After completing his graduate work, Primer returned to the United States, teaching first at Brown University (1880–1881). He taught at the College of Charleston in South Carolina from 1881 to 1890. During this period, he first directed scholarly attention toward the unique dialect of the city of Charleston in a paper he delivered at the Modern Language Association of America in 1887. This pioneering work, "Charleston Provincialisms" (1887), is one of the first attempts by a scholar to describe the speech of an American community. It was published as part of the "Transactions of the Modern Language Association", vol. III, 1888, p. 84–99; it was also published in Europe in "Phonetische Studien", vol. i, 1888, p. 227; and in the "American Journal of Philology", IX (1888), p. 198–213.