Ellen Johnson 
Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States, 1930-1990 [PDF ebook] 

This book discusses words used in the Southeast and how they have changedduring the 20th century. It also describes how the lexicon varies accordingto the speaker’s age, race, education, sex, and place of residence(urban versus rural; coastal versus piedmont versus mountain). Data collectedin the 1930s as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States project were compared with data collected in 1990 from similar speakersin the same communities.The results show that region was the most importantfactor in differentiating dialects in the 1930s but that it is the leastimportant element in the 1990s, with age, education, race, and age allshowing about the same influence on the use of vocabulary. An appendixcontains a tally of the responses given by 78 speakers to 150 questionsabout vocabulary items, along with speakers’ commentary. Resultsfrom the 1930s may be compared to those from 1990, making this a treasuretrove for anyone interested in regional terms or in how our speech is changingas the South moves from an agricultural economy through industrializationand into the information age.