ABSTRACT
In his recent analysis of the sociolinguistic construct remnant dialect community, Walt Wolfram maintains that such a community “retains vestiges of earlier language varieties that have receded among speakers in the more widespread population". Many African American communities in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, as well as a few in North Carolina and Florida, retain vestiges of African languages spoken by their ancestors, particularly in some grammatical constructions of the creole language often used among themselves. As a White woman born and educated in a nearby community on the Waccamaw River, the author needed both patience and time to establish credentials through work that the African American community valued. The author's contribution to helping the community value its own speech patterns was not the direct type of linguistic gratuity, as described by Wolfram, in which the linguist helps the community appreciate its own speech patterns.
