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 for over two 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 varieties of the colonists were quite different from any variety of English spoken today. In the early 1600s, the initial English-speaking settlers of the Tidewater area of Virginia, the first permanent English colony in North America, spoke a variety of Early Modern English, which itself was diverse. The older Southern dialects thus originated in varying degrees from a mix of the speech of these and later immigrants from many different regions of the British Isles, who moved to the American South in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as perhaps the English, creole, and post-creole speech of African and African-American slaves.
One theory of historian David Hackett Fischer's book "Albion's Seed" is that since indentured servants from Southern England primarily settled the Tidewater region and poor Northern English and Northern Irish families primarily settled the Southern backcountry, the Tidewater and backcountry dialects were most directly influenced by those two immigrant populations, respectively; however, linguists have disputed the specifics of this theory, instead arguing that dialect-mixing in both regions was in fact more varied and widespread. For example, an "Appalachian Journal" linguistic article reveals the flawed premises and misrepresentation of sources in "Albion's Seed", asserting that the early Southern dialects are difficult to trace to any singular influence.
Even in the decades following the American Revolution of the 1760s to 1780s, major metropolitan areas of the coastal American South, like Norfolk, Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina maintained strong commercial and cultural ties to Southern England. Thus, as the upper-class standard dialect in Southern England changed, some of its features were mirrored by the dialects of upper-class Americans in the aforementioned areas, followed by the regional dialects of these areas in general, regardless of socioeconomic class. Two such example accent features are the ""r"-dropping" (or non-rhoticity) of the late 18th and early 19th century, resulting in the similar "r"-dropping found in these American areas during the cultural "Old South", as well as the trap–bath split, which came to define these same two areas (as well as other areas of the South that imitated this phenomenon). Contrarily, away from the major coastal and plantation areas, and on certain isolated islands, Southern accents were more likely to preserve rhoticity.
By the time of the American Civil War in the 1860s, many different Southern accents had developed, most notably in eastern Virginia, the Lowcountry (namely Charleston), Appalachia, the Black Belt (the major plantation region), and the secluded islands along the Atlantic coasts of the Southern states.
Decline.
After the Civil War, the growth of timber, coal, railroad, steel, textile, and tobacco mill industries throughout the South, along with the whole country's resulting migration changes, likely contributed to the expansion of a more unified Southern accent (now associated with the 20th century), which gradually ousted 19th-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 Rights 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 (along with continued non-rhoticity among black Americans) since the middle of the 20th 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:
Plantation South.
Older speech of the Plantation South included those features above, plus:
Appalachia.
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 (for example, "worsh" or "warsh" for "wash"). 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.
The Lowcountry, 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:
Pamlico and Chesapeake.
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 (Delaware–Maryland–Virginia) 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 (or "Hoi Toider") accent, including:
Piedmont and Tidewater Virginia.
The people of the major central (Piedmont) and eastern (Tidewater) 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.
Southern Louisiana, as well as some of southeast Texas (Houston to Beaumont), 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, although it is experiencing a minor resurgence among younger Franco-Louisianaise. 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.
Current projects.
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 .
External links.
[[Category:English-American culture in Virginia]]
[[Category:Virginia culture]]
[[Category:American English]]
[[Category:Culture of the Southern United States]]
[[Category:African-American English]]