How We Talk: American Regional English Today
Editor/Author: Metcalf, Allan A.Publication Year: 2000
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 978-0-618-04362-0
Category: language
Image Count: 1
Book Status: Available
A Talking Tour of American English, Region by Region.
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Metcalf's How We Talk: American Regional English Today looks at the varied speech patterns throughout the different regions of the United States. The introduction discusses the origin of American English and how it varies greatly from its British English counterpart. From here the book is divided into six sections: "The South," "The North," "The West," "American Ethnic," "In the Movies," and "Dialects." Because southern speech holds the most distinctive differences in American English this section is the longest. The northern states also receive great attention, especially the distinctive accents of New York and Boston. Throughout the book maps are interspersed that detail exactly where accents exist, and drawings or photographs of items for which certain regions have varying names are also noted (e.g., "polecat" for skunk in the south, "fourteener" for mountains more than 14,000 feet high in Colorado). One of the most interesting facets of this book is its chapter on ethnic speech and how it varies from other dialects spoken in the region. The book focuses specifically on African American, Native American, Latino, and Yiddish speech. The book concludes with word and subject indexes.This is an interesting work that is neatly compiled to focus specifically on American dialects. The Dictionary of American Regional English (see ARBA 97, entry 833, for a review of volume 3) and the Atlas of North American English (Mouton de Gruyter, 2000) will give readers more information on the topic.
Shannon Graff Hysell
Staff, Libraries Unlimited, Inc.
