Virginia

English settlers encountered members of the Powhatan Indian confederacy, speakers of an Algonkian language, whose legacy includes such place-names as Roanoke and Rappahannock.

Although the expanding suburban area south of the District of Columbia has become dialectically heterogeneous, the rest of the state has retained its essentially Southern speech features. Many dialect markers occur statewide, but subregional contrasts distinguish the South Midland of the Appalachians from the Southern of the piedmont and Tidewater. General are batter bread (a soft corn cake), batter cake (pancake), comfort (tied and filled bed cover), and polecat (skunk). Widespread pronunciation features include greasy with a /z/ sound; yeast and east as sound-alikes, creek rhyming with peek, and can't with paint; coop and bulge with the vowel of book; and forest with an /ah/ sound.

The Tidewater is set off by creek meaning a saltwater inlet, fishing worm for earthworm, and fog as /fahg/. Appalachian South Midland has redworm for earthworm, fog as /fawg/, wash as /wawsh/, Mary and merry as sound-alikes, and poor with the vowel of book . The Richmond area is noted also for having two variants of the long /i/ and /ow/ diphthongs as they occur before voiceless and voiced consonants, so that the vowel in the noun house is quite different from the vowel in the verb house, and the vowel in advice differs from that in advise . The Tidewater exhibits similar features.

In 2000, Virginia residents five years of age and over who spoke only English at home numbered 5,884,075, or 88.9% of the total population, down from 92.7% in 1990.

The following table gives selected statistics from the 2000 census for language spoken at home by persons five years old and over. The category "African languages" includes Amharic, Ibo, Twi, Yoruba, Bantu, Swahili, and Somali. The category "Other Indic languages" includes Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and

Romany. The category "Other Asian languages" includes Dravidian languages, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, and Turkish.

LANGUAGE	NUMBER	PERCENT
Population 5 years and over	6,619,266	100.0
Speak only English	5,884,075	88.9
Speak a language other than English	735,191	11.1
Speak a language other than English	735,191	11.1
Spanish or Spanish Creole	316,274	4.8
French (incl. Patois, Cajun)	40,117	0.6
Korean	39,636	0.6
Tagalog	33,598	0.5
German	32,736	0.5
Vietnamese	31,918	0.5
Chinese	29,837	0.5
Arabic	25,984	0.4
African languages	21,164	0.3
Persian	19,199	0.3
Urdu	15,250	0.2
Other Indic languages	13,767	0.2
Other Asian languages	12,115	0.2
Hindi	11,947	0.2
Italian	10,099	0.2