The only book-length bibliography of the speech of an American region Catalogues the total range of scholarly and popular writing on the English spoken from Maryland to Texas, from Kentucky to Florida, focusing on the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, naming practices, word play, and other aspects of language that have interested researchers and writers for two centuries.

The sheer bulk of the listing, in excess of 3,800 items, attests the importance of Southern speech, long recognized as a distinguishing feature of the South, and the interest of Southerners in their speech as a mark of their identity. The entries recognize the variety of Southern dialects and the diversity of the language of such specific Southern groups as blacks, Appalachians, Sea Islanders, urbanites, and rural people, as well as the differences reflecting caste and class.

The writings on Southern American English compiled and annotated here include works of linguists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators, as well as popular commentators. The linguists include both theorists and dialect geographers. The study of Black English, which ahs proliferated since the first edition of this bibliography in 1971, is extensively reported, as are linguistic aspects of social and cultural adjustment arising from population mobility both inside and outside the region.