Robeson County, North Carolina, is a tri-ethnic community located along the corridor of Route 95 near the South Carolina border. Native Americans comprise approximately 40 percent of the county population, African Americans 25 percent, and Anglo Americans the remaining 35 percent. According to historical records, early Anglo settlers from the Scottish Highlands, some of whom were Gaelic speakers, found the Lumbee, the Native-American group within the county, speaking English when they arrived in the Robeson County area in the 1730s. A group of African Americans, including both runaway and free slaves, was also scattered in the region at the time, so that the three ethnic groups have lived in this region for almost three centuries.

The ethnic relations of the three groups have shifted through time in response to various sociopolitical events, including the desegregation of county school in the early 1970s. Despite some increase in intercommunication among the three ethnicities, ethnic boundaries remain strong; and Robeson County in large part continues to exist in a state of de facto segregation into three ethnic communities. Given the prominence of the Lumbee in this region and the longstanding tradition of maintaining three separate ethnic communities, Robeson County provides an ideal site for examining how the English variety of a Native-American community is sociolinguistically situated with respect to surrounding local varieties.

The economic base of Robeson County is changing. Robeson County historically has been a farming community producing large crops of tobacco and cotton. Corn has also been a major crop in the county. While these crops are still grown and sold today, the county is moving away from agriculture into other business. Robeson County is also home to the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, which was originally founded as an Indian normal school in the late 19th century.

Under the aegis of the NCLLP, we have been conducting sociolinguistic interviews with members of the three ethnic communities in Robeson County for the past three years. We are presently interviewing comparable sets of older, middle-aged, and young speakers of all ethnicities in an effort to determine: (1.) the distribution of dialectally diagnostic structures revealing patterns of shared and distinctive language features; (2.) shifting patterns of language that show convergence or divergence between the three ethnic groups over time; and, (3.) the role of dialect marking in the determination of the Lumbee speech community.


At this stage of the fieldwork we have conducted interviews with over a hundred Robeson County speakers. While our focus is on the vernacular structures within and across these respective varieties, we are also examining representative standard speakers in order to provide a profile of the social differentiation of language within each community as well.