Kirk Hazen. Identity and ethnicity in the rural South: A sociolinguistic view through past and present Be. Durham, NC: Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, 2000. Pp. xii, 178. Pb $20.00.

Extract

This book is the revised version of Hazen's 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). In it, Hazen investigates the linguistic behavior of three ethnic groups in Warren County, North Carolina, both individually and collectively, with respect to copula absence and leveling of past be, with the aim of ascertaining the linguistic boundaries that delineate the ethnic groups. These ethnic groups are African Americans (comprising 57% of the overall population in the 1990 Census), European Americans (38%), and Native Americans (4%). In addition to ethnicity, Hazen considers the influence of age, sex, and cultural identity. He situates his data and findings in the broader sociolinguistic context by discussing, for example, the contributions that they make to the origins debate and the divergence/convergence debate surrounding African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Perhaps the two most significant contributions of the study, however, are the discussion of wont as an innovative variant descended from wasn't, a past-tense corollary of present tense ain't (cf. Hazen 1998), and the discussion of the influence of cultural identity on sociolinguistic variation (cf. Hazen 2002).