English in America by Dr. Natalie Schilling / Great Courses

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS -PRINT: © Not Available
-DIGITAL: © Not Available
- *Audio: © May 4, 20216 Great Courses; 6 hours (approx..); unabridged (Audiobook information from the version on the Libby App.)
-FILM: Available in Video and DVD from Great courses. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/english-in-america-a-linguistic-history

SERIES: Great Courses

CHARACTERS:
N/A

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: As mentioned in a previous review, I’d been searching the library audiobooks in Libby for works on English, or grammar, or speech patterns.
I think I would love to be one of those people, like Professor Higgins, who could identify a person’s home town, and sometimes the entire path since, by listening to them speak.
When I was a switchboard operator for a hospital, we went through training on how to handle bomb threat calls. We learned to listen to diction, to pay attention to accents, pronunciations, word usages, and of course background noises in the caller's environment. It intrigued me.
-ABOUT: It’s primarily about how language takes on a common usage within regions, and there’s a good deal of history explaining the origins of people and their dialects in America.
An example of the "book's" contents is: Different regions address a group of people in their own unique ways-in some areas the common way is “you guys” (that’s my traditional way, though I’ve lately taken to y’all, which comes from the South. Some folks say, “yous”, some say, “yinz”, and some say “you’uns”.
TOC:
1
Defining American English Dialects
2
The Foundations of American English
3
From English in America to American English
4
The Rise of American Language Standards
5
Where Is General American English?
6
Mapping American Dialects
7
Ethnicity and American English
8
African American English
9
Mobility, Media, and Contemporary English
10
The History of American Language Policy

-OVERALL IMPRESSION: I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am now hoping to find materials that concentrate on the language of a single region, so I can get more familiar with nuances.

AUTHOR: Dr. Natalie Schilling. From Amazon:
“Natalie A. Schilling (also known as Natalie Schilling-Estes) is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University.[1]

Schilling received her PhD and BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA from North Carolina State University. Her 1996 PhD dissertation is entitled, The Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Status of /ay/ in Outer Banks English.[2]

She is an expert in sociolinguistics and forensic linguistics.[3] In collaboration with Walt Wolfram, she played an important role in documenting the High Tider variety of North Carolina English.[4] Fictionalized characters based on her have appeared in the TV shows Criminal Minds and Manhunt.[5]

In 2022, she was elected a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.[6”

--Dr. Natalie Schilling as quoted on the Great Courses website, “If we approach language not as grammarians – as guardians of proper usage–but as scientists–as linguists–then we need to study human language as it really is, not how we think it should be.”

NARRATOR: Dr. Natalie Schilling. See above.
The Great Courses are produced as lectures, so that’s the delivery style. There are rare occasions when she backs up ever-so slightly to correct her words because this isn’t the typical audiobook where sound equipment and editing have a role. She’s interesting and the timbre of her voice is easy to listen to.

GENRE: Non-fiction; grammar; language usage

LOCATIONS: Multiple

TIME FRAME: Current and historical

SUBJECTS: Anthropology; sociology; history; grammar; accents; dialects; ethnicity; culture; language usage

DEDICATION: N/A

SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From Lecture 1: Defining American English Dialects
(Please note that this is me transcribing what I hear, so punctuation, spelling, sentence and paragraph structure errors are mine.)
“Truck, lorry, elevator, lift, suspenders, braces, vest, waistcoat, shorts, pants, panties, knickers . . .what?”
We all know that American English is different from British English. Sometimes the translations are easy, sometimes they’re confusing, and occasionally we can really embarrass ourselves. And vocabulary differences are only part of the picture. There are also pronunciations and grammatical differences between American and British English: Americans say ‘father’ and ‘mother’, and in British English it’s ‘fatha’ and ‘motha’. Also in America, we say, ‘The government is debating the issue,’ and ‘The team is winning the game’ in England the verb can also be ‘are’, ‘The government are debating,’ ‘The team are winning.’
There are also lots of differences within American English. We know a lot about these too, but there may be some things we’d like to know more about. How many American English dialects are there? Where are they spoken? And what exactly is a dialect in the first place? Are dialects the same thing as accents? Are they slang? And why would we be interested in knowing more about dialects anyway? Shouldn’t we be more concerned with making sure we know proper English?
In this course, we’re going to tackle all of these questions and more. We’ll approach our expiration (exeration? word ?) from the perspective of linguistics; the scientific study of human language. More specifically, our viewpoint is that of sociolinguistics; the study of language in its social setting, in all of its rich variety, across geographic and social space. And an interrelation to cultural, social, interpersonal, and personal identity.
Let’s start with the first couple questions. What are the dialects of American English, and where are they spoken? Picture a US map. Where would YOU draw the dialect lines? If you’re like most Americans, you probably thought of the South right away, and drew a mental map around the Southeastern United States. For some of you, this line extends as far West as Texas, while for others, Texas is its own dialect area. Florida is usually left out of the South dialect region, since it’s considered to be a region of dialect transplants, including retired people from the North and people of Hispanic heritage, and the Caribbean Islands.
Beyond the South, you may have drawn a North or a New England, or you might have gotten more specific, and labeled the speech varieties of certain cities within these larger regions. Maybe Chicago in the Midwest; maybe New York City and Boston on the East coast. Your dialect lines probably get fuzzier as you think about the Western United States, so you might have indicated a California English, or West coast English.
Hawaii and Alaska are pretty far away from the mainland US, so you probably wouldn’t have grouped them in with any of the Continental dialect divisions.
It turns out that people’s mental maps of American dialect regions align pretty closely with the dialect lines laid out by sociolinguists and dialect geographers. The most important dialect line in the US is in fact between the South and the non-South. The dividing line doesn’t exactly follow the Mason-Dixon line but is pretty close. Essentially, the line that sets off the South starts off between Maryland and Virginia and runs through Southern West Virginia, Kentucky, Southern Missouri, Southern Oklahoma, and Texas.
The Northern dialect line separates off New York state from Pennsylvania, and runs through Northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and extends westward into Eastern Nebraska, South Dakota, and the whole of North Dakota.
Many dialect geographers also draw a midland dialect area between the North and South. This area encompasses the parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma that aren’t situated neatly in the North or South.
We’re probably all familiar with some of the more noticeable features of Southern American English. We know that words like ‘time’ and ‘ride’ are pronounced as ‘taam’ and ‘raad’. We also know that groups of people are addressed as ‘y’all’. We might even be familiar with some Southern grammatical structures like, ‘I’m fixin’ to go to the store’ for ‘I’m about to go to the store’, and, ‘I might could go with you’, which seems to be a softer way of saying ‘I think I can go, but I’m not sure.’ . . .”

At the Great Courses website, this first half-hour lecture is described this way:
“Begin with a big-picture overview of the American English dialect map, asking as we explore: What is the difference between a language, a dialect, and an accent? Discover the intricate rules governing all linguistic systems, and consider how and why some varieties of language become valued standards and others are stigmatized.”

RATING: 5 stars.

STARTED-FINISHED 10/18/2023-10/22/2023 ( )