How they speak in Hampton Roads

OLD team records area's accent - English with 'deep roots'. The project she refers to, "Tidewater Voices: Conversations in Southeastern Virginia," requires students to find people who are born here and persuade them to talk about themselves. The effort has a dual purpose: recording the narratives of people to add to the region's oral history, and analyzing those interviews for their dialects, pronunciations and syntax. Students have collected more than 80 oral histories, which will go into a book and CD that Anderson and the students hope to complete in the spring. The finished work will highlight how the local language fits into the broader spectrum of Southern and American English.