The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect

Nonstandard Were and the Nonstandard forms of the Preterite Negative of to be in Nineteenth Century New England Civil War Letters and Literary Dialect Portrayals

“…The evidence supporting this claim can be found in numerous sources, both subject literature, dictionaries, coeval commentaries made by normative grammarians, primary sources, and literary portrayals of American dialects; for instance, Kirkham (1834: 207) claimed that the structure I were could be found in such states as Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi: "I war thar, and I seen his boat was loadened too heavy". Randolph (1927aRandolph ( , 1927b, on the other hand, confirmed its usage as characteristic of Arkansas and Missouri, in fact of the Ozarks, and typically used by the hillmen born around the middle of the 19th century: "Some of the older people use war instead of was in some situations, but this usage has no connection with the subjunctive (...) they also say he shore war a master fiddler" (1927b: 4). Furthermore, when discussing the representation of the Ozark dialect in different novels, Randolph (1927a: 288) criticizes the rendering it was not true and adds that "most hillmen would be much more likely to say hit war'nt so".…”

On the history of Black English in the USA

“…For any English dialect, however, such an exaggeration is simply wrong and "not substantia ted by the evidence" (V. McDavid 1956: 72). 17 The main varieties and sources taken into consideration for this comparison are British dialects (Wright 1905;Francis 1961;Viereck 1975b;Orton et al 1978), early American speech (Eliason 1956;Abbott 1957), Eastern U.S. dialects (Atwood 1953), dialects of the North Central States and the Upper Midwest (V. McDavid 1956), Ozark (Randolph 1927), Appalachian (Hackenberg 1972;Wolfram/Christian 1976), and Anniston, Ala., (Feagin 1976) speech, and early (Harrison 1884) and present-day B1E (Williamson 1968). 18 In Great Britain, at the beginning of this century cotch and cotched were still reported to be in use in several counties (Wright 1905: 286, 294), whereas in Lowman's data collected in 1937 -38 both forms occur rarely and are not found at all in the materials of the Survey of English Dialects amassed another twenty years later (Francis 1961;Orton et al 1978: M52).…”