People from Horry County don't sound the same as people from the Smoky Mountains, whose dialect differs from New Orleans English; and Texans speak a variation on Southern English all their own.

Steve Nagle and Sara Sanders, English professors at Coastal Carolina University, have co-edited a new book, "English in the Southern United States," the most recent volume in Cambridge University Press' Studies in English Language Series. The book, intended as a textbook for linguistics studies, covers such subjects as how people in different areas of the same region have different speech patterns,

The history, sound, grammar and use of Southern English are among the topics in "English in the Southern United States," a collection of essays written by a team of linguistics experts, which was published recently. The book was conceived at the 1998 meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics as a festschrift, a collection of celebratory writing, to honor Michael Montgomery, a colleague who is highly respected in the field who is retiring.

Sanders, a South Carolina native, first became interested in the study of language during graduate school at the University of South Carolina. -Nagle, who is originally from New Jersey, - was on leave from Coastal pursuing doctoral work when they met at USC and discovered a shared scholarly interest in second-language learning and Southern English.