A Phonemic and Phonetic Analysis of the Folk Speech of Bedford County, Tennessee

Until recently, no systematic study of Tennessee folk speech had been performed. This study, descriptive in scope, will help fill a void and provide valuable data for determining Tennessee's relationship to other American dialects.

Five informants, each one fitting Hans Kurath's Type I, Group A classification, were interviewed using The Questionnaire for the Investigation of American Regional English: Based on the Work Sheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (Orton and Wright, 1972). The phonological material obtained from the five tape recorded interviews is presented in a unitary phonemic system along with characteristic allophonic and free variation (incidence of the phonemes).