Southern American English - Misplaced Pages

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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 coast to eastern Texas. Southern American English can be divided into different sub-dialects (see American English), with speech differing between, say, the Appalachian region and the coastal area around Charleston, South Carolina. The South Midlands dialect was influenced by the migration of Southern dialect speakers into the American West. The traditional dialect of African Americans, popularly called "Ebonics", shares many similarities with Southern dialect, unsurprising given that group's strong historical ties to the region.

Speakers of Southern American English have been stereotyped as uneducated or stupid, but without justification. Since the use of the dialect is stigmatized, educated speakers often attempt to eliminate many of its more distinctive features from their personal idiolect. Well-known speakers of Southern dialect include United States Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, along with playwright Tennessee Williams and singer Elvis Presley.

Pronunciation

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.
The distinction between the vowels sounds of words like caught and cot or talk and tock is mainly preserved. In much of the Deep South, the vowel found in words like talk and caught has developed into a diphthong, so that it sounds like the diphthong used in the word loud in the Northern United States.

Common use of "ain't" instead of "am not," though "ain't" is also as a contraction for "are not," "is not," "has not," and "have not"
Use of double modals ("might could", "might should", "might would", etc.)
Use of "y'all" as the second person plural pronoun (pronounced as in "tall", not "you-all")
Use of "fixin' to" as an indicator of immediate future action
Use of double negatives, as in "ain't got none" instead of "don't have any"; another comparison is "I ain't got no money" instead of "I don't have any money" -- also used as an emphatic negative response, as in "I don't never go"
Use of the word "done" in place of "already" or "did", such as in "We done did this" (We already did this).
Use of "over yonder" in place of "over there" or "in or at that indicated place," such as in "the house over yonder"
Cement, another word for concrete, is commonly pronounced as "see-ment" instead of "sa-ment"
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," "crawfish," or "crayfish" depending on the location