As I reflect on what is distinctive about this book, the word “seamless” comes to mind. Having experienced my share of multi-authored “readers,” pieced together around a broad subject representing diverse and sometimes conflicting, even contradictory, approaches, I find it refreshing to encounter an anthology that succeeds in introducing major questions in which leading scholars are currently engaged, and presenting them in sufficient detail and sophistication to serve as an invitation to join in the work.

The various contributions effectively fuse into a seamless product with several major themes, two of which I discuss in detail below. One concerns the relationship of Southern English to British dialects, the so-called British retentions hypothesis. The other involves the relationship of Southern English to African American language.

The notion of seamlessness may be applied not only to the manner in which the various contributions relate to the above themes, but also the notion – implicit in one of them – that Southern dialect and African American language are subcomponents of a single complex diachronic development with overlapping synchronic features. A third way in which the book achieves a seamless quality is in its function as a teaching tool. In that capacity, it benefits from the familiarity with dialects that most readers have as a consequence of their everyday experience. Their commonsense experience of the difference of British English from all varieties of American English, including Southern, provides a great platform for introduction of the British retentions theme. At a more general level, the notion of dialect that lay learners tend to bring with them into the classroom – an exotic entity spoken by others – can serve as the basis for a seamless transition to the more technical ways in which dialect is treated in linguistics.

As a teaching tool, the book has a number of advantages, including the fact that it is written with the conscious purpose of taking readers from an introductory to a more advanced level of understanding. A noteworthy example of how this end is accomplished is the inclusion of “Southern drawl” on several contributors' lists of core Southern features. At the same time that students learn the inadequacy of certain popular words for Southern dialect, such as twang, they learn that one such word, drawl, has a place in the technical lexicon of the field.

Students and other newcomers to the field of linguistics are provided a good introduction to many of the subtleties and complexities of the subject of language in the opening chapter by John Algeo, “The origins of Southern American English.” Algeo cautions readers to bear in mind that “Most talk about languages and their history – like talk about everything else – is metaphorical” (6). Against that backdrop, the importance of Algeo's point that “Southern American English is not a thing or a single entity” (8) is underscored, and students are better prepared to weight the specific arguments and supporting evidence presented in the following chapters.

The British retentions theme is developed by contrasting a default view that Southern English is composed of elements traceable to the British Isles, to the idea that many of the core features of Southern speech are innovations that occurred on American soil after the Civil War. The popular misconception that Southern dialect is a quaint relic of Elizabethan English is evoked by the title of Edgar Schneider's chap. 2, “Shakespeare in the coves and hollows?” Schneider's contribution is one of several that effectively utilize linguistic data from diverse sources to support their position on this issue. Schneider laments the limited availability of “direct written records of the speech forms of earlier days that we are interested in,” as he proceeds to discuss several useful sources at length, including a collection of Tennessee Civil War veterans questionnaires, and The Southern plantation overseer's corpus. He concludes with a very firm rejection of the notion that “Southern English is essentially a retention of older British dialectal forms,” insisting that such claims “simply cannot be upheld” (34).

Chap. 3, by Laura Wright, continues the interest in useful data sources begun in Schneider's piece. Without expressing a position on the British retentions issue, she presents data from London court and prison records which indicate that a number of features found in present-day Southern speech existed in the speech of prisoners included among the first settlers of the American colonies. The features selected for analysis call attention to the Southern vs. African American theme in that they include “invariant be,” “third-person present-tense indicative singular zero,” and “the zero-marked possessive.” Wright weaves into her article discussion of relevant issues in African American language studies in a manner that is typical of most contributions to the book. The next two articles, however – by Salikoko Mufwene, and Patricia Cukor-Avila, respectively – deal directly with African American language.

Mufwene's contribution departs sharply from the data-oriented emphases of the previous articles in a manner faithful to its title, “The shared ancestry of African American and American White Southern Englishes: Some speculations dictated by history.” While Mufwene's characterization of his argument as speculative is pretty accurate, he does cite “Evidence provided by the socioeconomic history of the United States” in support of “the Divergence Hypothesis.” In a far-reaching argument based on such diverse factors as rice vs. tobacco/cotton agriculture and “the mulatto phenomenon,” Mufwene makes the case that “AAVE shares many features with white nonstandard vernaculars and could not have developed from an erstwhile creole” (65).

Cukor-Avila's contribution, “The complex grammatical history of African-American and white vernaculars in the South,” begins with a systematic discussion of the various schools of thought that have contributed to the debate, including a section on “the divergence controversy,” and discusses recent research that has served “to keep the divergence hypothesis alive”; she notes that the term “linguistic innovations” has replaced “divergence.” The main focus of Cukor-Avila's article is a corpus of data collected in Springville, Texas, from white and African American subjects, and analyzed for the presence of selected grammatical features. The data presented contribute to the need for precise formulation of the nature and extent of overlap in the grammars of Black and White Southern varieties by pinpointing structures found in “AAVE grammar” but “not present in white vernaculars.”

The next chapter, by Cynthia Bernstein, focuses on three features which the author contends are “uniquely Southern”: yall, might could, and fixin to. Following that are two articles on Southern phonology. The first, by George Dorrill, includes the above-mentioned treatment of “Southern drawl.” The second, by Crawford Feagin, on “Vowel shifting in the Southern states,” includes a brief section on “African-American vowel shifting” in which she points out that “Southern Shift is not taking place in the Black community” (128), an assertion that provides tacit support for the divergence hypothesis.

The following article, Walt Wolfram on “Enclave dialect communities in the South,” deals primarily with dialects in North Carolina that Wolfram and his associates are currently studying. Inclusion of a brief reference at the beginning of the article to work by Poplack and colleagues on Samamá English is curious because that community is located in the Dominican Republic, outside the scope limited by the title. The omission of references to Samamá English data offered by other scholars in support of the creolist hypothesis contributes to the impression that subtle promotion of a pro-divergence view is an intentional feature of the book. If such is the case, anyone thinking about using it as a textbook would be well advised to assign supplemental readings that contribute to a balanced presentation of relevant issues.

The British retentions theme is picked up again in Jan Tillery & Guy Bailey's article (chap. 10), “Urbanization and Southern American English.” It examines several phonological and grammatical features that support the conclusion that Southern English is “not a conservative dialect bound to its past, but rather a dynamic, innovative variety that has experienced rapid, fundamental change over the last century and a quarter” (171).

Neither of the last two chapters – “The Englishes of southern Louisiana” by Connie Eble, and “Features and uses of Southern style” by Barbara Johnstone – deals directly or covertly with either the divergence hypothesis or the British retentions theme. The latter article refers to the extensive literature on African American discourse styles and discusses possible ways in which particular features of African American discourse may have influenced speech styles of white Southerners. Both pieces draw strength from the popularity of the subject matter and contribute to the book's pedagogical value.

Dedicated to Michael Montgomery, the book is a fitting acknowledgment of his iconic status in Southern language and cultural studies. Although none of the contributions bears his name, they all are replete with indications of his towering influence over the field.