Notes on Virginia Speech

R | SHE FEW scholars who have published studies on Virginia speech have 1 limited their observations to that part of the state lying east of the Blue Ridge mountains. Professor Edwin Shewmake in his English Pronunciation in Virginia (192y) says that by the word Virginia he means Eastern Virginia. He claims that differences in historical background and the separation by mountains of the western from the eastern counties ptevent consideration of any but the eastern counties in a study of typical Virginia speech. It is true, of course, that in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley a strong admixture of Pennsylvania Dutch speech may be found, and that the speech of the western part of the state, in general, is more like that of West Virginia than it is like the speech of the Eastern Shore. However, a comprehensive survey of speech in Virginia should include the counties of the Shenandoah Valley and southwest Virginia as well as those of the Piedmont and Eastern Shore regions. My tables for these notes are drawn from recordings of lol girls, whom I have grouped in three geographical sections, roughly dividing the state into Eastern, Central, and Western Virginia. The Eastern section includes those counties usually classified as Eastern Shore, Northern Neck, Tidewater, and Southeastern Virginia; the Central section includes Southside, Middle, and Piedmont Virginia; the Western section includes Southwestern Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Allegheny Ridges. I have recorded the speech of 36 Eastern, 34 Central, and 31 Western Virginia girls, all of them from representative middle class families, most from small towns and rural districts. The subjects were students in a state college

Linguistics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy