Though Greater New Orleans has long been recognized as a distinct dialect region within the American South, the study of the English varieties spoken there has been neglected, leaving crucial gaps in the linguistic literature on dialects of American English. We fill these gaps via a largescale survey study of key dialects in New Orleans. Crucially, our work also takes into account changing city-wide demographics and local ideologies following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, providing insights into linguistic practices in a post-disaster context.

The recovery process after Hurricane Katrina resulted in displacement of locals, gentrification by newcomer populations, and a shift in the public school system to an all-charter system, thereby eliminating neighborhood-based schools. Although many such changes are occurring elsewhere in the country, the rapidity of these changes following the storm allows for examination of their linguistic effects in a setting where these forces are intensified. By focusing our analysis on these issues in post-Katrina New Orleans, we are able to draw more general conclusions about the ways social processes and identity factors interact with linguistic choices.

The final corpus includes nearly 200 interviews with Black, white, and Creole New Orleanians. Participants were born and raised in the city, and most were multigenerational New Orleanians. The sample spans nearly a century, with the oldest speaker born in 1917 and the youngest in 2002, allowing time depth into the linguistic development and changes within New Orleans English. The audio recordings are of high quality appropriate for acoustic analysis, representing a key improvement over existing New Orleans English corpora, and have been time-aligned with transcripts and phonetic notation for ease of analysis. This makes the resulting corpus the largest, most diverse, and most well annotated corpus ever created for New Orleans English. One goal in this project was to spur additional research on New Orleans English given the existing data set; it will be made available to other researchers upon request, to continue expanding knowledge about varieties of English spoken in New Orleans.

Our analysis focused on place- and race-linked identity, both of which exerted independent and intersecting effects on the sample. Black, white, and Creole participants not only demonstrated differing linguistic patterns linked to their group identity, but also different ways of relating to New Orleans as a place; in a way, these groups seemed to inhabit the same space, but different places, as each group characterized the 'true' New Orleans in different - and at times seemingly incompatible - ways. This seemed partially driven by historic racial and geographic segregation within the city, leading to development of neighborhood-based traditions that further separated these ethnic groups from each other. Black, white, and Creole New Orleanians were also affected by Hurricane Katrina in different ways, which had varying impacts on language practices across generations. These findings provide insights into the relationship between language, place, race, and identity, in particular in a context of rapid change following a natural disaster.

At Virginia Tech, 18 undergraduate research assistants worked on the data set via REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates), learning about linguistic patterns in New Orleans as well as gaining skills for processing linguistic data. Research assistants completed a range of tasks, including transcribing, coding, and analyzing linguistic variation. Multiple REU participants presented preliminary results at academic conferences around the country, gaining skills in expressing research outcomes. These students have gone on to pursue careers in linguistics, education, speech language pathology, and other allied fields, taking the experiences and skills of this research assistantship forward with them.

As a part of broader impacts, we developed a Dialect Awareness Curriculum in collaboration with local educators and experts on linguistic outreach. The curriculum focuses on early elementary school literacy, and how awareness of local dialectal variation might help teachers to close the literacy gap in New Orleans, while also valuing the linguistic resources that each student brings to the classroom. In this way, we mobilize our insights to serve the children of New Orleans, and tackle issues of linguistic discrimination.

Last Modified: 10/01/2024
Modified by: Katie Carmichael