Recently I dated a young woman who spoke the most alluring South-Central Virginian dialect. In terms of Standard American English, it was a linguistic train-wreck. Double negatives, bizarre compound past tenses, subject/verb fistfights and mellifluous pronunciation found deep in the Shenandoah and exactly nowhere else on Earth. It just charmed me cross-eyed. She figured this out soon enough, and whenever she didn’t get my attention by texting me, she would call me up and talk to me and I’d melt. Her dialect, though, was a source of deep shame and embarrassment to her. She was forever being “corrected” by people who were fiercely jealous of her and she knew that when she was in Fairfax, Virginia, she sounded different from other people at her university. Charmed by Language Linguists – those trained in the scientific study of language – are never…