This detailed, carefully reasoned, and well written
and researched study focuses on /ay/ patterning in Lumbee English
as well as on linguistic and social differences among Lumbee speakers
and between Lumbee speakers and White or African American speakers in
Robeson County. In particular, the author examines three variants of /ay/
in different age and social groups of Lumbee speakers: (1) the monophthongal
or glide-shortened variant; (2) a backed or backed/raised variant; and
the [aI] variant found in non-Southern American speech. Schilling-Estes
provides a thorough quantitative analysis of these variants in Lumbee
English; explores their use among Robeson County White and Black speakers;
and considers the inter-ethnic patterning of distinctive Lumbee English
features such as invariant be or bes, r-lessness,
perfective I'm, and leveling to weren't.
Schilling-Estes begins her analysis with a discussion
of the concept of an insular or historically isolated community and
how the concept might be applied to the Lumbee. She notes that the fields
of sociolinguistics and dialectology have lagged behind other fields
in questioning the concept of the pure, truly isolated culture which
is being threatened or tainted by outside influences. She notes classification
schemes that can be used to measure the extent to which a culture is
insular; according to these, Robeson County is “relatively historically
insular” (p. 144). She also provides a very useful historical and
social overview of the Lumbee community.
The author's introduction to the Lumbee dialect makes
the important point that the Lumbee themselves, as well as White and Black
speakers in Robeson County, have long held that subcommunities of Lumbees
can be identified by their speech differences. For instance, Prospect residents
are considered the most traditional Lumbees, and their speech is thought
the most authentic. Schilling-Estes notes that the present study is the
first to look at dialect differences within the Lumbee community.
The research involved 70 sociolinguistic interviews with
Lumbee speakers--from the North Carolina Language and Life Project (which
began in early 1994), oral history interviews conducted by Adolph Dial
(1969-1971), and from a recording of 17 Prospect school children made in
1993. The raw results of /ay/ patterning among Lumbee speakers are
shown in Table 1. Types of /ay/ patterning are grouped as pre-voiceless,
pre-voiced, pre-nasal, and pre-word boundary. In each of these groupings,
the three variants mentioned earlier are tabulated. Results are also shown
for four generational groups and, within each generational group, for Prospect
residents, Union Chapel residents, and others. Table 2 shows raw data (in
the same categories) on /ay/ patterning among Robeson County Black
and White speakers. Other tables show VARBRUL analyses for the three varieties
of /ay/ among Lumbee, Black, and White speakers.
Schilling-Estes provides detailed, carefully reasoned
analyses of the results of this research, considering both internal and
external constraints. Her results showed that in general, both inter- and
intra-group differences with respect to /ay/ are lessening. However,
dialectal distinctiveness is preserved (compared to Blacks and Whites)
in Lumbee use of backed and/or raised /ay/. This variant is most
commonly used in pre-voiceless contexts, and next most commonly in pre-voiced
contexts. This variety of /ay/ is favored in Prospect, somewhat
favored in Union Chapel, and disfavored elsewhere. This distinctive pattern
was observed in all four generations of Lumbee speakers.
Schilling-Estes goes on to discuss other distinctive
features of Lumbee dialect, comparing their use among Robeson County
Blacks and Whites. She concludes: “Even though the Lumbee may be
too numerous and widely dispersed to preserve wholesale dialectal distinctiveness,
they have nonetheless managed to preserve a degree of linguistic uniqueness
by heightening their usage levels for several noticeable forms and by
preserving or innovating unique patterns for variants that they share
with neighboring ethnic groups” (p. 168).
Key source