The Gettysburg College Dialect Project: Regional Linguistic Variation among African American and European American English Speakers in the Lower Susquehanna Valley

Gettysburg College, Gettysburg PA

Investigators

Abstract

The Gettysburg College Dialect Project: Regional linguistic variation among African American and European American English speakers in the Lower Susquehanna Valley" With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jennifer Bloomquist will investigate the linguistic patterns that characterize the regional dialect spoken in Pennsylvania's Lower Susquehanna Valley (LSV). Although the rural, European-American Pennsylvania German speaking population of the LSV region has been studied extensively by linguists, Pennsylvania Germanisms do not account for the patterns found in the language of LSV African-American speakers, nor do they fully contribute to the types of regionalisms that have developed in the area's urban centers. In order to address this lacuna, the project team will conduct one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews with lifelong residents of the Lower Susquehanna Valley in general, and with urban and African- American speakers in particular. In addition, a project website that includes an interactive survey will be developed so that a wide variety of participants will be able to contribute to the data set that will define the dialect and its boundaries. The Gettysburg Dialect project contributes to the field of dialectology in that it focuses on an area of dialect study that has been long neglected in terms of race and geographical location (rural vs. urban). Not only is the project valuable to dialectology, but the research is also important to the field of linguistics in general because it investigates linguistic patterns among northern African-American speakers who speak both the regional variety and African-American English in varying degrees, depending on sociohistorical and sociocultural factors such as community cohesion or geographic isolation. Since the vast majority of work done previously on the development of African-American English has focused on urban and southern speakers, this project will contribute a wealth of information to the ways in which African-American Englishes have evolved in isolated communities in the midland dialect region. It is this aspect of the research that will complement projects currently underway on African-American English in other regions of the United States. Because the research will also contribute to the construction of a dialect survey website, there will be an online educational resource for anyone interested in learning about the Lower Susquehanna Valley, its residents, or the dialect(s) that they speak.