Dialect areas of the United States

Historical development of “Gender and Language Variation”:

• 
  In the past: male-female language differences in English were seen as uninteresting; this field has not traditionally been a central concern of dialect studies;
  

• 
  Today: there exists and extensive collection of studies, anthologies, and books devoted exclusively to issues of language and gender in English (e.g. Deborah Tannen: “You Just Don´t Understand”)
  

• 
  Fact 1: women tend to use more standard language features then men, whose speech tends to be more vernacular
  

• 
  Fact 2: women adopt new language variants much earlier than men
  

The contradiction between fact 1 and 2: women appear to be more conservative than men; they use more standard variants which often represent older language forms  women appear to be more progressive then men because they adopt new variants more quickly;

• 
  Fact 3: the patterning of male-female language differences depends not only on the language feature in question but also on the social class of the speaker
  

• 
  Reason 1 (Labov): women are quicker to adopt innovative variants, which carry local prestige and which haven´t been in place long enough to acquire negative valuation in the lager community (be up to date)
  

• 
  Reason 2 (Labov): women in the lower middle class are most likely to stigmatize features and adopt prestige features because members of this social class are more upwardly mobile than members of any other socioeconomic class
  

• 
  Reason 3 (Labov): males tend to use more stigmatized variants in their speech than females; symbolic: males and females want to define themselves as either masculine or feminine (e.g. non-standard forms may symbolize masculinity and toughness)
  

B: Trudgill (1983) goes a step beyond Labov; he asks why women are more prestige-conscious than men:

• 
  Reason 1 (Trudgill): women want to transmit culture through childrearing
  

• 
  Reason 2 (Trudgill): men and women have different occupational roles; men have traditionally been rated by their occupation; women have often been rated to a greater extend by how they appear; therefore the linguistic “cosmetic” of prestigious language may be more important for women than it is for men
  

These reasons are not only theories. Labov´s and Trudgill´s notions that women´s linguistic behaviour can be explained in terms of their focus on social prestige are of widespread acceptance.

 

1. Lexical differences

 

1.1. Definition

• 
  we talk about lexical differences in regional dialects if the same object is described by different labels
  

• 
  by this process the meaning of words can change in two ways:
  

it can be narrowed or broaded.

 

1.2. Examples:

• 
  the words "creek" and "ditch" taken from the dialect spoken in the Outer Bank islands of North Carolina
  

bay in a common meaning refers only to a specific body of water

small river in general refers only to the inlet which allows boats to enter the creek

• 
  grammatical differences in regional dialects means that a special grammatical word category like the plural can be described by different word forms. In one dialect for example the plural could be marked by the suffix "s" and in another dialect it could be marked without the suffix "s". Other grammatical changes are also possible like the use of the “-ed”-ending in verbs, the use of the “-ing”-ending in verbs or the use of prepositions.
  

• 
  in some Anglo-American dialects the plural “-s” is used:
  

• 
  in some dialects spoken in the Anglo-American Southern the plural-s is eliminated by nouns indicating weights and measures if the plural noun is preceded by a specific number, since this number serves as a clear marker that the following noun is plural, thus making the “-s”-ending superfluous.
  

Midland & West	Rural Southern White	New England
rhotic	not to be fit into larger group	non-rhotic (Boston, Eastern NE) car [ka:] park [pa:k]
conservative vowel sheme – have remained monophthongal	“southern drawl” southern shift	northern shift:
vowel shift: o and au shift into an intermediate vowel: cot and caught are merged	triphtongization glide weakening pin/pen/merger	vowel shift: o and au shift into an intermediate vowel: cot and caught are merged (homophones)
		“ju” (jod-dropping): after [n] [d] [t] [s] [z] [l] new [n(j)u:], Tuesday [t(j)uzdeı]

Carver, Craig M.: American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press (1989)

Fought, Carmen: Chicano English in Context, Houndmills (2002)

Kortman, Bernd: English Linguistics: Essentials (Anglistik – Amerikanistik), Cornelsen Verlag (2005)

Kortmann, Bernd, Schneider, Edgar W. (eds.): A handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 1, Phonology, Mouton de Gruyter (2004), including the accompanying CD

Poplack, Shana (ed.): The English History of American English, Malden, Mass. (2000)

Rickford, John R.: Afro American Vernacular English, Malden, Mass. (1999)

Viereck, Wolfgang /Karin, Ramisch, Heinrich: dtv-Atlas: Englische Sprache, dtv-Verlag (2002)

Wolfram, Walt, Schilling-Estes, Natalie: American English, 2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing (2006)
Internet-Sources:
www.wikipedia.org (28^th Nov 2005)

www.evolpub.com/Americandialects(11^th Nov. 2005)