| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
| |
| URBAN DIALECTS |
| |
| |
| as topics for investigation are a development of sociolinguistics, and they seem to be a relatively more complicated issue in today’s American English than they have been considered heretofore. The point is that each of our very large cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charleston, Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—and probably others as well, has come increasingly to display an urban dialect that is more than simply an amalgam of the regional dialect(s) surrounding it. For one thing, one aspect of the very large urban population is its lack of regional homogeneity of origin; in some cities it sometimes seems that almost everyone is originally from somewhere else. But in another way, large portions of the urban population are tied by poverty, race, ethnicity, or other constraints into inner cities and ghettolike enclaves wherein the linguistic homogeneity is far greater than would be encountered in the surrounding regional dialect areas. And most important of all, these same constraints also mean a wider divergence among the characteristics of the social class dialects concentrated within the relatively few square miles of—say—Boston or Philadelphia. Some scholars now conclude that urban dialects, particularly the lower-class dialects, especially those that also represent a racial or ethnic homogeneity, are diverging more and more from the norms of the prevailing Standard, Common, and Vulgar regional dialects spoken elsewhere in those same large metropolitan centers (Labov, as quoted in Stevens 1985a, A14). | 1 |
| |
| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
|
|
