Language, ideology and identity in rural eastern Kentucky
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Linguists still know relatively little about the speech of the rural US South, in part because rural speech is thought to be more conservative than urban speech with regard to language change. In order to fill in a gap in our dialect map and explore the innovative capacity of rural speakers, this dissertation examines language use in its social context in Wilson County (a pseudonym), a small rural community in Eastern Kentucky. Data come from interviews with thirty women, stratified by age and education level, who have spent most of their lives in the community. I employ a combination of ethnographic and quantitative methods to analyze interviewees' use of three local dialect features, monophthongization of /ay/ before voiceless consonants (n=270), raising and fronting of /^/ (n=309), and leveling of standard-were to was (n=450). Results show that speakers use pre-voiceless /ay/-monophthongization and /^/- fronting and raising nearly categorically, but use was-leveling infrequently. Metapragmatic commentary indicates that the overall low level of morphosyntactic variation is driven by standard language ideology (Lippi-Green 1997) and negative ideologies that characterize rural and Mountain Southerners as old-fashioned, unsophisticated and ignorant. Such commentary also indicates that, inversely, the high use of local phonetic features is motivated by those same negative ideologies about rural and Mountain Southerners: Wilson Countians appear to have developed a strong sense of local identity and pride in oppositional reaction to cultural and linguistic marginalization. I conclude that speakers combine strongly locally-accented phonology with relatively prescriptive grammar in an effort to appear local and authentic, yet at the same time competent and modern. As predicted, younger and more-educated speakers use less of the local phonetic features than older and college-educated speakers do. More-educated speakers also use less was-leveling than less-educated speakers do. Mainstream language norms appear to be entering the community through those speakers who feel the greatest pressure to appear competent and modern. The high rate of pre-voiceless /ay/-monophthongization (a relatively new Southern feature), as well as the complete reorganization of linguistic constraints on wasleveling since Northern British settled the region, indicate that rural speech can be highly innovative.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Greene, Rebecca Dayle |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics |
| Primary advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Primary advisor | Rickford, John R, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Thesis advisor | Rickford, John R, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
| Advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rebecca Dayle Greene. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2010. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Rebecca Dayle Greene
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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