Date:  Sat, 5 Feb 1994 07:32:37 -0600

From:  mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU

Subject: Re: Regional variation in BE



On Thu, 30 Dec 1993, Rudy Troike wrote:



> Dear Joan, Sali, Tim, et al. ADS-Lers,

>     The reference to regional variation in BE/AAVE that I made was the

> hardly momentous and necessarily largely anecdotal paper I published ages

> ago (20 years!), in which the call for research on this topic has gone

> largely unheeded. Unfortunately, valuable possibilities have disappeared

> in the meantime. The reference is:

>     Troike, Rudolph C. "On Social, Regional, and Age Variation in Black

> English," Florida FL Reporter (1973, Spring/Fall), 7-8.

>     One pervasive feature which seems to have a much wider occurrence

> in the East is the devoicing of final -/d/, replaced with either /t/ or glotta

> stop. At the time, I had not encountered this in Texas. Another items was

> evidence that older speakers in Texas had the /IN/:/EN/ distinction, but that

> it had been lost among younger speakers. This evidence considerably confounds

> the view that the lack of the distinction is an original diagnostic of BE.

> With more research, much more could be (could have been) found.

>     On Tim's interesting anecdote, I found differences between speakers in

> Houston and Dallas, but his story calls to mind a student I had once who came

> up after class and asked, in a strong "Brooklynese" pronunciation, if I though

> she sounded like a Southerner. I was rather astonished by the question, and

> assured her that she did not, so far as I could tell on casual hearing. Then

> she explained, almost in tears, that she had lived for two years in Atlanta, G

> where her husband had been stationed, and that after about a year, when she

> would call home to her parents in Brooklyn, they would accuse her of "sounding

> like a Southerner", evidently implying that this was somewhat treasonous to

> family solidarity. As a result, she was feeling somewhat estranged from her

> parents, which was very upsetting to her. The phonetic differences, whatever

> they were, were clearly very subtle, but were enough to be detectable to

> members of the linguistic community (her parents).

>     This is a common experience, of course, for all of its being little

> documented. Brits are often able to detect minute differences in regional

> varieties which are unidentifiable to American ears, at least on first hearing

> Someone once gave me a tape of a young speaker from NYC who was "obviously"

> Black, but when played for a colleague who was a native speaker, he expressed

> doubt, though he could not put his finger on anything specific. He was in fact

> right -- the speaker on tape was a Nuyorican -- New York Puerto Rican. But

> again, the differences were so subtle that they would probably not have been

> expressible even in narrow phonetic transcription.

>     Now, the urgent need is still to document regional differences before

> they change or (pace Dennis) disappear.

>     Feliz Navidad, y'all,

>                 --Rudy

>

I just had another experince last week like Rudy descirbed back in December.

A student in my grad class went to Colo. and met a Texas lady who had a

pronounced coastal southern pronunciation (Shirley does a good

imitation). But shirley's lady was told she talked like a Yankee when

she went home. This reminded me of Raven McDAvid's stories about goin

ghome to So. Car. and being told he talked like a Yankee. This always

surpirsed me becasue Raven's dialect was so different from my own that

wen he referred to the LANCS community of "Murphysboro" (IL) I would have

to get him to repeat it several times before I knew what he was talking

about. This is interesting because, as Rudy says, there are linguistic

cues that folks recognize, but they are very subtle. I hear stories like

this a lot and can never imagine what the cues might be, even though I

think I have a pretty good ear. This all sugests that even if some sort

of national levelling of extreme regional diferences ever takes place

(which I doubt anyway) there will remain significant distinctions which

many commentators will miss.



January's gone--goodbye and good riddance!



Tim Frazer