INVESTIGATING SELF-CONSCIOUS SPEECH - THE PERFORMANCE REGISTER IN OCRACOKE ENGLISH

This article examines PERFORMANCE SPEECH in the historically isolated island community of Ocracoke, North Carolina. Over the past several de cades islanders have come into increasingly frequent contact with tour ists and new residents, who often comment on the island's ''quaint'' r elic dialect. In response, some Ocracokers have developed performance phrases that highlight island features, particularly the pronunciation of/ay/with a raised/backed nucleus, i.e. [Lambda(h)]. The analysis of /ay/in the performance and non-performance speech of a representative Ocracoke speaker yields several important insights for the study of la nguage in its social context. First, performance speech may display mo re regular patterning than has traditionally been assumed. Second, it lends insight into speaker perception of language features. Finally, t he incorporation of performance speech into the variationist-based stu dy of style-shifting offers support for the growing belief that style- shifting may be primarily proactive rather than reactive.