Identity and Ethnicity in the Rural South: a Sociolinguistic View Through Past and Present Be

Identity and Ethnicity in the Rural South investigates the interaction of cultural and ethnic identity as realized in language variation. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of sociolinguistic data on the past tense of the verb be and on its absence, this work explains the synchronic and diachronic trends of language variation and several important social factors, including ethnicity, sex and cultural identity. This volume also informs the debates about the origins and contemporary synchronous relations of African-American vernacular English to other ethnic varieties.