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People make quick judgments about dialects, professor says
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Published: March 22, 2009
HICKORY - The moment we speak, people form an opinion about us, Walt Wolfram says.
"Language may be the last unacknowledged prejudice," Wolfram, a professor of linguistics at N.C. State University, said during a talk this past week in Hickory. "You can't say you don't get a job because you don't talk right."
Wolfram spoke at the Champions of Education breakfast Thursday.
He said that no matter how one talks, something in their voice gives their biographical details away in the first few seconds.
"On the basis of voice, you make assumptions. We do linguistic profiling," Wolfram said. "When someone talks differently, we notice. It affects all of our lives."
He said that there are pronounced differences even across the state, from the Appalachian Mountains to Ocracoke Island.
He said that the original dialect of Ocracoke Island is dying out and should be preserved.
Wolfram even touched briefly on the dialects of Spanish-speaking immigrants, saying they may be undergoing some stigma for their dialects, but it is what thousands of immigrants before them underwent when they first came to the country.
"It's never about the language, it's about what it represents. It's about what Spanish represents," Wolfram said.
He showed a clip from a documentary he helped create, Mountain Talk, which showed how a dialect can morph in certain parts of the country.
In one mountain town, the residents, who have lived there most of their lives, have created their own words, including si-gogglin (cock-eyed), airish (chilly) and gaum (cluttered).
Wolfram is creating a 450-minute linguistic unit that can be taught in schools to go along with the state standard course of study that describes the different languages and their dialects now spoken in North Carolina.
■ Sarah Newell Williamson writes for the Hickory Daily Record.
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