Article published In:
English World-WideVol. 32:1 (2011) ► pp.74–103
The fall of demonstrative them
Evidence from Appalachia
The varieties of English in the United States’ Appalachian region have undergone changes throughout the 20th century. This paper examines a change to one of the more stereotyped of vernacular dialect features, the use of them in a demonstrative determiner construction: them apples are the best. Although this dialect feature is found in English varieties around the world, this study is the first to take up a quantitative assessment of it as a sociolinguistic variable. In this paper, we discuss the historical background for demonstrative them, its current distribution in a corpus of modern Appalachian speech, and its relations to the other modern plural demonstratives, these and those. The data reveal that them functions primarily as an alternate to those, but the use of demonstrative them is sharply in decline across apparent time. As a stereotype of Appalachian speech, demonstrative them still remains, but younger Appalachian speakers have largely abandoned this stigmatized form.
Cited by
Cited by 11 other publications
Boberg, Charles
2021. Accent in North American Film and Television, 
Hasty, J. Daniel & Becky Childs
2021. Investigating Appalachian Englishes: Subregional Variation in the New Appalachia. Journal of Appalachian Studies 27:1 ► pp. 69 ff.
Hasty, J. Daniel & Becky Childs
2023. You ain’t from here, are you?: Subregional Variation and Identification in the New Appalachia. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage
Hazen, Kirk
2011. Flying high above the social radar: Coronal stop deletion in modern Appalachia. Language Variation and Change 23:1 ► pp. 105 ff.
Hazen, Kirk
2012. VARIABLE WORDS FROM VARIABLE Lives: TEACHING ABOUT LANGUAGE VARIATION FROM THE PAGES OF THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN REGIONAL ENGLISH
. American Speech 87:2 ► pp. 214 ff.
Hazen, Kirk
2018. The Contested Southernness of Appalachia. American Speech 93:3-4 ► pp. 374 ff.
Höhn, Georg F. K.
2020. The third person gap in adnominal pronoun constructions. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5:1
Kohn, Mary
2022. Teaching Grammar to Nonlinguists. American Speech 97:4 ► pp. 548 ff.
Moore, Emma & Sarah Spencer
2021. “It just sounds proper common”: Exploring the social meanings expressed by nonstandard grammar. Linguistics and Education 63 ► pp. 100933 ff.
RUPP, LAURA & SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE
2019. This here town: evidence for the development of the English determiner system from a vernacular demonstrative construction in York English. English Language and Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 81 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.