Some issues for further research

Although recent research sheds considerable light on the urbanization of SAmE, a number of issues remain unresolved. For instance, the correlation between urbanization and widespread phonological change is clear, but the motivations for innovations and their paths of diffusion are not clear. Bailey, Wikle, Tillery and Sand (1993) show that innovations may have traveled along a variety of paths of diffusion (i.e., either up or down the urban hierarchy or “contagiously”). However, whether different types of innovation correlate with different types of diffusion remains unclear and is an important topic for future research.

The triggers for linguistic innovation in urban SAmE are less clear than the paths of diffusion. Recent work on vowel–consonant transitions is promising, though. For example, Tillery, Bailey, Andres, Miller and Palow (2003) suggest that vowel-consonant transitions between diphthongs and a following r or l may have triggered glide shortening in words of the PRIZE/PRICE classes. They marshal linguistic atlas evidence to show that glide shortening probably occurred first in words like file and fire, then spread to other voiced environments, and finally diffused to voiceless environments in some areas. The development of monophthongs in the PRIZE/PRICE classes, in turn, created the phonetic context that allowed for the lowering and retraction of vowels in the FACE class, one of the major features of the Southern Shift (Labov, Ash, and Boberg fc.). The emergence of several of the most distinctive characteristics of SAmE, then, may have been triggered simply by the transition from vowels to a following r or l. While these are hypotheses that still must be confirmed, they do point to phonetic contexts as an important locus for studying the motivation for phonological change in SAmE. Fortunately, both the formation and the transformation of urban SAmE has occurred recently enough (within the last 125 years) that its history is well documented. The existence of such documentation (much of it on tape recordings) provides an unusual opportunity for studying the diffusion of linguistic innovations and the motivations for language change.

The transformation of urban SAmE is still a work in progress. Both in-migration and metropolitanization continue to be major forces in the South. In the United States, net gains in domestic migration between 1995 and 2000 were limited almost exclusively to the South and the Intermountain West. Domestic migration in some areas, though, now pales in comparison to migration from other countries. In Texas, for instance, net domestic migration between 1995 and 2000 was 148,000. Foreign migration during just the two-year span between 2000 and 2002, however, was more than 360,000. While most other Southern states have not yet experienced migration from abroad to this extent, the foreign population in states such as North Carolina and Georgia is growing at a rapid pace and is creating an ethnic complexity heretofore unknown. How the continuing transformation of the Southern population and its increasing ethnic complexity will affect SAmE is an important question for future research.

The concentration of the new Southerners in the largest cities of the region also creates new opportunities for social fissures in SAmE. The Sunbelt migration after 1970 and the rapid growth of the population in the largest metropolitan areas have already created significant new sociolinguistic dimensions. In the American Southwest, rurality and nativity now have more important consequences for linguistic variation than such factors as social class and gender do, and the emerging rural/urban split seems to be producing a dichotomy much like the earlier Southern/South Midland distinction. This emerging dichotomy provides an important venue for studying mechanisms of dialect creation.

Although African Americans returning to the South are now a significant part of the migration to the region, precisely how they will either impact or be impacted by the SAmE of whites is an open question. The relationship between African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and various white vernaculars, of course, has been an on-going controversy for more than 30 years. It is increasingly clear, however, that both a significant part of the distinctiveness of AAVE and also its relative uniformity across the United States is a consequence of the African American population’s movement to and concentration in the inner-city areas of large metropolises. Future research on urban SAmE should examine whether African Americans maintain these national AAVE norms or whether they adopt local norms as they return to the South. The impact of African Americans on white speech also deserves consideration. Before they began leaving the South during World War I, African Americans had a significant influence on rural SAmE. Whether or not they influence urban SAmE as they return to the South is an important question for future research.

Because of its distinctiveness, SAmE has long been the most widely studied regional variety of American English. While the metropolitanization of SAmE is eroding some of that distinctiveness, it certainly has not eliminated it. Perhaps more important, metropolitanization has created new dimensions of language variation that should make SAmE fertile ground for research for years to come.