9319577 WOLFRAM ABSTRACT This project examines the sociolinguistic significance of a set of Southeastern seaboard island communities located on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Four primary research sites and several different secondary sites are being studied. Ocracoke, an Outer Banks island community settled in the early 1700s and still inaccessible by automobile, was selected for detailed sociolinguistic and ethnographic study. This variety is compared with the speech of two other Outer Banks communities which are now accessible by automobile, Harkers Island and Hatteras, as well as a contiguous mainland costal community, Beaufort, North Carolina. Data from these sites are, in turn, compared with previously collected data from other types of historically- isolated areas, including the Appalachian and Ozark mountains, and the Eastern Shore dialect area of Smith Island off the coast of Maryland. Data sources consist of a set of cross-generational sociolinguistic interviews being conducted in the four primary dialect areas, a set of previously collected oral history interviews providing for time-depth studies, a set of interviews conducted in connection with sociolinguistic studies in other historically-isolated situations, and a limited set of earlier written historical records reflecting Outer Banks varieties of the 1700 and 1800s. The particular set of socio-historical circumstances that combined to create the prototypical quasi-isolated island community makes it ideal for the empirically-based examination of general sociolinguistic principles relating to dialect contact, assimilation, and change. This study also provides an important basis for examining assumptions related to the apparent time construct and the critical intersection of social and linguistic structures in the description and explanation of language variation and change. ***
