A survey of written and spoken Tennessee English was recently begun. Work is in progress on the first stage of the project, which involves the compilation of a bibliography. Data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will be examined in planning the survey itself. The next stage will consist of the preparation of a questionnaire which will concentrate on informants' phonological, orthographic, and syntactic systems (data not collected by the LAGS project). Research techniques will be similar to those of the Arkansas Language Survey (ALS). The questionnaire is model-oriented rather than item-oriented, and enables the interviewer to record informants' speech in a wide range of styles. Samples of written English will also be collected. The general aims of the survey include: (1) the continued gathering of linguistic data useful for identifying geographic boundaries in Tennessee; (2) the investigation of the processes of obsolescence and replacement in the syntactic, phonological, and lexical systems of native Tennesseans; (3) the identification of the linguistic correlates of social stratification of Tennessee English in both its spoken and written forms; (4) the determination of the importance of style shifting as an explanation of linguistic variation in Tennessee; (5) the testing of the hypothesis that Americans generally have a negative attitude toward their own use of language; and (6) the gathering of data yielding information about the relationship between speech and writing. (Author/LG)