BLACK AND WHITE SPEECH IN THE SOUTH: EVIDENCE FROM THE LINGUISTIC ATLAS OF THE MIDDLE AND SOUTH ATLANTIC STATES

The relationship between the speech of whites and blacks in the Southern United States is a crucial issue for an understanding of the nature of linguistic variation in American English. The archives of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) located at the Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina contain a wealth of material touching on the question of black-white speech relationships in the South that has hitherto been little exploited.

A phonological analysis of the speech of sixteen pairs of black and white LAMSAS informants in the states of Maryland (two pairs), Virginia (seven pairs), and North Carolina (seven pairs) was performed in this study. The informants were all interviewed in the period 1933-1939 by a single field worker, Guy S. Lowman, Jr. The interviews, lasting four to six hours each, were recorded in fine phonetic notation in field records containing responses to over 800 questions concerning pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon. The pairs of black and white speakers were matched as closely as possible for age, education, social class, and geographical proximity.

The phonological analysis in this study was performed on the stressed vowel nuclei of English, since these have been determined to be the crucial phonological determinants for dialectal variation in American English (see Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid, Jr., The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States).

The principal findings of the study are that systematic differences exist between black and white speakers in the pronunciation of the stressed vowels, on the phonic or subphonemic level. This is the same type of variation that is used to characterize dialect differences in the United States. The differences in speech, however, while systematic, are not categorical: i.e., there are no speech features examined that exist solely for black or white speakers. Another finding was that regional variation in speech was less apparent for black speakers than for white speakers.