Well, Folks, Go-on Home and Undastand Y'all Family First

I came across a very interesting yet saddening article from my hometown of Raleigh, NC this weekend titled "Raleigh has lost its drawl, y'all". And indeed it has lost it's distinctive Southern drawl. I cannot count the number of times in my travels that people have asked where my Southern accent is, if I am truly from North Carolina, and I have not been able to provide them with an answer. But apparently this is what I should be telling folks:

“There’s no question as to when the change happened, based on the birthdates of the speakers,” NCSU linguistics professor Robin Dodsworth said. “You went within the space of two or three generations from being an unambiguously Southern-speaking city to an unambiguously non-Southern-speaking city.”
If anything, people in Raleigh are sounding more Eastern than Southern, linguistics experts say. While characteristic accents linger in the rural South, urban centers along the East Coast talk more like each other.
“Raleigh has some features that other cities along the Eastern Seaboard share, and Philadelphia has, historically, been one of these,” Dodsworth said in response to a question about Raleigh’s linguistic brethren. “Also D.C., Richmond, even Charleston, to some extent.”

I would take this one step further in saying that Raleigh has undergone, via the influence of increased immigration from other linguistic regions of the US, a turnover in diglossic power. In the past, our quaint Southern dialect was once considered the H-varity, yet as more people relocated from large urban centers (and by this I mean to imply areas such as New York who bring with them a large degree of cultural capital), and the rise in international technology industry in the area, a less dialect heavy language became more prevalent. As the southern dialect began to lose dominance it also lost its H-varity status. Now, unfortunately, the Raleigh dialect, is moving into an L-varity, one that is less suited for business and government and understood as an antique.

Much of the discussion in both the Kubota and Ward (2000) and McKay and Bokhorst-Heng (2008) articles for this week call for an integration of both L-varity and H-varity into the classroom. My point in calling attention to the gradual but definitive loss of the Raleigh dialect, is that the effects of globalization on English should not exclusively be concerned with foreign-immigration, and that many distinct and historically valuable diglossia's are present in every region of our own country. When we look at the pedagogic and ethical concerns presented in both of these articles, they highlight the struggle that First Circle countries experience when creating ESL policies in primary schools. I found that most of the policies presented, as well as the solutions by the authors, still toiled with issues of Otherization.

I do not mean to have a solution for this tremendous problem, however I believe that a vital part of helping students comprehend World Englishes is to have them first understand local Englishes. Brief exposure to a WE from India that they may never experience in person does not seem that it would have lasting affects on their conception and empathy for other WE. If they were to start in their own backyard however, and could identify WE in their own community, perhaps they would more readily understand and empathize with the vast multiplicities in which English has taken shape.



http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/04/06/2806388/raleigh-has-lost-its-drawl-yall.html