Lexical Change in Kentucky Speech

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1998

Abstract

Analysis of the field records for Kentucky has established that Kentucky is clearly situated in the Midland region of American speech (Irons 1997). This paper presents preliminary findings of a project designed to answer the following questions: to what extent is this dialect maintained in Kentucky and to what extent has it changed over the last half century. The data covered here are only lexical. The results show a decline in regionality in the nature of Kentucky speech and imply a need to redefine how regionality of speech, especially in lexical terms, is determined.

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