Dialect Loss and Innovation: Documentaries and Outreach Program

This project will produce two one-hour documentaries on language diversity in the southeastern United States, one on a receding traditional variety of English on the Outer Banks of North Carolina tentatively titled Vanishing Voices of the Outer Banks, and one on the emergence of Spanish and Hispanic English in the Mid-Atlantic South tentatively titled The Spanish Voice in the New American South. The intended audience is a regional public television audience, but the documentaries will also be appropriate for a general broadcasting audience and for other informal science education venues.

The general educational goals of the documentaries and associated outreach activities involve (a) a sociohistorical parameter that focuses on understanding the historical roots and orderly development of language varieties; (b) a sociocultural parameter that focuses on understanding the social role of language in community life; (c) a cognitive parameter that focuses on understanding the systematic patterning of language varieties; and (d) an affective parameter that focuses on confronting the attitudes and stereotypes of linguistic subordination that often characterize the public perception of language diversity.

Descriptively, the project provides visual documentation of the history, development, and current status of receding and emerging language varieties of the American South as representative of other changing language situations in the USA. This project also addresses broader issues of social inequality related to language prejudice and stereotyping in American society, including discrimination based on language differences.