Wolfram & Ward's American voices is a perfect book for those who have been asked to teach an introductory class on American dialects or for anyone who wants a reliable basic understanding of the subject. The book is aimed primarily at the intelligent layperson, with 40 chapters of approximately five pages apiece, discussing easily distinguished characteristics of different US dialects, from the South (7 chapters), the North (7 chapters including Phily and Pittsburgh), the MidWest (6 chapters), the West (the largest area, but with 4 chapters reflecting the fact that researchers have assumed that nothing happens there), Island dialects (8 chapters), and a few ethnic dialects (7 chapters). This book is a very welcome addition to ‘popular’ teaching materials on dialect variation.
The introductory chapter, by Wolfram & Natalie Schilling-Estes, provides a theoretical and historical anchor and perspective on changes occurring in different areas. Given the fact that most of the present population of North America settled in the US from other parts of the world and arrived with other languages, this chapter considers settlement patterns, population shifts and the importance of settlers' ethnic (and linguistic) backgrounds to regional influences on English usage. Unlike texts which detail variation in and the theoretical importance of specific phonological (Labov, Ash & Boberg Reference Labov, Ash and Boberg2006, Yaeger-Dror & Thomas to appear) or morphosyntactic (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes Reference Wolfram and Schilling-Estes2005) patterns, this book aims to draw in readers by referencing the types of variation that can be easily perceived by a non-linguist; to make that mix more ‘tasty’ most chapters flesh out their five pages with other lexical idiosyncrasies of the area in question. For example, the average reader will be fascinated to learn not just that in the South fire can be homophonous with far (which is actually a phonological variable, presented as lexical), but that in Appalachia people say you'uns and use double modals (might could, should oughta. . .). In New Orleans flying horses means a ‘merry go round’, or as Connie Eble states ‘carousel’, the devil beating his wife is rain while the sun shines, lost bread is French toast, and gris gris is to put a hex on someone, while in the Bahamas a hex is obeah.
While most of the dialect areas have a variety of unique lexical terms as well as their own local food specialties which require such terms, and hence differ from each other, a similarity exists in that many dialects have an unflattering lexical term for ‘outsiders’ (dingbatters, trolls). An obvious conclusion is that some of the dialect coherence of a given area is provided by a wish to remain distinct from those outsiders for whom residents have the funny names.
An example of the treatment of phonology is the introduction to New England (by Julia Roberts, Naomi Nagy & Charles Boberg, three researchers who have plenty to say about phonological change in other publications). This chapter does not discuss phonology in any detail, saying only that Eastern New England has both the cot/caught merger and a Mary/merry/marry merger. To maximize the interest of this text for non-professionals, the loss (or reinsertion) of postvocalic-r in the eastern half of the region and Maine is discussed in terms of words which sound funny or merge with other words, not in terms of the environmental conditioning which allows r to resurface, or how the reemerging r-fulness can alter the vowel phonology of the region.
Similarly, the discussion of New York City does include a larger phonological component, but the evidence of glides being appended to vowels is disguised as more ‘funny’ words, so that coffee and pass are presented as cu-uhfee and pi-uhss, while the old chestnut toidy-toid street is said to no longer be common among ‘European Americans’; no evidence is adduced to help us learn the actual demographic details of who uses a specific dialect feature.
While almost a whole page on Philadelphia is devoted to ‘pronunciation’, the characteristic fronted /ow/ of BOAT is transcribed ‘eh-oo’, the fronting of the nucleus of BOUT is described as ‘Southern’ and transcribed as ‘a-o’; the raising of BORE is transcribed as ‘oor’. The Irish import youse for you [pl] is included as a regional grammatical feature in Philadelphia, as is positive anymore. Amusingly, the articles on New York City, Philadelphia and West Coast dialects all claim yo is a distinctive local vocabulary item.
The first real discussion of phonological change occurs in Matthew Gordon's chapter on the Midwest, where he discusses not just the cot/caught merger, but the Northern Cities Shift, complete with the classic diagram of the short vowel chain shift. Richard Cameron continues with this trend, discussing the population shifts that brought the Northern Cities Shift, and telling us that the locals attribute the Northern Cities Shift to ‘sounding nasal’ (121). Thomas Murray continues the trend toward inclusion of phonologically quantifiable patterns in his chapter on St. Louis, which is followed by Beth Simon's enjoyable chapter describing how the speech of Michigan Upper Peninsula speakers (or Yoopees) has been influenced by settlement patterns and the language background of the settlers. Penelope Eckert & Norma Mendoza-Denton popularize their discussion of California English, avoiding references, but conveying the important point that California dialect variation results from the interplay of such population demographics with self-identification and ‘stylization’.
All of the articles in the section on ‘islands’ discuss the influence of settlement patterns on the phonology and lexicon of the different island communities without any detailed analysis – a possible boon to the non-professional reader, but unsatisfying for academics.
The discussion of ethnic dialects – presented by John Baugh, Walt Wolfram & Ben Torbert for African American dialects, by Megan Melançon for Acadian (=Cajun) English, by Carmen Fought for Hispanic dialects, by Walt Wolfram for Lumbee English, and by Cindy Bernstein for ‘Jewish English’ – would be worth the price of the book by itself. The authors manage to present evidence of dialect diversity while allowing the novice to relate to potentially undervalued dialects. Both chapters on African American English (AAE) emphasize political issues relevant to this ethnic dialect. Fought discusses the significance of code switching in the speech of bilinguals, even those, like the California Hispanics she is discussing, who were in North America before the Anglos. On the other hand, some chapters err by claiming local dialect characteristics as ethnic dialect features. (For example, Bernstein tells the reader that the stigmatized realization of stressed schwar followed by a consonant (discussed in the NYC paper as the ‘toidy toid street’ phenomenon) is ‘Jewish English’, when it is now actually only found in Southern rural AAE dialects (Labov, Ash & Boberg Reference Labov, Ash and Boberg2006, Strand & Wroblewski Reference Strand and Wreblewski2007)).
As Fridland summed up her chapter on Memphis: ‘our speech is as much about our culture as are our hospitality, our music and our barbecue’. Each of these contributors could say the same. Each chapter tells a bit about the settlement patterns, local lexical idiosyncrasies, and culture, without requiring that the reader have a background in linguistics.
Wolfram and Ward have provided a book which manages to introduce the non-specialist to many intriguing aspects of dialectology. I highly recommend it to teachers, students, and those who read the ‘language maven’ columns or watch programs about language usage (like the US Public Broadcasting System's series American Tongues, which was also edited with Wolfram's help). The contributors eschew linguistic jargon while presenting evidence of local dialect features which can distinguish regions from each other. Consistent with this style, there is no index, but there are short biographical sketches for each of the authors, many of whom claim the dialect they are discussing as their native ‘tongue’.
The bad news for readers of JIPA is that pronunciation variants are presented in a non-IPA format which makes their interpretation questionable. (How, exactly, does one pronounce ‘cu-uhfee’? Only someone who has heard New Yorkers can tell.) In addition, the linguistics is randomly sown throughout the book. Chain shifting, for example, is first discussed on page 108 (by Matthew Gordon), and is then followed up with further clarification by Jeff Conn in his discussion of Portland on page 151. However, there is no way to see this as a development planned by the editors, it is merely the luck of the geographic draw that different aspects of the same phonological patterns are discussed, although they might not even be considered as related phenomena by the casual reader. On the whole, then, this book is clearly not intended for a reader of this journal looking for recurrent phonetic patterns in American communities, since even those phonetically conditioned phonological variables (like chain shifting of vowels, cluster reduction, or conditioned loss or diphthongization of ‘r’ discussed earlier in this review) which follow clear systematic patterns are only discussed relative to the larger patterns in a few of the chapters.
One other criticism is the editors' apparent unwillingness to insist on a consistent format. Most of the chapters avoided references; others included a few references for ‘further readings’. If I could make one suggestion, it would be that in a future edition ‘further readings’ be appended to each chapter. At the same time, the book is a boon for non-professional courses, and can serve as a gift to friends who are always asking what exactly it is that the linguist does.
