ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses interpretation of the fieldwork carried out by Shana Poplack in Brazil. The development of bidirectional changes depends on the existence of forks in the road, where an unstable linguistic situation may be resolved in one of two manners. Bailey's oldest record of Southern phonology, a Civil War veteran, showed no evidence of the Southern Shift, and, in particular, no monophthongization of /ay/, although he does show the Southern features of vocalization of postvocalic /r/ and diphthongization of /oh/. But one must also consider the influence of Portuguese on bilingual speakers, and it is always possible that the upper mid position is a result of such an influence. The tokens gave and came are clearly monophthongal in a way that is phonetically distant from /ey/ in the present-day American South. It is therefore possible that the Southern Shift was advanced when the Confederate soldiers came to Brazil than the current evidence from this expatriate population indicates.
