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Thomas E. Murray and Beth Lee Simon (eds.), Language variation and change in the American Midland: A new look at ‘Heartland’ English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2007

Carmen Silva-Corvalan
Carmen Silva-Corvalan
Affiliation:
Spanish and Portuguese, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0358 USA, csilva@usc.edu
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Extract

Thomas E. Murray and Beth Lee Simon (eds.), Language variation and change in the American Midland: A new look at ‘Heartland’ English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. Pp. ix, 319. Hb $165.

The editors of this volume have brought together an excellent collection of original essays that discuss issues of importance in the accounting of language patterns in American English and, in particular, in the definition of the “Midland” as a dialect area. As Simon states in an introductory piece, “The scrutiny given Midland dialect here raises fundamental issues regarding the basic notion of dialect and, consequently, how we theorize patterns of language variation” (p. xi). The essays present the results of empirical work using modern methodologies that incorporate statistical, archival, ethnographic, and textual investigations. These studies provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the Midland and its speakers, but they go beyond this to provide insight into the dynamics of language change and geosocial patterns .

Type
BOOK NOTES
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2007 , pp. 810 - 811
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

Frazer, Timothy (ed.) (1993). “Heartland” English: Variation and transition in the American Midwest. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Kurath, Hans (1949). A word geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.