Do All Southerners Have the Same Dialect?

03 March 2005

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No dialect in the U.S. is more noticed -- and commented on -- than Southern English. This is where a person totes things, but carries friends to see a show. And where else do we cut on the lights and mash the button in the elevator? To quote the title of a recent book on Southern terms, "Y'all is Spoken Here". Nothing is more Southern than its speech.

But is the South really united linguistically? Try telling people from the Carolinas that they all talk alike. Along the coast, people speak some of the most distinctive English dialects used anywhere. Someone on the Outer Banks of North Carolina may say It's hoi toid on the saned soid. That's high tide on the Sound side for those who don't recognize the distinctive vowel sounds of the coast -- or hah tahd on the sound sahd in the mainland South.

In South Carolina, traditional Charleston speech seems to have a vowel system all its own. The pronunciation of the vowel in sow and row sounds like the /o/ in Minnesoohtans, and the vowel of out and about is like the Canadian oat and aboat. Travel to the Sea Islands and you find Gullah or Geechee -- a creole language that goes back to the days of rice plantations populated largely by blacks from Africa and the West Indies. The sounds and rhythms of Gullah are popularized in the B'rer Rabbit stories and in George Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess. The English is closer to the creoles of the Bahamas and Jamaica than to dialects of the Southern mainland.

Travel to the western mountains and you'll find the imprint of the Scots Irish in the hollows of Southern Appalachia. In the Smoky Mountains, you might be greeted with Hit's nice to see you'uns. The plural form you'uns is, of course the equivalent of the infamous Southern y'all. And hit for it is a relic of an older English pronunciation. This is where a boomer is a red squirrel-- not a thundershower as in other parts of Carolina. In the mountains, Sai-gogglin' means something is crooked; while other Carolinians may use catawampus to talk about things that aren't quite plumb. And the term dope among older mountain people may still refer to a soft drink, thanks to some of it original ingredients.

Now add the sounds of African Americans in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain to the mix. And don't forget the unique dialect of the Lumbee Indians along the North and South Carolina border. With over 55,000 members, they're the largest group of Native Americans east of the Mississippi. Put it all together and you have dialect differences greater than those in just about any other region of the United States.

Why such diversity? First, there's the so-called "founder effect." Groups of speakers came from different parts of the world and left their imprint on the speech of the region -- the Scotch Irish influence in Appalachia, the Scottish effect on dialects in the Cape Fear valley; Southwestern England influence on the Outer Banks. And, of course, the African influence on the Sea Islands.

But there's also a cultural mix. In the antebellum South, aristocrats sent their children to England for a proper education. So the seventeenth-century British trend of dropping the r in words like fou' for four found a colonial home among the southern elite. At the same time, words like tote for carry, goober for peanut, and cooter for turtle came from African languages through the Charleston port. The result was an ironic mixture in the South of African slave language and prestigious British pronunciation.

But the most intriguing aspect of speech in the south is that much of it is homegrown. Some of the most widely-known features of Southern speech are probably the pronunciation of the vowel in tahm for time, the pronunciation of stick pin and ink pen both as "pin", and the thoroughly Southern plural, y'all. Recent research shows that these traits were barely present in the antebellum South. They're relatively new. Over the past 150 years, they germinated on their own, took root, and spread through the South like a linguistic Kudzu.

Dialects bear the impression of their history but they also have an amazing creative capacity to mark new identity. Southern English in the Carolinas is a shining example of the many paths that dialects can take.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Richard D. Cain at March 17, 2005 12:09 PM