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Welcome to the 504 Voices Dialect Awareness Curriculum! This document is intended to be a guide for teachers, especially those involved in literacy instruction at the K-3 level, in the New Orleans area. While we've written this to target a K-3 audience, we hope it will be of use to those teaching older students as well, in particular those providing remedial instruction. We've arranged the curriculum into five modules; you can start at the beginning and read straight through, or you can skip around to the sections you find most interesting. The purpose of this guide is to highlight the importance of dialect awareness in the instruction of reading and to provide teachers in New Orleans with a primer on features they may encounter in the classroom that may affect their instruction. 

In this paper, we present a focused perceptual dialectology study of variation in a single metropolitan area: New Orleans, Louisiana, long overlooked by linguists. We asked participants to complete a map-drawing activity using two maps, one of the city and its nearest suburbs, and one of the larger cultural zone. We also added the dimension of time by additionally asking participants to complete a map showing changes that have occurred since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which we identified as a catalyst for an increase in the rate of demographic change in the city. The results show that, unlike similar participants in other studies, African American and white New Orleanians draw the same city but label it differently, suggesting they occupy the same space but live in different places. When considering change over time, participants highlighted differences in the ethnic makeup of the city. We conclude that ethnicity in New Orleans is a key—if not the key—driver of perception both of linguistic variation and of change. With this study we confirm the importance of working with local actors to understand the way language practices map onto speakers’ understandings of space and place and the ways they may influence variation and change. The findings we present here provide us with key questions that will strengthen the results of production studies currently underway, demonstrating the significance of such work as a corollary to production studies.