NEWS RELEASE

Contact: David West (west@nsula.edu )
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466

4/10/2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NATCHITOCHES - A program celebrating a new book on southern language will be held at Northwestern State University Friday, April 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Friedman Student Union Ballroom. Admission is free and the public is invited to attend. The event is part of the 74th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics sponsored by the Northwestern Department of Language and Communication, the Louisiana Folklife Center, the College of Liberal Arts and the Northwestern State University Writing Project.

The book, being published this spring by the University of North Carolina Press, is the Language volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. That series of 24 paperbacks, edited at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, covers everything Southern from food to politics. The Friday evening program, "A Southern Linguistic Quilt," will include nine of the contributors to the volume who will play and comment on recordings of Southerners from Virginia to Louisiana and will sometimes perform. They will stitch together lively, colorful, and fascinating pieces of the fabric of Southern speech and demonstrate what it means to live and speak like a Southerner.

The program has been organized by the editors of the book, Ellen Johnson of Berry College and Michael Montgomery of the University of South Carolina. The featured contributors have each spent years studying particular Southern communities, emphasizing Southerners and the ways they use language.

Presenters will tell how natives of Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia, employ "Talking Backward" as an ironic way of expressing solidarity with one another as islanders and perhaps to amuse, if not also confuse, outsiders. Those attending will also hear Gullah from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and a tale from the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. The contrasting speech and rhythms used in black and white churches will be explained. Louisiana will also be included as you'll find stories (with translation) in Cajun French and Louisiana French Creole as well as stories from timber workers in northern Louisiana.

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