Professional regional dialects?
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During my many years serving as an expert witness I learned, among other things, that lawyers in one part of the US pronounce certain legal terms in ways that lawyers in other parts of the country do not. My favorite is their variation in pronouncing voir dire. In most of the country I hear them say vwahr deer, more or less the French way, although some drop the "r" on the end of voir. But in parts of the South this comes out more like vohr dyer, although sometimes you can hear a third syllable in the second word, making it sound like a private journal, a diary.
Until recently, I hadn't thought much about the possibility that professionals, like doctors and lawyers, might have professional regional dialects. By this I don't mean the general regional dialects of their areas. Even US presidents speak some version of those. And I don't mean saying "nucular" for "nuclear" or "gummit" for "government." Neither of these pronunciations seems to be regionally distributed. What I've begun to wonder is if there might be such things as Northern, North Midland, South Midland, and Southern versions of the legal expressions commonly used by lawyers.
Recently, over at the Volokh Conspiracy July 29, 2008 I read that there is a lawyer's word that is found only in the state of Georgia, where Eugene Volokh reports that the courts try to avoid the conceptual difficulty of deciding whether radio and television broadcasts should be labeled "libel" or "slander" by referring to them as "defamacasts." In some states lawyers pigeonhole broadcasting either as libel or slander, but not Georgia, where "defamacast" is the accepted term. It looks like there must be a dialect isolgloss framing the boundaries of that state alone.
I wonder if some enterprising dialectologist might discover other isoglosses of regional legal vocabulary, pronunciation, and maybe even grammar. This could be the next step in our unending search for structured language variation.