Older Southern American English


Older Southern American English was a set of American English dialects of the Southern United States, primarily spoken by white Southerners up until the American Civil War, moving toward a state of decline by the turn of the twentieth century, further accelerated after World War II and again, finally, by the Civil Rights Movement. These dialects have since largely given way, on a larger regional level, to a more unified and younger Southern American English, recognized today by a unique vowel shift and certain other vocabulary and accent characteristics. Some features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, like non-rhoticity, though typically in only very localized dialects or speakers.

History

This group of American English dialects evolved over a period of several hundred years, primarily from older varieties of British English spoken by those who initially settled the area. Given that language is an entity that is constantly changing, the English of the colonists was quite different from any variety of English spoken today. The colonists who initially settled the Tidewater area spoke a variety of Early Modern English, which itself was varied. The older Southern dialects thus originated in varying degrees from a mix of the speech of immigrants from the British Isles, who moved to the South in the 17th and 18th centuries, and perhaps also creole or post-creole speech of African slaves.
One theory of historian David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed is that indentured servants from Southern England settled in and therefore influenced the Tidewater dialect in Virginia, while poor Northern English and Northern Irish families did the same for the early dialect of the Southern backcountry; however, linguists have disputed that such migration patterns specifically influenced the American South's dialect development, with a dialect-mixture model being more widely accepted. For example, an Appalachian Journal linguistic article reveals the flawed premises and misrepresentation of sources in Albion's Seed, asserting that a singular influence on Southern backcountry speech is based in no conclusive body of evidence.

Atlantic Coast

The earliest English settlers of the colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts were mainly people from Southern England. The Boston, Massachusetts; Norfolk, Virginia; and Charleston, South Carolina areas maintained strong commercial and cultural ties to England. Thus, the colonists and their descendants defined "social class" according to England's connotations. As the upper-class English dialect changed, the dialects of the upper-class Americans in these areas changed. Two examples are the "r-dropping" of the late 18th and early 19th century, resulting in the similar r-dropping found in Boston and parts of Virginia during the cultural "Old South", as well as the trap–bath split, which came to define these same two areas but virtually no other region of the United States.
It is difficult to account for all variants of the local accent, which have largely been supplanted by newer Southern features.

Decline

The growth of timber, coal, railroad, steel, textile, and tobacco mill industries throughout the South after the Civil War, along with the whole country's resulting migration changes, may have contributed to the expansion of a more unified Southern accent, which gradually ousted nineteenth-century Southern accents. Before World War II, the demographic tendency of the South was out-migration, but after the war, a counter-tendency emerged. Now, a high in-migration of Northerners, especially toward urban areas of the South, may have been another motivation for the abandonment of older Southern accent features. Finally, the Civil Right 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 explain the sudden adoption of rhoticity among most white Southerners since the middle of the twentieth century onwards.

Phonology

General Older South

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:
Old Southern phonemeExample words
bride, prize, tie
bright, price, tyke
cat, trap, yak
æ tensing|hand, man, slam
trap-bath split|bath, can't, pass
mouth, ow, sound
or father, laager, palm
or
ark, heart, start
bother, lot, wasp
or
face, rein, play
dress, egg, head
or
or
nurse, search, worm
fleece, me, neat
kit, mid, pick
happy, money, sari
or
goat, no, throw
thought, vault, yawn
cloth, lost, off
or
choice, joy, loin
or
strut, tough, won

Older speech of the Plantation South included those features above, plus:
Due to the former isolation of some regions of the Appalachian South, the Appalachian accent may be difficult for some outsiders to understand. This dialect is also rhotic, meaning speakers pronounce Rs wherever they appear in words, and sometimes when they do not. Because of the extensive length of the mountain chain, noticeable variation also exists within this subdialect.
The Southern Appalachian dialect can be heard, as its name implies, in north Georgia, north Alabama, east Tennessee, northwestern South Carolina, western North Carolina, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, western Maryland, and West Virginia. Southern Appalachian speech patterns, however, are not entirely confined to the mountain regions previously listed.
The dialect here is often thought to be a window into the past, with various claims being made that it is either a pocket of Elizabethan English which survived or the way that the Scots-Irish-origin people that make up a large fraction of the population there would have spoken. 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 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.

Charleston

, most famously centering on the cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, once constituted its own entirely unique English dialect region. Traditionally often recognized as a Charleston accent, it included these additional features, most of which no longer exist today:
The "Down East" Outer Banks coastal region of Carteret County, North Carolina, and adjacent Pamlico Sound, including Ocracoke and Harkers Island, are known for additional features, some of which are still spoken today by generations-long residents of its unincorporated 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 the Delmarva Peninsula and neighboring islands in the Chesapeake Bay, such as Tangier and Smith Island. These two regions historically share many common pronunciation features, sometimes collectively called a High Tider accent, including:
The people of the major central and eastern regions of Virginia, excluding Virginia's Eastern Shore, once spoke in a way long associated with the upper or aristocratic plantation class in the Old South, often known as a Tidewater accent. Additional phonological features of this Atlantic Southern variety included:
Southern Louisiana, as well as some of southeast Texas, and coastal Mississippi, feature a number of dialects influenced by other languages beyond English. Most of southern Louisiana constitutes Acadiana, dominated for hundreds of years by monolingual speakers of Cajun French, which combines elements of Acadian French with other French and Spanish words. This French dialect is spoken by many of the older members of the Cajun ethnic group and is said to be dying out. A related language called Louisiana 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's trap–bath split and the fronting of.
New Orleans English was likely developing in the early 1900s, in large part due to dialect influence from New York City immigrants in New Orleans.

Grammar and vocabulary

A project devised by Old Dominion University Assistant Professor Dr. Bridget Anderson entitled Tidewater 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. The two variants being analyzed the most closely in this study are the diphthong as in house or brown and post-vocalic r-lessness as in for.