Why do American southerners talk that way?
Walt Wolfram
Do all Southerners have the same dialect? What are the ingredients of the way they talk? Where did the speech of the Carolinas come from?
No dialect in the U.S. is more noticed—and commented on—than Southern English. Th is is where a person totes objects, but carries friends to see a show. And where else do we cut on the lights and mash the button on a machine? To quote the title of a recent book on Southern terms, Y’all is Spoken Here. Nothing about the American South 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. Th at’s high tide on the Sound side for those who
Why do american southerners talk that way? 117
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. Th e pronunciation of the vowel in so and row sounds like the /o/ of French or Spanish (which does not glide into an ‘oo’ ending as the ‘o’ sounds of most other English dialects do), and out and about sound like the Canadian oat and aboat.
Travel to the Sea Islands and you fi nd Gullah—a creole language, also known as Geechee, that goes back to the days of rice plantations populated largely by blacks from Africa and the West Indies. Th e sounds and rhythms of Gullah are popularized in the Br’er Rabbit stories and in George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess. Th is variety of English is closer to the creoles of the Bahamas and Jamaica than to dialects of the Southern mainland.
Travel to Carolina’s western mountains and the hollows of Southern Appalachia, and you’ll fi nd the imprint of the Scotch Irish.
In the Smoky Mountains, you might be greeted with Hit’s nice to see you’uns. Th e 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. Th is is where a boomer is a red squirrel—not a thundershower as in other parts of Carolina. In the mountains, si-gogglin’ (pronounced SIGH-gahg-lin) 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 its 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 fi ft y-fi ve thousand members, they’re the largest group of Native Americans east of the Mississippi. While the Lumbee no longer maintain a Native American Indian language, their dialect is ethni-cally distinct from both the white and the black dialects that are its
neighbors. Put it all together and you have dialect diff erences greater than those in just about any other region of the United States.
Why such diversity? First, there’s the so-called ‘founder eff ect’.
Groups of speakers came from diff erent parts of the world and left their imprints on the speech of the region—the Scotch Irish infl u-ence in Appalachia, a Scots fl avor in dialects of the Cape Fear valley;
speech patterns from Southwestern England in the Outer Banks;
and, of course, the African infl uence on the Sea Islands.
But there’s also a cultural mix. In the antebellum South, aristo-crats sent their children to England for a proper education. Th ere they found a brand of English in which r sounds at the end of syllables (like four, fear, or fair) had gone silent around the seven-teenth century; this British trend 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. Th e 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 home-grown. 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.
Th ey’re relatively new. Over the past one hundred and fi ft y years, they germinated on their own, took root, and spread through the South like a linguistic kudzu.
About the author
Walt Wolfram, the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University, describes himself as a dialect nomad. He has studied dialects ranging from African American varieties in large metropolitan areas to the speech of small, isolated island and mountain communities. He has authored more than twenty
Why do american southerners talk that way? 119
books and two hundred and fi fi ty articles, in addition to producing a number of TV documentaries. More information on Dr. Wolfram’s media productions is available at: http://www.talkingnc.com and http://
www.ncsu.edu/linguistics
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Dialects are discussed in chapters 3 (dialects versus languages), 18 (British, American, and other versions of English), and 41 (changing dialects in the U.S.). Various languages of America are discussed in chapters 25 (revitalizing threatened Native American languages), 35 (languages of the U.S.), 36 (America’s language crisis), 37 (Spanish in the U.S.), 38 (Cajun), 39 (German in the U.S.), 40 (Gullah), and 49 (Native American languages).
Elsewhere:
Bernstein, Cynthia, Tom Nunnally, and Robin Sabino, eds. Language Variety in the South Revisited (University of Alabama Press, 1997). A collection of articles from a decennial conference dedicated to the study of language in the American South.
Nagle, Steven, and Sara Sanders, eds. Language in the New South (Cam-bridge University Press, 2003). An anthology on diff erent dialects of the American South, including regional and ethnic varieties. Important overviews of major Southern dialects are included.
Wolfram, Walt, and Ben Ward, eds. American Voices: How Dialects Diff er from Coast to Coast (Blackwell, 2006). A major section in this collection of brief, popular profi les of dialects in North America and the Carib-bean is dedicated to the American South. Th e sections on sociocultural dialects and island dialects also include some Southern dialects.
Picone, Michael, and Catherine Davies, eds. Language Variation in the South III (University of Alabama Press, forthcoming). Th is collection includes papers from the most recent conference dedicated to language in the American South. Most major researchers in the fi eld have articles in this collection.