Clai Rice and Wilbur Bennett
 

This paper will present the initial results of what van Herk 2008 calls "A Very Big Class Project" (222), a project investigating the perceptions that residents of Southwest Louisiana have of the dialects spoken in the area. Research on English dialects in Southern Louisiana has often compressed variant dialectal forms under the label "Cajun English" (Oetting and Garrity 2006) or deliberately restricted it by race (Dubois and Horvath 2003a, 2003b), despite awareness that a wide range of variation exists in the geographical area. We are curious to discover if there are characteristics distinctive to a particular geographical region that are not captured by the standard description of Cajun or Creole English. The research goal of the 1st phase was to identify areas of Southwest Louisiana that many residents feel have recognizable dialect characteristics and to see what kind of sociological labels are used by residents in discussion of local dialects. The associated pedagogical goal was to involve students in a project that reinforces the information and skills provided in the class, using tasks equal to their increasing skill levels, inspire the students to participate, and importantly, constitute "real research" (Van Herk 228). 
            The semester-long project consisted of four steps: information collection, normalization, interpretation, and reporting. Each step was preceded by instruction and followed by discussion. After the phonology and variation components of the course were completed, students interviewed local residents with questions and a map that helped elicit information about where residents believed people spoke a different dialect and what qualities make up those dialects. After normalizing the responses, picking out dialect labels and identifying geographical areas, students entered the results in an inline database. Finally, they wrote a summary of their findings, comparing them with the results of other students from the database. We are still compiling the overall results, but expect to report on labels frequently used to describe areas of significant dialect difference, such as New Orleans, on the role of racial terms within those labels, and on differences among parishes and cities surrounding Lafayette. We will also report the results of the first step for the project in the Spring 2009 courses, which will be how to refine the questionnaire or map to focus more on local variation.

References

            Burns-Hoffman, Rebecca. 2007. "Designing the Introductory Linguistics Course Project." Paper presented at SECOL, Nagadoches, LA. 
            Dubois, Sylvie, and Barbarba Horvath. 2002. "Sounding Cajun: The Rhetorical Use of Dialect in Speech and Writing." American Speech 77: 264-287. 
            Dubois, Sylvie, and Barbarba Horvath. 2003a. "The English Vernacular of the Creoles of Louisiana." Language Variation and Change 15: 153-286. 
            Dubois, Sylvie, and Barbarba Horvath. 2003b. "Verbal Morphology in Cajun Vernacular English." Journal of English Linguistics 31: 34-59. 
            van Herk, Gerard. 2008. "The Very Big Class Project: Collaborative Language Research in Large Undergraduate Classes." American Speech 83: 222-30. 
            Oetting, Janna B., and April Wimberly Garrity. 2006. "Variation Within Dialects: A Case of Cajun/Creole Influence Within Child SAAE and SWE." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49: 16-26.