1 PREVIOUS STUDIES OF ALABAMA SPEECH

The purpose of the preliminary vocabulary survey made with mail questionnaires in Alabama during 1963-64 as a part of my doctoral dissertation1 and supplemented with information from ad­ ditional questionnaires completed during 1966-67 was to help lay the foundation for an investigation of the speech of the entire state which would use field interview techniques developed in Europe and the United States. The present survey is the only study of Alabama speech for which Linguistic Atlas mail questionnaires were distributed to informants from communities selected after a study of the settlement history of the state had been made. The first studies of Alabama speech were lists of words col­ lected from conversations with unidentified persons, conducted without the guidance of prepared questions. L. W. Payne’s “A Word-List from East Alabama” 2 and Leah A. Dennis’s “A Word- List from Alabama and Some Other Southern States” 3 are studies of this type. During 1932-41 six master’s theses which were in­ tended to serve as preliminary investigations for the work sheets for the Linguistic Atlas were completed at Auburn University (then Alabama Polytechnic Institute).4 These theses are also, for the most part, word lists. The next studies of Alabama speech use some of the methods of linguistic geography. James B. McMillan based his “Phonology of the Standard English of East Central Alabama” 5 upon some ran­ dom collecting as well as upon prepared questions and texts. Mc­ Millan says that his study of pronunciation in the nine counties of East Central Alabama is of the type which precedes an atlas in­ vestigation.6 Madie Ward [ Barrett J’s master’s thesis, “The Treat­ ment of /r/ in Southeast Alabama Speech,” 7 was a preliminary study for her doctoral dissertation, “A Phonology of Southeast Alabama Speech.” 8 For the latter study she used the short work sheets of the Linguistic Atlas, with some additions of her own from personal observation as well as from published word lists, to obtain transcriptions of the speech of informants from nine coun­ ties in Southeast Alabama. In his detailed classification of folk expressions,9 Saunders Walker limited himself to the usages of Negroes in the eastern tier of Alabama counties. Lawrence Mason Foley’s “A Phonological and Lexical Study of 1

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the Speech of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama” 10 uses data obtained with the short work sheets of the Linguistic Atlas from twenty- seven residents of the county (twenty-two white and five black). Foley had hoped to obtain a proportional number of black in­ formants, twenty-nine percent, but he was unable to locate this many willing informants. The studies of speech in Alabama, as well as in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Georgia and Florida, which most closely resemble the present one are those dealing with the word distribution survey conducted by Gordon R. Wood and his associates during the late 1950’s.11 For this sur­ vey, several of the Linguistic Atlas mail questionnaires were com­ pleted in each county in the area. From the three thousand col­ lected in this way, one thousand were selected. In 1967 W ood completed another study12 based partly upon this survey and partly upon Thelma Goodwin’s investigation of speech in Madison, Jackson, Colbert, Morgan, Marshall, Winston, St. Clair, Calhoun, Montgomery, Russell, Marengo, Bullock, Washington, Escambia, and Houston Counties.13 For Goodwin’s project, the interviews of thirty-four informants were recorded on tape as they named and described the objects and situations drawn in Stanley M. Sapon’s Pictorial Linguistic Interview Manual. These studies, especially those by McMillan, Barrett, and Wood, provide some clues about the distribution of speech characteristics in certain parts of Alabama. McMillan finds that such phonological features as the frequent absence of postvocalic r and the substitu­ tion of diphthongs for historic short vowels occur in the standard speech of East Central Alabama. Barrett finds more postvocalic r’s and fewer ingliding diphthongs in Southeast Alabama than in East Central Alabama. In the publications of the findings from his word distribution study, Wood draws isoglosses between variant forms of certain vocabulary items and suggests that these isoglosses may be used to determine the boundary between the South Mid­ land and the Southern dialect areas. He also notes the widespread use of Midland terms in the Southern area. In his second study, he notes that a variety of vocabulary, grammatical, and phonologi­ cal features are to be found in the parts of the state that were investigated. However, these studies do not take the place of a consistent, con­ trolled investigation of the speech of the entire state such as the

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one the present study is intended to precede. In most of the al­ ready completed studies, because settlement history was not stud­ ied to determine which communities in the area should provide informants, and because different types of responses were solicited, the information in one study is not strictly comparable with that of any of the other studies of speech in this area or with the ma­ terial collected for the Linguistic Atlas in other parts of the country.

NOTES

1 Virginia Oden Foscue, “Background and Preliminary Survey of the Linguistic Geography of Alabama” (University of Wisconsin diss., 1966). 2 L. W. Payne, “A Word-List from East Alabama,” DN, 3 (1908), 279- 328 and 343-91. 3 Leah A. Dennis, “A Word-List from Alabama and Some Other South­ ern States,” PADS, No. 2 (November 1944), pp. 6-16. 4 Elizabeth Green, “A Dialect Survey of Mobile, Mobile County, Ala­ bama” (Alabama Polytechnic Institute thesis, 1932); Charles Boyd Guest, “A Survey of the Dialect of the Lee County, Alabama, Negro” (Alabama Polytechnic Institute thesis, 1932); Joe T. Hall, “A Dialect Study of Lang- dale, Chambers County, Alabama” (Alabama Polytechnic Institute thesis, 1932); Catherine Rogers, “A Dialect Study of Camp Hill, Tallapoosa County, Alabama” (Alabama Polytechnic Institute thesis, 1940); Cecile Satterfield, “Dialect Studies of Aiarburg School District, Autauga County, Alabama” (Alabama Polytechnic Institute thesis, 1940); and Coralee Rash, “A Dialect Study of Kinston, Chambers County, Alabama” (Alabama Polytechnic In­ stitute, 1941). 5 James Benjamin McMillan, “The Phonology of the Standard English of East Central Alabama” (University of Chicago diss., 1946). 6 Ibid., p. 8. 7 Madie Bell Ward [Barrett], “The Treatment of /r/ in Southeast Ala­ bama Speech” (University of North Carolina thesis, 1946). 8 Madie Ward Barrett, “A Phonology of Southeast Alabama Speech” (University of North Carolina diss., 1948). 9 Saunders Walker, “A Dictionary of Folk Speech of the East Alabama N egro” (Western Reserve University diss., 1956). 10 Lawrence Mason Foley, “A Phonological and Lexical Study of the Speech of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama” (University of Alabama diss., 1969). 11 Gordon R. Wood, “An Atlas Survey of the Interior South,” Orbis, 9, No. 1 (1960), 7-12; “Word Distribution in the Interior South,” PADS, No. 35 (April 1961), pp. 1-16; “A W ord Geography of the Interior South,” Yearbook of the American Philosophical Society 1961 (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 602-04; “Dialect Contours in the Southern States,” American Speech, X X X V III (December 1963), 243-56. 12 Gordon R. Wood, Sub-Regional Speech Variations in Vocabulary,

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Grammar, and Pronunciation. Cooperative Research Project No. 3046 (Edwardsville, Illinois, 1967). W ood’s latest work, Vocabulary Change (Edwardsville, Illinois, University of Southern Illinois Press, 1971), deals with the same material as the above publication. 13 Thelma Goodwin, “Observations on Speech Patterns in Fifteen Areas of Alabama” (Troy State College term paper, 1960).

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