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Essays & Articles

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Do You Speak American? article index to learn more!

Words That Shouldn’t Be?

• Sez Who?
  
• Born in the USA
• Campus Talk
• Hip Hop Nation
• Summary
• The Truth About Change
• Summary
• Language & Society
• Summary
  
• Like, Quote Me
• The Oxford English Dictionary
• The Power of Slang
• Summary
• Slayer Slang
• Wired Words
• Summary
• World Wide Web of Words

From Sea to Shining Sea

• American Dialects & Varieties
• A-Prefixing
• African American English (AAE)
  
• Creole History of AAE
• Ebonics Timeline
• Ebony + Phonics: Comprehending Ebonics
• Summary
• Hooked on Ebonics
• IMing in Appalachia
• Language Diversity
• When Worlds Collide
• Are Dialects Fading?
  
• Cajun English
  
• California English
• Talking with Mi Gente
• Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
• Linguistic Profiling
• On the Road: Life in a DARE Word Wagon
• Lumbee Dialect
• Historical Timeline
• Lumbee Publications
• The Midwest Accent
• New York Style
• Pacific Northwest
  
• Steel Town Speak
  
• Yinzburgh, an online community
• Smoky Mountain Speech
• Talking New York
• Sounds of the South
• Rful Southern
• Summary
• Dahling
• Spanglish
• Diversity on Campus
• Habla Español? (Does Spanish Threaten American English?)
  
• Spanish in the USA
• Spanglish: the Making of a New American Language
• ¡Viva Spanglish!
• Texas English
  
• Drawl or Nothin’
  
• Standard American
• Do You Speak Presidential?
• Presidential Voices
• How Hamlet Lost His Drawl
• My True Voice – A Pittsburgh Experiment
• My True Voice in Action – Samples from the Program
• Official American
• Don’t Make English Official - Ban it Instead!
  
• English Only – The Legendary English-Only Vote of 1795
• National American? (John Adams – Our Second President’s View on Official English)
  
• The Power of Prose
• African American Women
  
• American Debuts
• The American Voice
  
• Arab & South Asian Voices
  
• Asian Americans
• Border Tongue
• Cuban-American Voices
• Debut
  
• Harlem Renaissance & Beyond
• Hawaiian Islands
  
• Native American Voices
• The Northeast
• Voices of the South
• The American Southwest
• Texas and  the West
• The Urban Landscape
  
• The WPA

What Speech Do We Like Best?

• Beastly Mispronunciations
• Correct American?
• Decline of Grammar
• Gatekeeping
  
• Summary
• State of American
• Language as Prestige
• Crossing Over
  
• Summary
• Language Prejudice
• They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City
  
• Watch You Language
• Women Talk To Much
• What is Sociolinguistics?
• A Linguist's Journey
• Managing Language
• Summary
• Social Identity
  
• Sociolinguistics Basics
  
• Summary

What Lies Ahead?

• Language Change
  
• Vowel Shiting
• Summary
• Americans are Ruining English
  
• Global American
• Global English
  
• The Power of Mass Media
• Talk the Talk?
  
• Summary
• The Vanishing Verb
• Technology Spotlight
• Machine Voices
• Summary
• Talk to the Screen