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Southern American English is a dialect of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from central Kentucky and northern Virginia to the Gulf Coast and from the Atlantic to eastern Texas. Southern American English can be divided into different sub-dialects (see American English). Speakers in the Appalachian Mountains area and the coastal area around Charleston, South Carolina speak slightly different dialects. Another dialect with many similarities is South Midlands.

Speakers of Southern American English are often assumed to be uneducated or stupid, but this stereotype is untrue. Well-known speakers of Southern dialect include President Jimmy Carter, author Tennessee Williams and musician Elvis Presley. Southern American English has a number of similarities to Ebonics.

Pronounciation

• Merge of the /e/ and /i/ vowel sounds before nasals, such that "pen" and "pin" are pronounced the same
• Change of the /z/ sound in contractions to /d/, e.g. "wasn't" = /wadnt/
• The diphthong /aI/ becomes monophthongized to /a:/, so that "like" and "night" are pronounced with a single long vowel
• The diphthongization or triphthongization of the traditional short front vowels as in the words pat, pet, and pit: these develop a glide up from their original starting position to , and then back down to schwa. This is the feature often called the "Southern drawl".
• The English of the Deep South is historically non-rhotic: it drops the sound of final /r/ before a consonant or a word boundary, so that guard sounds similar to god and sore like saw. Epenthetic /r/, where an /r/ sound is inserted between two vowel sounds ("lawr and order") is not a feature of coastal SAE. The more northern or Appalachian varieties of SAE are rhotic. Non-rhoticity is rapidly disappearing from almost all Southern accents, to a greater degree than it has been lost in the other traditionally non-rhotic dialects of the East Coast such as New York and Boston.
• In much of the Deep South, the vowel found in words like talk and cross has developed into a diphthong, so that it sounds like the diphthong used in the word loud in the Northern United States.

Word use

• Use of "y'all" as the second person plural pronoun
• Use of "fixin' to" as an indicator of immediate future action
• Use of the word "done" in place of "already" or "did", such as in "We done did this" (We already did this).
• Word use tendencies from the Harvard Dialect Survey:
  • A carbonated beverage in general as "coke" (likely influenced by The Coca-Cola Company being headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and the resultant dominance of Coca-Cola in the region).
  • The bug-like animals that roll when you touch them as "roley-poleys" rather than "pill bugs" or "woodlouse"
  • The push-cart at the grocery store as a "buggy"
  • The small freshwater crustacean in lakes and streams as a "crawdad" or "crawfish" depending on location

Related topics

• Regional Vocabularies of American English

External link

• U.S. dialect map

• English language