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Article Evaluation

Chose to edit Southern American English and review it. Can't find any problems with it; all the links I clicked worked, and there was no persuasive language. Just a factual, historically accurate (to my knowledge) summary of Southern American English.

Scrapped the old idea on fixing hyperlinks; instead, adding to sections of the article in terms of dialects spoken in New Orleans as well as history behind the language that isn't given in the article.

Questions:
 * Other dialects besides Yat? They would go under Local Variance. Example of section proposed to be added listed below... Also planning to divvy up the different kinds of accents and add a section for each
 * What is New Orleans English? Article is unclear on its conception, and the lead is unfocused
 * Prune dead links, such as the Allan A. Metcalf one
 * Prune redundant links, such as the link to Ireland and Immigrants
 * Add actual examples of accents spoken in New Orleans

EXAMPLE OF CHANGES IN HISTORY SECTION OF NEW ORLEANS ENGLISH BELOW

History
Port cities like New Orleans and New York City (with regard to the surrounding boroughs) have caused the growth of similar dialects as both cities attracted many European immigrants during the 19th century. The result has yielded similar dialects which combine sounds from Irish, German, Italian, and many other immigrants' speech which have blended with the local dialect to create a new variant.

Allan A. Metcalf discusses the socioeconomic associations linked with speakers of Yat. He notes that Yats mostly live near the Irish Channel in blue-collar neighborhoods. The dialect's connotation with the working class, white population encodes the speaker’s identities. Metcalf describes the historical linguistic setting of Louisiana from the Choctaw to the French along with Spanish and English.

The origins of the accent are described in A. J. Liebling's book The Earl of Louisiana, in a passage that was used as a foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole's well-known posthumously published novel about New Orleans:

There is a New Orleans city accent. . . associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.

Today, few citizens of German or Irish background occupy the Third Ward; the presence of immigrant groups in the city of New Orleans, however, has inevitably led to the formation of the Yat dialect.

Historically, the city of New Orleans has been home to people of French and Spanish heritage, as well as those of African heritage, which led to the creation of the Louisiana Creole language. This city came under U.S. rule in the Louisiana Purchase, and over the course of the 19th century, the city transitioned from speaking French to becoming a non-rhotic English speaking society. Similarly, much of the south has historically spoken non-rhotic English. The city's geographic isolation has helped lead to the creation of a new local dialect.

A misconception in other parts of the US is that the local dialect of New Orleans is Cajun. The city's cultural and linguistic traditions are distinct from that of the predominantly rural Acadiana, an area spanning across South Louisiana. While there has been an influx of Cajuns into the city since the oil boom of the later 20th century and while there are some similarities due to shared roots, Cajun culture has had relatively little influence upon Creole culture and thus Yat culture. The confusion of Cajun culture with the Creole culture is largely due to the confusion of these French cultures by the tourism and entertainment industries; sometimes this was done deliberately, as "Cajun" was often discovered to be a potentially lucrative marketing term.

A Yat accent, is a creole accent and is considered an identity marker of white, metropolitan people who have been raised in the greater New Orleans area. Speakers with a New Orleans accent are typically proud of their accent as it organically stems from the historical mixing of language and culture. This distinctive accent has been dying out generationally in the city due to white flight of the city, but remains very strong in the suburbs. However, the creole Yat dialect does survive in the city in several areas, notably Mid-city, Lakeview, parts of Gentilly and Uptown.

Pronunciation
Numerous phonological differences occur between words pronounced in the dialect and their standard equivalents, most often in the form a stress-shift toward the front of a word (i.e., 'insurance', 'ambulance' as, ), or in the form of a change in vowel quality. A southern tendency that shifts vowel sounds known as monophthongization has distinctly separated Yat from other port city dialects.

Some of the most distinct features are:
 * the rounding and lowering in some cases of and  to  (i.e.,  'God,' 'on,' 'talk', become, , )
 * the loss of rhoticity on syllables ending in (i.e. 'heart,' fire' become, )
 * the full rhoticization of a syllable-internal (i.e. 'toilet,' becomes ). This feature is more typical in men than in women.
 * the loss of frication in the interdental fricatives and  (i.e. 'the,' 'there,' 'strength' become, , )
 * the substitution of or  (spelled -in, -en) for  (spelled -ing)
 * the split of the historic short-a class into tense and lax  versions
 * the coil–curl merger of the phonemes and, creating the diphthong , before a consonant, in words such as boil, oil, and spoil, although this feature has mostly receded, except St. Bernard Parish

There are some words with phonemic incidence, yet according to no particular pattern, including 'sink', 'room' , 'mayonnaise' , 'museum' , 'ask'.

New Orleans is pronounced, or with the  still intact. The N'awlins' of the tourist industry and the common  are not to be heard among natives. Louisiana is pronounced as the standard or a slightly reduced, or as.

Additional sources to hopefully be procured that will assist in editing and fixing the article
Dillard, J. L. 1985. Language and linguistic research in Louisiana. Pp. 1-42 in Nicholas Spitzer (ed.) Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to    the State. Baton Rouge: Moran Colographics, Inc. Lestrade, Patricia. 2002. The continuing decline of Isleño Spanish in Louisiana. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 21:99-117. Lipski, John M. 1990. The Language of the Isleños: Vestigial Spanish in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Starnes, Mary. 1994. Attitudes toward Yat dialect speakers in New Orleans, Louisiana. Pp. 21-32 in Linda DePascual, et al. (eds.) New Orleans Neighborhood Talk. New Orleans: Loyola University of New Orleans.

Mjd2's peer view
The Wikipedia article definitely lack with citation and resources. You could possibly add more to the linguistic features it is missing a large portion of information that could make the article better. I saw what you plan on adding to the article and agree information to the background. Just finding credible sources would help that article a lot. It is a rather short article that could greatly improved. Darceyguffey (talk) 6:58, 19 March 2018