AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 34 (2009) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Konferenzbericht Current Research in North American English: The 2008 Meeting of the American Dialect Society Ludwig Deringer The annual meeting of the American Dialect Society was held January 3-5, 2008 in Chicago, at the convention of the Linguistic Society of America as usual, along with the meetings of the American Name Society, the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, and the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Eclectic, without a cover title, the ADS meeting offered analyses and interpretations of variation in American and Canadian English, in fine-drawn differentiation, reflecting the Society’s openness to approaches and methodologies and providing a cross section of current research interests. In his featured address, Richard W. Bailey (U of Michigan) presented a sociohistorical survey of the vernacular of the conference venue itself: Chicago English. The development that has given a new tack to North American English linguistics since the 1970s was clearly evident in the 2008 program: linguistic geography, as manifested in the Linguistic Atlas and regional dictionary projects, which had constituted the dominant research trend since the 1930s, today is paralleled by variationist sociolinguistics. Two landmarks exemplify the two paradigms: the multi-volume Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), eds. Frederic G. Cassidy, Joan Houston Hall and Luanne von Schneidemesser, began publication in 1985 and is awaiting completion (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press); the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change: A Multimedia Reference Tool (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg appeared in 2006 (Mouton de Gruyter). Ludwig Deringer 158 At the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft held March 1-3, 2000 at the University of Marburg - home of Deutscher Sprachatlas - , Labov, introducing the Atlas of North American English in his plenary lecture entitled “The Triumph of Regional Dialects,” had pointed out the “sharp degree of differentiation” in phonology as a basis for systematically (re-)drawing dialect boundaries on the North American continent. Essentially, the newness of the approach lies in its focus on phonemics rather than vocabulary or grammar. More precisely, ANAE maps specific, ongoing changes in the vowel systems of American and Canadian English, such as chain shifts and mergers. Providing Hertz measurements of vowel formants, acoustic analysis allows for establishing accurate isoglosses. As Labov had explained in Marburg, the sound changes, which began around 1945/ 1950, define three major phonological developments and the resultant dialect areas: the “Northern Cities Shift” of the Great Lakes urban area, the “Southern Shift” identifying Appalachia and Central Texas, rather than the plantation coast area, as “the typical Southern areas,” and the “Canadian Shift.” With many papers extending the findings of ANAE, the 2008 ADS meeting highlighted sociophonology and ethnophonology in a continued effort to modify existing dialect boundaries or to chart new ones. Papers focusing on the Great Lakes urban area studied a variety of changes now in progress at different stages of completion, as well as resistance to change. Two brief exhibits will have to do: Aaron J. Dinkin (U of Pennsylvania) was able to finetune the boundary between Western New England and the Inland North in New York state, namely, between the Gloversville - Watertown - Glens Falls and the Amsterdam - Oneonta lines, reasoning that Yankee, in marked contrast to Dutch, settlement areas are open to the Northern Cities Shift. Focusing on Canada, ANAE co-author Charles Boberg (McGill), in his investigation of whether or not Montreal is part of “Inland Canada” or “a separate dialect region,” with reference to ANAE Maps 15.3 and 15.7 concluded that “Montreal should be part of Inland Canada, though with some ethnic exceptions; however, in other terms, Montreal English is notably distinct” (conference handout, p. 11). According to Boberg, the main difference is Montreal’s “resistance to the merger of / ær/ and / er/ ” (p. 11). Paradigmatic vowel changes in the Northern Cities Shift area were also traced for Vermont, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Even studies not immediately drawing on ANAE prioritized sociolects and ethnolects, often through phonology and phonetics. They concentrated on dialect maintenance and change, issues that per se imply dialect perception, endangerment, attrition, and death. Again, an exhibit: Katie Carmichael (Tulane) studied the endangered Louisiana French spoken by the Pointe- Au-Chien Indian Tribe (PACIT) near Pointe-Aux-Chênes. The younger generation were found to be semi-speakers of the vernacular, no longer Konferenzbericht 159 evidencing features that were habitual for the older generation of bilingual speakers now over 50 years of age, for whom PACIT French had been their first language. Among linguistic differences distinctive of the French of the younger generation Carmichael noted “excessive vowel variation,” “Englishinfluenced grammatical structures,” and “lack of first person singular clitic pronoun ‘je’” (conference handout, p. 2), compensated by the stressed pronoun mon (p. 3). Related conference topics included aspects of dialect accommodation, as of African American English in the Lower Susquehenna Valley, the more recent perception of Wisconsin and Michigan speech as an “enregistered” regional dialect (in the terminology of Asif Agha), and immigrant language contact situations, e.g. Chicano English of Southern California, or the pronunciation of English by ethnic Polish speakers of Hamtramck, Michigan in the metropolitan Detroit area. Still other papers pursued separate agendas, such as a typology of negation in vernacular and regional English, or a conceptualization based on newspaper corpora, which, significantly, represented the only study of written dialects on the program. Prosody came up as vowel duration and speech rate were suggested as variables to complement vowel structure analysis in future research, while pedagogy figured in a report on how student researchers can be involved in sociolinguistic projects even in large introductory level classes. The gathering concluded in a panel that brought together a number of key issues of the conference: “Re-Examining Language Data in the Study of American English Dialects.” Panelist Walt Wolfram (North Carolina State U) considered, in Labovian methodology, “real-time” change in today’s speech of the Atlantic island community of Okracoke, North Carolina, against its status of about a decade and a half ago, comparability given. In the 1990s, Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes had already analyzed “apparent-time” (i.e. generational) change in the dialect (published 1995-1999). On the panel, Wolfram raised the questions: “Can moribund dialects be revitalized or reconfigured to preserve sociolinguistic uniqueness? ” and “Does a sustained dialect awareness program have an effect on the progression of dialect erosion? ” In the light of his new empirical data, he was confident that if language ideologies can be changed, people develop “a distinctive regional association” and “become proud of their dialect over time.” Neology, another ADS domain, is regularly featured in “Among the New Words,” a column in the ADS journal American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage running since 1941, and currently edited by Wayne Glowka (Reinhardt College), Chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. With the usual media coverage, ADS held its Words of the Year vote in several categories and determined subprime Word of the Year 2007: an adjective meaning “a risky or poorly documented loan or mortgage” - a reflex of the lingering real estate crisis in the United States. Ludwig Deringer 160 Beyond findings ever so full and discriminate, ADS at LSA 2008 reflected two trends: first, it further demonstrated the potential of the groundbreaking Atlas of North American English. William Labov, in his Principles of Linguistic Change, compares the systemic sound changes presently at work in North American English to processes of historical significance, as in the Great Vowel Shift. This kind of scholarship then surely is among the most exciting today. Digitized and formalized, dialectology now seems to be firmly located at the interface of the humanities and the sciences. Second, the meeting signaled a growing dialect awareness that rightly values the multiplicity of linguistic varieties as an expression of cultural pluralism. Through the everrefined precision of both dialect geography and sociolinguistic dialectology, contours in the deep structure(s) of North American culture(s) readily emerge. This vibrancy in current research can give new momentum to the idea of American Studies and Canadian Studies as the integrative study of language, literature, and culture. Thus, the state of the art marks a fresh opportunity to perceive cultural diversity through dialectal variation, multiculturalism through multilingualism, or the ‘Figure in the Carpet’ through the ‘Sound(s) of America.’ Ludwig Deringer Lehr- und Forschungsgebiet Amerikanistik und Kanadistik RWTH Aachen