Older Southern American English is a diverse set ofEnglish dialects of theSouthern United States spoken most widely during the mid-19th century, gradually transforming among itsWhite speakers—possibly first due to economy-driven migrations following theAmerican Civil War—up until the mid-20th century.[1] By then, these local dialects had largely consolidated into, or been replaced by, a more regionally unifiedSouthern American English. Meanwhile, among Black Southerners, these dialects transformed into a fairly stableAfrican-American Vernacular English, now spoken nationwide among Black people.[2] Certain features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, likenon-rhoticity, though typically only among Black speakers or among very localized White speakers.
This group ofAmerican English dialects evolved over two hundred years from the older varieties ofBritish English primarily spoken by those who initially settled the area. Given that language is an entity that is constantly changing,[3] the English varieties of the colonists were quite different from any variety of English spoken today. In the early 1600s, the initial English-speaking settlers of theTidewater area of Virginia, thefirst permanent English colony in North America, spoke a variety ofEarly Modern English, which itself was diverse.[4] The older Southern dialects thus originated in varying degrees from a mix of the speech of these and later immigrants from many different regions of theBritish Isles who moved to the American South in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as perhaps the English, creole, and post-creole speech of African and African-American slaves.
One theory of historianDavid Hackett Fischer's bookAlbion's Seed is that indentured servants chiefly from England'sSouth andMidlands primarily settled the Tidewater (Virginia) region and poorNorthern English andUlster Scots families primarily settled the Appalachian Southernbackcountry, so that the Tidewater and backcountry dialects were most directly influenced by those two immigrant populations, respectively.[5] Indeed, theAppalachian dialect shows such likely immigrant influences as evidenced by, for example, their consistent preservation ofrhoticity.[6][7] However, linguists have disputed many of the specifics of Fischer's theory, instead arguing that dialect-mixing in both regions was in fact more varied and widespread.[8] For example, anAppalachian Journal linguistic article reveals the flawed premises and misrepresentation of sources inAlbion's Seed and asserts that the early Southern dialects are actually difficult to trace to any singular influence.[9]
In the decades following theAmerican Revolution of the 1760s to 1780s, major population centers of the coastal American South, such asNorfolk, Virginia, andCharleston, South Carolina, maintained strong commercial and cultural ties to southern England around London. Thus, as the upper-class standard dialect around London changed, some of its features were mirrored by: the dialects of upper-class Americans in eastern Virginia and the Charleston area, followed by the dialects of the surrounding regions in general, regardless of socioeconomic class. One such example accent feature is the "r-dropping" (ornon-rhoticity) of the late 18th and early 19th century, resulting in the similarr-dropping found in these American areas during the cultural "Old South". Contrarily, in Southern areas away from the major coasts and plantations (like Appalachia), on certain isolated islands, and variously among lower-class White speakers, accents mostly remained rhotic. Another example feature is the British-styletrap–bath split, which also helped define the eastern Virginia accent. The split was also adopted in the Gulf, Appalachian, and plantation regions of the South, though with their own articulation distinct from the British one. (The feature is extinct in virtually all these areas today.)[10]
After the Civil War, the growth of timber, coal, railroad, steel, textile, and tobacco mill industries throughout the South, along with the whole country's resulting migration changes, likely contributed to the expansion of a more unified Southern accent (now associated with the 20th century), which gradually ousted 19th-century Southern accents.[11] The South's 19th-century linguistic prestige was rooted in the plantation areas and higher-class White people, including features such as non-rhoticity. However, by the mid-20th century, linguistic features originating from Texas, Appalachian towns, and lower-class White people—such as rhoticity—were suddenly expanding throughout all the Southern States.
Also, before World War II, the demographic tendency of the South was out-migration, but after the war a counter-tendency emerged in the Southern cities, which received masses of migrant workers from the North: another possible motivation for the abandonment of older Southern accent features. Finally, the Civil Rights Movement seems to have led White and Black Southerners alike to resist accent features associated with the other racial group and even develop newly distinguishing features, which may have further contributed to the sudden mid-20th-century adoption of rhoticity among White Southerners of all classes, despite continuing non-rhoticity among Black Americans.[11] Today, this linguistic divide on the basis of rhoticity, alongside other accent features, largely persists between Black versus White Southerners.
The phonologies of early Southern English in the United States were diverse. The following pronunciation features were very generally characteristic of the older Southern region as a whole:
[ɜɪ~əɪ] (non-rhotic before a consonant) or [ɜː] (non-rhotic) or [ɜɚ] (rhotic)
nurse, search, worm
/iː/
[iː~ɪi]
fleece, me, neat
/ɪ/
[ɪ]
kit, mid, pick
happy, money, sari
/oʊ/
[ɔu~ɒu] (after late 1800s) or [oː~uː] (plantation possibility)
goat, no, throw
/ɔ/
[ɔo]
thought, vault, yawn
cloth, lost,off
/ɔɪ/
[ɔoɪ] or [oɛ~oə] (plantation possibility)
choice, joy, loin
/ʌ/
[ɜ] or [ʌ] (plantation possibility)
strut, tough, won
Lack ofYod-dropping: Pairs likedo anddue, ortoon andtune, were often distinct in these dialects because words likedue,lute,new, etc. historically contained adiphthong similar to/ju/ (like theyou sound incute orpuny).[13] (as England'sRP standard pronunciation still does), but Labov et al. report that the only Southern speakers who make a distinction today use a diphthong/ɪu/ in such words.[14] They further report that speakers with the distinction are found primarily inNorth Carolina and northwestSouth Carolina, and in a corridor extending fromJackson toTallahassee. For most of the South, this feature began disappearing after World War II.[15]
Yod-coalescence: Words likedew were pronounced as "Jew", andTuesday as "choose day."
Wine–whine distinction: distinction between "w" and "wh" in words like "wine" and "whine", "witch and "which", etc.
Horse–hoarse distinction: distinction between pairs of words like "horse" and "hoarse", "for" and "four", etc.
Rhoticity and non-rhoticity: The pronunciation of ther sound only before or between vowels, but notafter vowels, is known as non-rhoticity and was historically associated with the major plantation regions of the South: specifically, the entirePiedmont and most of the South's Atlantic Coast in a band going west towards theMississippi River, as well as all of theMississippi Embayment and some of the westernGulf Coastal Plain. This was presumably influenced by the non-rhotic East Anglia and London England pronunciation. Additionally, some older Southern dialects were even "variably non-rhotic in intra-word intervocalic contexts, as incarry [kʰæi]."[12] Rhotic accents of the older Southern dialects, which fully pronounce all historicalr sounds, were somewhat rarer and primarily spoken inAppalachia, the eastern Gulf Coastal Plain, and the areas west of the Mississippi Embayment.[16]
Palatalization of /k/ and /g/ before /ɑr/: Especially in the older South along the Atlantic Coast, the consonants/k/ (as inkey orcoo) and/ɡ/ (as inguy orgo), when before the sound/ɑːr/ (as incar orbarn), were often pronounced with the tongue fronted towards thehard palate. Thus, for example,garden in older Southern was something like "gyah(r)den"[ˈgjɑ(ɹ)dən] and "cart" like "kyah(r)t"[cʰjɑ(ɹ)t]. This pronunciation feature was in decline by the late 1800s.[15]
Lack or near-lack of/aɪ/ glide weakening: The gliding vowel in words likeprize (but less commonly inprice or other situations of this vowel appearing before avoiceless consonant) commonly has a "weakened" glide today in the South; however, this only became a documented feature since the last quarter of the 1800s and was otherwise absent or inconsistent in earlier Southern dialects. Today, the lack of glide weakening persists in theHigh Tider and updated Lowcountry accents. Full weakening has become a defining feature only of the modern Southern dialects, particularly the most advanced sub-varieties.[17]
Mary–marry–merry distinction: Unlike most of the U.S. and modern Southern, older Southern did not merge the following three vowels before /r/: [e~eə] (as inMary), [æ] (as inmarry), and [ɛ] (as inmerry). Although the three are now merging or merged in modern Southern English, the "marry" class of words remains the least likely among modern Southerners to merge with the other two.[18]
Clear /l/ between front vowels: Unlike modern Southern and General American English's universally"dark" /l/ sound (often represented as [ɫ]), older Southern pronunciation had a "clear" (i.e.non-velarized) /l/ sound whenever /l/ appears betweenfront vowels, as in the wordssilly,mealy,Nellie, etc.[15]
Was,what andof pronounced with [ɑ]: The stressed wordwhat, for example, rhymed withcot (not withcut, as it does elsewhere in the U.S.).[19]
Nohappy-tensing: The final vowel of words likehappy, silly, monkey, parties, etc. were not tensed as they are in newer Southern and other U.S. dialects, meaning that this vowel sounded more like the[ɪ] offit than the[i] offeet.
/oʊ/, as ingoat, toe, robe, etc., kept a back starting place (unlike most Southern since World War II, but like most Northern U.S. dialects today); this became anopener[ɔu~ɒu] in the early 1900s.[19] The modern fronted form of the Atlantic South started as far back as the 1800s in northeastern North Carolina, in the form[ɜy], but only spread slowly, until accelerating after World War II.[20]
/ʃr/ pronounced as[sɹ] (e.g. causingshrimp,shrub, etc. to sound likesrimp,srub, etc.); this feature was reported earliest in Virginia.[21]
The area in dark purple approximates the Plantation Southern dialect region, excluding theLowcountry (the Atlantic coast of South Carolina and Georgia).
Older speech of thePlantation South included those features above, plus:
Non-rhoticity:R-dropping historically occurred in the greater central sections of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and in coastal Texas and some other coastal communities of the Gulf states. Rhoticity (orr-fulness) was more likely in the southernmost sections of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as in northern Florida, western Louisiana, and eastern Texas.[22]
Trap–bath split: Words likebath,dance, andask, used a different vowel ([æ̈ɛ~æ̈e]) than words liketrap,cat, andrag ([æ~æ̈ɛæ̈]).[10] A similarly organized (though different-sounding) split occurs inStandard British English.
/eɪ/, as inface, was inconsistently pronounced[e̝ː].[23]
/oʊ/, as ingoat, was inconsistently pronounced[o̝ː].[20]
Due to the former isolation of some regions of theAppalachian South, a uniqueAppalachian accent developed. This dialect is rhotic, meaning speakers consistently preserve the historical phoneme/r/. Moreover, Appalachians may eveninsert it innovatively into certain words (for example, "worsh" or "warsh" for "wash").
The dialect here is often thought to be a window into the past, with various claims having been made that it is either a surviving pocket of Elizabethan English or the way that thepeople of Scotch-Irish origin that make up a large fraction of the population there would have spoken back when they first migrated and settled there. However, these are both incorrect. Though some of the distinctive words used in Appalachia have their origins in the Anglo-Scottish border region, a more realistic comparison is the way that some people in North America would have spoken in the colonial period.
Researchers have noted that the dialect retains a lot of vocabulary with roots in "Early Modern English" owing to the make-up of the early European settlers to the area.[26]
The Lowcountry, most famously centering on the cities ofCharleston, South Carolina andSavannah, Georgia, once constituted its own entirely unique English dialect region. Traditionally often recognized as aCharleston accent, it included these additional features, most of which no longer exist today:[27]
The "Down East"Outer Banks coastal region ofCarteret County, North Carolina, and adjacentPamlico Sound, includingOcracoke andHarkers Island, are known for additional features, some of which are still spoken today by generations-long residents of itsunincorporated coastal and island communities, which have largely been geographically and economically isolated from the rest of North Carolina and the South since their first settlement by English-speaking Europeans. The same is true for the very similar dialect area of theDelmarva (Delaware–Maryland–Virginia) Peninsula and neighboring islands in theChesapeake Bay, such asTangier andSmith Island. These two regions historically share many common pronunciation features, sometimes collectively called a High Tider (or "Hoi Toider") accent, including:
Rhoticity (orr-fulness, like in most U.S. English, but unlike in most other older Atlantic Southern dialects)
/aɪ/, such as the vowel in the wordshigh tide, retaining its glide and being pronounced beginning further back in the mouth, as[ɑe] or even rounded[ɒe~ɐɒe], often stereotyped as sounding like "hoi toid," giving Pamlico Sound's residents the name "High Tiders."[31]
/æ/ is raised to[ɛ] (socattle sounds likekettle);/ɛ/ is raised to[e~ɪ] (so thatmess sounds likemiss); and, most prominently,/ɪ/ is raised to[i] (sofish sounds likefeesh).[32] This mirrors the second and third stages of theSouthern Vowel Shift, despite this particular accent never participating in the very first stage of the shift.
/ɔː/ pronounced as[ɔ~o], similar to modern Australian or London English.
/aʊ/, as inloud, town, scrounge, etc., pronounced with a fronted glide as[aɵ~aø~aε].[28] Before a voiceless consonant, this same phoneme is[ɜʉ~ɜy].[29]
/ɛər/, as inchair, square, bear, etc., as[æɚ].[28]
The people of the major central (Piedmont) and eastern (Tidewater) regions of Virginia, excluding Virginia'sEastern Shore, once spoke in a way long associated with the upper oraristocraticplantation class in theOld South. Additional phonological features of this Atlantic Southern variety included:
InVirginia's Tidewater region particularly, these further features became associated with the labelTidewater accent:
/ɔːr/,/ɔː/,/ɑː/, and/ɑːr/ all potentially merge (as well as a small number of words that have/æ/ in other American dialects, namelyaunt,rather, and, earlier,pasture: an imitation of the British-styletrap-bath split). The merged vowel is long, low-back, and rounded:[ɒː] or[ɒɒ̝]. Examples words for each traditional phoneme includemore,maw,ma, andmar, respectively.[30]
/ɜːr/, as inbird, earth, flirt, hurt, word, dirt, etc. pronounced with a weak/r/ consonant as[ɜʴ], or a less common variant without/r/:[ɜ].[10]
SouthernLouisiana, as well as some of southeastTexas (Houston toBeaumont), and coastalMississippi, feature a number of dialects influenced by other languages beyond English. Most of southern Louisiana constitutesAcadiana, dominated for hundreds of years by monolingual speakers ofCajun French,[33] which combines elements ofAcadian French with other French and Spanish words. This French dialect is spoken by many of the older members of theCajun ethnic group and is said to be dying out, although it is experiencing a minor resurgence among younger Franco-Louisianaise. A related language calledLouisiana Creole also exists. The older English of Southern Louisiana did not participate in certain general older Southern English phenomena, for example lacking the Plantation South'strap–bath split and the fronting of/aʊ/.[34]
New Orleans English was likely developing in the early 20th century, in large part due todialect influence from New York City migrants in New Orleans.
A project devised byOld Dominion University Assistant Professor Dr. Bridget Anderson entitledTidewater Voices: Conversations in Southeastern Virginia was initiated in late 2008. In collecting oral histories from natives of the area, this study offers insight to not only specific history of the region, but also to linguistic phonetic variants native to the area as well. This linguistic survey is the first of its kind in nearly forty years.[35] The two variants being analyzed the most closely in this study are the/aʊ/ diphthong as inhouse orbrown and post-vocalicr-lessness as in/ˈfɑðə/ for/ˈfɑðər/.
^Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an Accent. New York, New York: Routledge.
^Wolfram, W, & Schilling-Estes, N. (2006). American English. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.
^Fischer, David Hackett (1992). "From the South of England to Virginia".Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. On line stores/Public Libraries: OUP USA.ISBN978-0195069051.
^Kirkpatrick, Routledge (ed.) (2010).The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. Routledge: London and New York. pp. 97-99.
^Michael Ellis (1992). "On the Use of Dialect as Evidence: "Albion's Seed" in Appalachia".Appalachian Journal.19 (3):278–297.ISSN0090-3779.JSTOR40933361.
^abcdefgKurath, Hans; MacDavid, Raven Ioor.The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Vol. 3. University of Michigan Press, 1961.HathiTrust. pp. 18-22.
^Wolfram, Walt (1997).Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue. University of North Carolina Press. p. 61.
^Dubois, Sylvia and Barbara Horvath (2004). "Cajun Vernacular English: phonology." In Bernd Kortmann and Edgar W. Schneider (Ed).A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 412-4.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. (1997).English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge.ISBN9780415114769.
Shores, David L. (2000). Tangier Island: place, people, and talk. Cranbury, New Jersey. Associated University Presses.
Wolfram, W, & Schilling-Estes, N. (2006). American English. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.
