American Voices How Dialects Differ from coast to coast_03 pdf

Eastern Tennessee, separated from Memphis by mountainous geography and the mid-state terminus of the early railroad system, is associated with Appalachian dialects and features such as i

Sounds of Ole Man River

(Memphis, TN)

Valerie Fridland

When people from outside the South learn I grew up in Memphis,Tennessee, I inevitably get the comment, “You don’t sound like you’refrom Memphis – what happened to your accent?” As I consider myself

a true native, my response is always to ask for a description of what aMemphian sounds like “You know, you don’t have that that twang” iswhat usually emerges as people realize they don’t really know what aMemphian, or a Southerner for that matter, specifically talks like, exceptthat they know one when they hear one Non-Southerners, in fact, aregenerally not very good at separating out the different dialects spokenwithin the South, viewing us as one mass lump on the American dialectlandscape While Southern dialects share much linguistically and histor-ically, intra-regional varieties are also quite salient, differing along ethnic,social and geographic lines

Memphis is geographically poised at the border of west Tennessee,Mississippi and Arkansas, overlooking the banks of the Mississippi River.Its name, taken from another river city, the Egyptian city of Memphis onthe Nile (whose residents were also “Memphians”), reflected its location

on the majestic Mississippi, an early sign that Memphis was destined tobecome an important trading center in the region The city was settled inthe early 1800s, by, among others, the future US President Andrew Jackson,and owes much of its linguistic history to the spread of the earlier settle-ment from eastern Tennessee The city continued to grow rapidly withsettlers from the Southern Coastal regions in Virginia and North Carolinawho migrated first into eastern Tennessee Originally of English andScots-Irish descent, these settlers joined others from eastern and middleTennessee as they moved farther west As travel became easier throughnew developments such as steamboats, these early immigrants were soonjoined by settlers from other Southern states such as Kentucky, Alabama,Mississippi and Georgia The combination of intra-Southern migration, alarge African American community, and the city’s role as a major riverport and center for national goods distribution led to the formation of arecognizable local variety of speech, one that is distinctly urban in light ofthe contemporary trend of rural in-migration to urban areas of the South

In fact, Memphis’ position as headquarters for several major companieslike Federal Express and the Coca-Cola Bottling Company has contri-

buted to local speech, with terms such as to FedEx used synonymously with

“to ship overnight” and coke used for any carbonated drink And, when

a Memphian goes shopping, we are more than likely heading to PigglyWiggly, affectionately known locally as simply “The Pig,” a locally foundedgrocery chain that originated the supermarket concept

Within a region so often negatively defined by its speech, there is aninherent pride in our speech and distinctions are made among intra-regional dialects For those of us raised in Memphis, worse than the stigma

of speaking with a Southern accent was the stigma of being perceived asspeaking with a rural Mississippi or Arkansas accent Native Memphianscan easily tell where non-natives from other parts of the South are from,especially those that we have high degrees of contact with Ask a Memphianwhat they sound like compared to other Southerners and they will prob-ably use these groups as references for what they do not sound like Therural dialects, those associated with the areas of Arkansas and Mississippinear Memphis, tend to be described as more “country” sounding andhave more intense use of marked features like the pronunciation of the

long i of bye and time without the glide, as in baa for bye, tar for tire, or ah for I), flapping (idn’t, wadn’t for isn’t, wasn’t), multiple negation (I don’t

see nothing), and vocabulary items like ain’t Eastern Tennessee, separated

from Memphis by mountainous geography and the mid-state terminus

of the early railroad system, is associated with Appalachian dialects and

features such as intrusive r as in warsh your clothes, voiceless w sounds as

in hwich for which and a-prefixing as in I was a-hunting In addition, the Scarlett O’Hara breathy-voiced Southerner who drops r’s as in Well, ah

nevah for Well, I never would be quickly tagged as a resident of the Deep

South by most mid-Southern Memphians whose r’s remain steadfastly

intact However, while Memphians can recognize the natives fromthe non-natives, it is usually also a “I know it when I hear it” kind ofdifferentiation rather than any clear-cut criteria they can list

Part of the difficulty in discerning the differences between Southerndialects is that it is generally a matter of degree rather than kind that

separates one from another While some features like intrusive r and

a-prefixing are clearly present only in certain areas of the South and not in

others, most Southern features are at least marginally present in all localdialects, with the differences between local varieties hinging on the extent

to which people in different areas use them in their speech Memphians

may say y’all and fixin’ to as much as the next Southerner, but they don’t tend to use ain’t and lose l sounds as in caw me for call me or hep for help

as often as their more rural neighbors When a native Memphian hearsanother Southerner speak, it is not simply one trigger word or form thatcues the Memphian into that speaker’s background, but a composite of

a number of different dialect features used at a different frequency than

a Memphian would use them in similar conversation Since very few ofthe distinctive language forms are by themselves diagnostic but instead are

shared by these dialects, people are not readily able to articulate what it is

per se that makes them know where another speaker is from It is no

wonder that non-Southerners who are much less exposed to the variationsthat occur in the South find it hard to hear differences among Southerndialects

In addition, the enduring myth that Southern American English is asubstandard variety of Standard English tends to lead to the grouping ofthese dialects under the same rubric of improper speech, without muchinvestigation into the historical patterns that laid the foundations for thedialects now spoken throughout the South and the distinctions that aremaintained All of the dialect features noted above are as linguisticallyprincipled and patterned as any of the characteristic features of Northern

or Western speech and many, such as r-lessness and vocalic mergers, are widely evidenced in other “prestige” dialects (e.g., the r-less speech of the highly regarded Received Pronunciation in Britain or the Western cot/

caught vowel merger), yet Southern dialects remain socially disfavored.

As linguist Dennis Preston showed with his research into folk linguisticbeliefs about the dialects spoken within the United States and as mostcaricatures about the South reveal, most Americans, including Southernersthemselves, have negative evaluations of the varieties of English spoken

in the Southern US In general, people have only a vague idea of the types

of features that make Southern dialects distinct Instead, only a smallsubset of features are widely recognized, those that are highly stereotypical

such as double modals (I might could do that) or the Southern drawl (itself

a vague cover term for a variety of distinctions in the way vowel sounds

are produced) and, of course, the ubiquitous y’all Since most dialects

within the South share these highly salient features, outsiders are unlikely

to notice the differences that set the dialects apart The fact that mostmedia renditions of Southern accents are spoken by actors adopting whatthey believe replicates a generic “Southern twang” does little to help clarifythe image of a united Southern tongue

What makes the picture of intra-regional variation even more ing is that within each area of the South, social factors such as ethnicity,age and gender also mitigate the use of different features For example, all

confus-Southern English speakers use tahm for time and baa for bye to some

degree, but white speakers from the Deep South tend to use it moreextensively than, say, a white speaker in Memphis and, in general, whiteSouthern speakers use it more extensively than black Southern speakers.Curiously, this situation is reversed in Memphis, as black Memphians show

a greater frequency of use of this feature than white Memphians, showing

that generalizations about the South as a whole abstract away fromintra-regional variations Similarly, while the pronunciation of the vowels

in pin and pen as the same (called a “vowel merger”) is still widespread,

there is evidence from recent research that speakers under 25 years of age

in Memphis are less likely to merge these two sounds than their oldercounterparts On the other hand, the low back vowel merger which makes

indistinct the difference in pronunciation of words like cot and caught or

Don and dawn is more common among young white Memphians than

among their older counterparts, but is not generally considered a feature

of other Southern American dialects Black Memphians, like older whites,maintain the traditional vowel distinction in words using these two

vowels In contrast, r-dropping, a feature that characterizes older speakers

in the Deep South, is found among African American, but not EuropeanAmerican, speakers in Memphis While often local black and white speechmay differ in terms of what speech features are used, the large AfricanAmerican population in Memphis also contributes much to the local flavor

of speech in Memphis, with terms which originated in African Americanspeech having spread out to many in the younger European American

community, contributing terms such as Dog! (pronounced dawg), as in

Dog! I’m hungry to the local variety.

Within the South, in places such as Memphis, locals tend to have verystrong feelings about the variety of their speech community and its role inidentifying them as an authentic member of that community, even if it isnot so easy from the outside to tell different Southerners apart When a

Memphian talks about getting some ’cue and going to visit the King, you

can bet we are talking about a big plate of pulled pork barbecue and a visit

to Graceland, not a trip to a pool hall or a European monarchy In fact,mentioning to a local that you have ever eaten beef barbecue, much lessenjoyed it, may be considered fightin’ words Speech is as much about ourculture as are our hospitality, our music and our barbecue And, as anyMemphian will tell you, don’t be messing with our Barbecue! The samegoes for our speech

PART II

THE NORTH

Two major New England shibboleths are the “dropping” of postvocalic r (as in cah for car and bahn for barn and the low central vowel in words like aunt and glass (Carver 1987) Neither pattern is found across all of

New England, nor are they all there is to the well-known dialect, faithfully

reproduced in the movie Good Will Hunting We present a brief description

of the settlement of the region and give examples of current vocabularyand pronunciation patterns to illustrate both how New England differsfrom the rest of the country and what region-internal differences exist

Settlement of New England

The Massachusetts Bay coastal area, one of the country’s original culturalhearths (Carver 1987), was settled by English immigrants in the early1600s In search of better farm land, some original settlers moved westfrom the coast and settled the Lower Connecticut River Valley in centralConnecticut They were joined soon after by new immigrants fromeastern and southern England, and later from Italy, Scotland, Ireland,and elsewhere Settlement spread, generally along river valleys, into NewHampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island New England is nowcomprised of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Con-necticut, and Rhode Island Boston is still known as the hub, referring

to its position as the center from which settlements radiated in NewEngland

The Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England (Kurath 1939–

43) divides the area into eastern and western New England (divided by theGreen Mountains of Vermont in the north, the Berkshires in the middle,and the Connecticut River farther south), with seven sub-regions dictated

by settlement patterns (Carver 1987) However, today there is little in theway of linguistic markers of these regions, aside from some distinctive

characteristics of eastern New England A Word Geography of the Eastern

United States (Kurath 1949) divides New England into only three regions

(Northeastern, Southeastern, and Southwestern), better representinglinguistic differences

Ethnic groups have had differing influences across the region Theseinclude Native American groups, such as the Abenaki in Northern

Vermont and the Mahican in southwestern Vermont, both of whom spokelanguages in the Algonquian language family Native American languageshave died out in Vermont, but the Abenaki descendants remain, particu-larly in northwestern Vermont, and have begun a process of revival

of customs and language Also present in New England are Americans who moved south from French-speaking parts of Canada, andlarge Irish and Italian groups Upper Maine (north of Penobscot Bay) isquite distinct from the rest of the region, due to ties with New Brunswick,Canada

Franco-Vocabulary

New England has always been nautically oriented, so ship building, fishing,and seafood vocabulary are traditionally associated with the region For

example, nor’easters are a type of storm typical of the region Similarly,

there is a lot of farming vocabulary particular to the region, including

carting or teaming a load ‘hauling a load’ and open and shut day ‘a day

with variable weather’ Some gastronomic terms particular to the region

are Boston brown bread, a dessert, grinder ‘long deli sandwich’, hamburg

‘ground beef’, tonic ‘carbonated drink’, dropped egg ‘poached egg’, as well

as food introduced by Native Americans such as hasty pudding and quahog (Rhode Island) or cohog (Boston) for a type of edible clam A porch may

be a piazza, a hair bun is a pug, a traffic circle is a rotary (Carver 1987:28– 36) Two common ways of agreeing with someone are to say a-yuh or so

don’t I (meaning ‘so do I’).

According to a survey completed by a small group of University ofNew Hampshire students, words still widely used and recognized by

residents of New Hampshire today include grinder, hamburg, rotary, and notch ‘mountain pass’ On the other hand, belly-bunt ‘ride a sled face-down’, pung ‘sleigh for hauling wood’, and pug ‘hair bun’ are

recognized by few people Words which were not included in the

older dialectological research but which are heard today include bubbler

‘drinking fountain’, bulkie ‘round sandwich roll’, and spa ‘convenience store’ in Boston; directional ‘turn signal’ and frappe ‘milk shake’ in eastern Massachusetts and New Hampshire; dooryard ‘where you park your car’ and numb as a hake ‘not very bright’ in downeast Maine; and soggie ‘greasy hotdog’, cabinet ‘milkshake’, take a heart ‘have a heart attack’ in Rhode

Island

A feature of eastern New England, also exhibited by speakers in theVirginia and North Carolina hearth areas, is the vocalization (locally

referred to as “dropping”) of r in post-vocalic position People talk

about “New Hampsha” and “Woosta” instead of New Hampshire and

Worcester The distinction between word-initial wh and w sounds, as

in which/witch, is retained to some extent in parts of New Hampshire,

Vermont, and Massachusetts Eastern New Englanders also traditionally

make a distinction between pairs such as for and four, or horse and hoarse,

which is not heard in most of the rest of the US As a result of this

distinction, combined with r-dropping, a Boston pronunciation of short sounds the same as shot; north rhymes with moth This distinction may be

disappearing among young people

Words such as cot and caught, stock and stalk sound the same in most

of eastern New England, both having a more or less rounded vowelpronounced in the low-back corner of the mouth (An exception tothis pattern is Providence, Rhode Island, where the two vowels aredistinct.) Many speakers in eastern Massachusetts and northern New

Hampshire have three distinct vowels in the words Mary (the vowel

of ban), merry (the vowel of bet), and marry (the vowel of bat),

while those in Vermont and southern New Hampshire pronouncethe three words alike (Nagy 2001) Bostonians and northern NewHampshirites generally maintain a distinction between the vowels in

the first syllables of bother and father (the a of father is produced further

back in the mouth), while many residents of Vermont and southernNew Hampshire, especially younger people, have merged those vowels(Nagy 2001)

In western New England, quite a different phonological system holdssway As in New York City and upstate New York, speakers in Hartford

and Springfield retain the distinction between cot and caught, stock and

stalk But western New England is less uniform in its speech than eastern

New England People in Vermont are likely to make no difference

between cot and caught, like speakers east of them, while people in western

Massachusetts are likely to disagree on this point: older people retainthe difference while younger people have lost it As for the eastern

New England shibboleths mentioned above, r is regularly pronounced throughout western New England, and the broad a is much less common – laugh and dance have the same vowel as lap and Dan.

In Vermont, articles have been appearing regularly in the local pressquestioning and worrying about the possibility that the Vermont dialectmay be dying This is thought to be caused by the modern influx of people

from elsewhere in the US, known as flatlanders, either temporarily, for skiing (such people are sometimes called coneheads in Vermont) or for

leaf-peeping (admiring the fall foliage), or as permanent settlers seeking a

more rural way of life Early evidence shows that the dialect may, in fact,

be changing toward a more standard-sounding one Two of the most

talked-about Vermont vowels are ou, as in cow, which is pronounced

kyou, and long i as in kite, which is pronounced more like koit Women

and younger speakers are pronouncing these vowels more like they aresaid elsewhere in the country whereas older rural men tend to retain themore traditional Vermont pronunciations However, not all of the news isbad for those bemoaning the fate of the heritage of Vermont, including its

dialect Another prominent feature is known locally as “t-dropping” or,

more technically, as glottal stop (ʔ) replacement of t This feature has

been widely studied in Great Britain, where it is found in many dialectsincluding the Cockney dialect demonstrated most famously by ElizaDoolittle (or Dooliʔl) Even children, including those relatively new toVermont, are learning and using glottal stop This is a feature of Vermontspeech that doesn’t appear to be going away!

Summary

Like many older parts of the US, New England, and eastern New England

in particular, is characterized by a distinct local dialect that is graduallyreceding due to the influence of “general American” speech used in themass media and by newcomers to the region Much of the distinct NewEngland vocabulary was connected with traditional occupations that areless important in today’s economy As people move from all over thecountry to take advantage of higher education and high-tech jobs inthe Boston area, young New Englanders sound increasingly like youngpeople in other parts of the country However, some local features remain,especially in rural areas and in city neighborhoods with large proportions

of local people Many people in these areas still drop their r’s, though no

longer as consistently or in as many words as they used to As for the lack

of a distinction between the vowels in cot and caught, it is actually the rest

of the country that is becoming more like eastern New England

How to Talk Like a New Englander: A Brief Dictionary

belly-bunt ride a sled face-down You’d be crazy to belly-bunt on a pung (NH)

bubbler drinking fountain I’m thirsty Where’s a bubbler? (MA/NH)

creemee soft ice cream The creemee machine is broken (VT)

dooryard where you park your car Park in the dooryard (ME)

flatlander outsider He’s a flatlander from New Jersey (VT)

frappe milkshake I want a chocolate frappe (Boston, NH)

leaf peepers autumn tourists You can’t go out The roads are full of leaf

peepers (VT)

nor’easter storm typical of the There’s a nor’easter coming (all)

region

pung sled for hauling wood We teamed a load of wood on the pung (NH)

quahog type of edible clam Let’s go out for quahogs (RI)

sliding sledding Grab your sled, and let’s go sliding (VT)

tonic carbonated drink Cola is my favorite kind of tonic (MA)

woodchuck/ Vermonter, local The chucks and flatlanders mix most at

chuck town meeting (VT)Sources: Carver 1987 and students from the Univercity of New Hampshire and theUniversity of Vermont

References

Carver, Craig M (1987) American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Kurath, Hans (1939) Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England.

Providence: Brown University

Kurath, Hans (1949) Word Geography of the Eastern United States Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press

Nagy, Naomi (2001) Live free or die as a linguistic principle American Speech 76:

30–41

Telsur Website 2000: www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas

Beantown Babble (Boston, MA)

Jim Fitzpatrick