Isolation within isolation: the invisible Outer Banks dialect

Walt Wolfram & Kirk Hazen

Fri. 11-12:40 A

It is often assumed by sociolinguists that small, isolated, economically-concentrated speech communities will not tolerate a profusion of forms over a long period without discernible movement toward a reduction of variants. Dorian (1994) challenges this assumption based on her long-term study of East Sutherland Gaelic, showing "individually patterned variation within small and homogeneous speech communities" (Dorian 1994: 631), but there are unfortunately few occasions to test the current sociolinguistic assumption.

Our current studies of Ocracoke English (Wolfram, Schilling-Estes, Hazen, and Craig forthcoming; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes forthcoming), a post-insular speech community located on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, have provided us with a unique opportunity to examine the question of long-term dialect profusion within a small, isolated community. At one point, shortly after the Civil War, there were over 100 African Americans in Ocracoke, but for the past century, only one African American family has resided on the island, and today, only one ancestral African American survives, a 91-year-old woman. The speech of this lone African American islander can provide a unique window into the question of long-term diversity within insular dialect communities. A recent sociolinguistic interview with this speaker offers intriguing insight into (1) the maintenance of an ethnically distinct African American vernacular English variety alongside the European-American Ocracoke Vernacular on the Outer Banks and (2) the character of dialect convergence and divergence among groups and individual speaker within small, insular dialect communities.

Our analysis, which compares a set of linguistic variables for the lone ancestral African American with the dialect profile for European American Ocracoke speakers on Ocracoke (Wolfram, Schilling-Estes, Hazen, and Craig forthcoming; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1994; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes forthcoming) reveals a pattern of selective linguistic accommodation. Some classic, non-AAVE features of Ocracoke English are displayed by this African American speaker (the production of [øy] for /ay/, the regularization of were(n't) in She weren't there, core Ocracoke lexical items such as mommuck 'hassle') at the same time that she has maintained a set of non-Outer Banks vernacular features. These structures include those primarily associated with AAVE, such as copula absence, inflectional -Z absence (third person, plural, and possessive -Z absence), and syllable-final cluster reduction. This pattern of selective accommodation reveals that a regionally-influenced version of AAVE has been perpetuated by this single African American family for at least a century within this small island community. The pattern of selective accommodation to the Ocracoke Vernacular along with the maintenance of salient features of AAVE raises significant questions about the nature of selective dialect accommodation and long-term dialect profusion. Proposed answers include an appeal to levels of linguistic organization, sociolinguistic segregation, and symbolic socio-psychological identity.

References

Dorian, Nancy C. (1994) Varieties of variation in a very small place: Social homogeneity, prestige norms, and linguistic variation. Language 70.631-696.

Schilling-Estes, Natalie and Walt Wolfram. (1994) Convergent explanation and alternative regularization patterns: 'were/n't' leveling in a vernacular variety, Language Variation and Change 6.273-302.

Wolfram, Walt and Schilling-Estes. (forthcoming) Moribund dialects and the language endangerment canon: The case of the Ocracoke brogue. Language 71 (No. 4).

Wolfram, Walt, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Kirk Hazen, and Chris Craig. (forthcoming) The sociolinguistic complexity of quasi-isolated southern coast communities, in Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (eds.) Language in the South Revisited. University: University of Alabama Press.