This book provides a very readable and up-to-date description of language variation in American English, covering regional, ethnic, and gender-based differences. The authors include situations ranging from historically isolated, rural dialects to developing, urban ethnic varieties as they consider the descriptive, theoretical, and applied ramifications of dialects in American society. The second edition of American English includes new chapters on social and ethnic dialects, including more comprehensive discussions of Latino, Native American, Cajun English, and other varieties, samples from a wider array of US regions, and a separate chapter on African American English. Updated chapters and exercises as well as features such as a phonetic symbols key, and a section on the notion of speech community, combine to make the new edition a valuable resource for students and specialists alike.

Author Biography

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University, and author or co-author of 17 books and over 250 articles, including The Development of African American English (with Erik Thomas, Blackwell 2002) and American Voices (edited with Ben Ward, Blackwell 2006). Natalie Schilling-Estes is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is co-author of Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue (with Walt Wolfram, 1997) and co-editor of The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (with J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill, Blackwell 2002).