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Movement, Economy, Orientation: Twentieth-Century Shifts in North American Language

Movement, Economy, Orientation: Twentieth-Century Shifts in North American Language

This peer-reviewed edited volume, published by the American Dialect Society, draws together eight articles that use empirical linguistic data to highlight how recent language developments in American English are driven by social forces of migration, economic change, and individual speakers’ expressions of their identity. The volume is inspired by a growing amount of research on North American English showing that sociolinguistic innovations have arisen and receded on generational time-scales, leading to periods of relative stability followed by rapid change as younger speakers shape their own linguistic identities. The volume’s studies discuss changes in phonological, grammatical, and lexical phenomena among White Americans, Black Americans, Irish Catholics, and Yats from communities in New York, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and California.