follow, containing the bibliography, the Data Summary (all of the responses to the fieldwork questions), contrastive maps, and a cumulative Index of the regional, social, and usage labels in all five volumes of entries. The fieldwork for DARE The fieldwork for the DARE project was undertaken between 1965 and 1970. At that time many Americans could look back on childhoods when automobiles, radios, and telephones were brand new (or non-existent). Most Americans had some familiarity with rural life, from their parents and grandparents if not from direct experience, and they remembered a time before widespread mechaniza- tion. The late 1960s was an ideal time to conduct a language survey: the oldest participants, born in the 1880s and 1890s, could remember hearing stories about the Civil War and themselves knew American life from the dawn of the twenti- eth century onward; they had seen tremendous changes in their culture and were storehouses of words and expressions for artifacts and practices that had gone out of use. In an attempt to collect and preserve as many of these terms as possible, the selection of informants was deliberately biased towards those over sixty years old. At the same time, care was taken to provide comparison groups by interview- ing people between forty and sixty years of age, and others who were younger than forty, to determine which words were going out of use, which were stable, and which were newly entering the language. The data that were collected, and the maps we can make from the data (see below), present thousands of snapshots of the language of mid-twentieth-century America. But what of the differences in our society between then and now? Are those earlier data really relevant today? It is certainly true that extraordinary changes have taken place in American society in the last thirty-five years, and people are generally better acquainted with other parts of the country than our parents and grandparents were. Yet, in broad terms, most of the regional language patterns that emerge from the fieldwork of 1965–70 are still recognizable today. The boundaries may not be as well defined as they were then, but the basic patterns persist. (It is possible, for instance, to find hoagies advertised on the billboard for a tiny caf´einnorthern Idaho, as I did in the summer of 1998. But if you were to ask people across the country what they called that kind of sandwich, the large majority of those who said hoagie would still live in the region with Pennsylvania and New Jersey at its center.) The desire to know about the regional patterns in American English was not one that suddenly emerged in mid-twentieth century. Creation of an American dialect dictionary comparable to Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary had been one of the reasons for the founding of the American Dialect Society in 1889. Collection of adequate data in this vast nation, however, was rightly recognized as the sine qua non of such an ambitious project. Although scholars collected and The Dictionary of American Regional English 95 published word lists from various parts of the country in the decades after the founding of the American Dialect Society, it was not until 1963 that the timing and staffing were right for a full nationwide survey. At that time Frederic G. Cassidy, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, proposed a plan that was accepted by the Society. He was appointed Editor and charged with carrying out the project. Details of the planning and organization are spelled out in the introductory matter to the first volume of DARE (Cassidy and Hall 1985: xi–xxii). For our purposes, it is enough to explain that 1,002 American communities were selected for interviews. The places ranged in size from metropolitan areas to sparsely populated rural communities, chosen both to reflect population density in the country at large and to sample places that had had significant historic impact on a region (for example, the Pennsylvania German communities in southeastern and south central Pennsylvania). Trained fieldworkers – mostly graduate students, but also faculty members from colleges across the country – were then sent to those places to find and interview people who had been born there and who had spent all, or at least most, of their lives there. In many instances, this in itself was a huge challenge. Fieldworkers had to find a key community member who could point them in the direction of appropriate informants (as the interviewees were called), gain the trust of the informants, and schedule the time for the lengthy interview. It usually took a full week to complete one questionnaire, with the fieldworker fitting sections of it into whatever blocks of time the informants could spare. Because the socio-political climate of the late 1960s was volatile, some fieldworkers found themselves having to convince local authorities that they were not “outside agitators” and that their work was part of a legitimate, scholarly investigation. In most cases, the local people were extremely helpful and proved to be interested in the project and interesting sources of information. The questionnaire used by the fieldworkers was based on materials gathered over the decades by members of the American Dialect Society in anticipation of this nationwide survey. The questions had been arranged by Frederic G. Cassidy and Audrey R. Duckert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the question- naire had been field-tested in Wisconsin. After the first seventy-five interviews, about 200 of the original 1,847 questions were dropped as not worthwhile, and a few others added. In order to allay any suspicions on the part of the informants, the questions were organized so that neutral and unthreatening topics such as weather, furniture, and foods came first, with questions of a more abstract or personal nature, such as religion, health, and relationships among people com- ing later. In all, there were forty-one different categories of questions. Because some informants did not have time to answer the whole questionnaire and oth- ers felt unable to answer questions in certain sections (such as hunting, fishing, wildflowers, farm buildings, or farm animals), in many communities the field- workers divided the questionnaire among several informants, resulting in a total pool of 2,777 participants. In each case, careful records were kept of the age, sex, race, level of education, and community type for each person so that accurate 96 joan houston hall correlations could be made between the answers to the questions and the social variables of the informants providing those answers. The Appendix to this chapter contains sample questions from the questionnaire. The DARE Maps As soon as the fieldworkers completed their questionnaires they sent them back to project headquarters, where each informant was given a unique code – such as AL1, for the first informant in Alabama – and all of that person’s responses were entered into a database with that code. When all the responses from the 1,002 communities had been entered, the corpus included approximately two and a half million items. The goal was to be able to map each response electronically to see whether it displayed any kind of regional pattern. (While this use of computer methods is common enough today, in 1965 it was a radical innovation.) In order to accomplish that, a unique map had to be devised that would take into account the differences in population density from one part of the country to another so as to give each informant an equal amount of space. The top map shown in figure 6-1 and those in figures 6-2 through 6-4 are the result. Note that while the general outline of the USA seems distorted, the basic shapes and positions of the states have been retained. A comparison of the states of Connecticut and New Mexico on the DARE map and the conventional map in figure 6-1 will help to explain the reasoning behind the “distorted” map. Connecticut is a small but densely populated state, and in order to have the number of interviews proportionate to the population, we needed to interview people in seventeen Connecticut communities. New Mexico, on the other hand, is geographically large but sparsely populated, calling for interviews in only four communities for proportional representation. If we represented our findings on a conventional map, and four people in each state had responded with the same answer, the mapped results would be highly misleading: in Connecticut, the four informants would take up much of the state’s allotted space; in New Mexico the four would take up very little space. Yet in Connecticut they represent only 24 percent of the pool, where in New Mexico they are 100 percent of the pool. So with the DARE map each informant takes up the same amount of space on the map, and when there are gaps between dots on the map we know they represent places where informants did not use the term rather than places where no one lives. Although DARE maps may be confusing at first, with a little practice they are actually easier to “read” than a conventional map. Earlier Work in American Dialect Geography Prior to the DARE project, research in American linguistic geography had uncov- ered four major dialect areas in the eastern part of the USA – North, North [...]... with percent increase 1940–70 and 1960–70 17 – 412 565 38 5 281 32 4 671 33 8 770 226 244 70 33 4 35 3 33 6 37 4 31 2 233 789 544 279 32 8 % Increase Multilingualism and non-English mother tongues non-English -language efforts in their programming, and periodicals offering all or part of their contents in languages other than English had also multiplied dramatically between 1960 and 1970 When examined on a state-by-state... yet another reversal in connection with his constant efforts to maintain the Yiddish language in the USA The first thing to recognize in this connection is that the attrition of American multilingualism has not proceeded uniformly throughout the past two centuries; it cannot be represented by a single, monotonic downward line Instead, the recurring rise and fall of non-English languages in the USA reveal... self-evident that the process of language shift (or loss of non-English mother tongue) has been a dominant and perhaps even the dominant “American experience” almost since the founding of the country Thus, if we examine multilingualism in the USA today, we are examining an interesting but somewhat “exotic” phenomenon as soon as we leave the immigrant generations themselves behind Of course, “leaving the immigrant... 19 73 1940 Mother tongue 102 91 152 236 220 181 169 261 82 197 296 36 3 119 270 291 221 8 23 384 480 447 5 93 265 195 % Increase 1940–1970 24 ,35 9,661 – 164,822 96,119 23, 089 1,677, 130 1,900 ,39 4 5 83, 335 114,944 76,950 36 ,156 17,095 12,665 16,744 54,124 131 ,174 44, 839 458,625 2,880,050 55,252 21,765 7,826,017 4,945,867 Change 1960–1970 Table 7-1 Mother tongue of the native-of-native parentage for twenty languages... amounts of information about the language we use, the various meanings we intend, the different places words are found, the histories of their forms, and the social nuances of their use But the published volumes do not come close to exhausting the resources gathered by the DARE project Thousands of the words collected for DARE that will not be entered in the Dictionary may nevertheless be of use to other... (for which the fieldwork was conducted in the 1 930 s) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (with most of the fieldwork being conducted in the 1 930 s and 1940s) A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Kurath 1949) contains maps showing the distributions of hundreds of the words that Hans Kurath and his fieldworkers investigated and providing the basis for his delineations... successful in maintaining their mother tongue during six to eight generations, in contrast with newcomers to secondary settlement areas in the mid-west Hamtramick is an example of a Polish town, in Illinois, that has steadfastly retained its Polish character in language, religion, and culture, Multilingualism and non-English mother tongues while also participating substantially in American life Amerindian... well as being speakers of Pensylfawnish – and knowledgeable listeners to sermons in “Luther German”) have succeeded relatively well in multiplying and retaining their mother tongues by establishing themselves in rural areas of their own where they can distance themselves from most kinds of social interaction with outsiders to their own sheltered communities The same is true for Yiddishspeaking ultra-Orthodox... important point at which to begin our examination of multilingualism in the USA because, unlike most other countries in which societal multilingualism exists, there are in the USA also few speakers of sidestream languages who are removed from their family’s immigrant origins by more than two generations (I use the term “sidestream” to refer to languages and varieties that are frequently regarded as lying outside... 2,807,000 1,516,000 (Estimated) 1960 169, 634 ,926 149 ,31 2, 435 204,822 1 13, 119 29,089 1,460, 130 2,488 ,39 4 670 ,33 5 148,944 86,950 52,156 24,095 30 ,665 34 ,744 58,124 170,174 56, 839 605,625 4,171,050 62,252 25,765 10,646,702 6,475,652 1970 85,110,086 70,960,255 1 23, 662 79,459 19,989 941 ,35 0 1,5 63, 354 484,515 67,184 57,690 38 ,976 18,895 16,685 25 ,34 4 43, 244 117,194 50,679 480,585 3, 412,070 50,872 22,045 7,728,922 . member who could point them in the direction of appropriate informants (as the interviewees were called), gain the trust of the informants, and schedule the time for the lengthy interview. It usually. of the kind illustrated by spindle in the Word Geography also occur in DARE,ascan be seen by the maps in figure 6 -3. The maps illustrate these senses of the headwords: blue norther ‘a cold wind from. England (for which the fieldwork was conducted in the 1 930 s) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (with most of the fieldwork being conducted in the 1 930 s and 1940s). AWord Geography