Chapter 1. General information.

1.1 Background

As pointed out by Preston (1997), there is no doubt that a vague idea of American Southern English exists. People do not always have an accurate idea of what it entails, but they are certainly aware of a distinct dialect region in the Southeastern United States. In his work implementing folk linguistics surveys in which non-linguists draw and label the dialect regions on maps of the United States, he demonstrates that respondents overwhelmingly identified a South with more frequency than any other dialect region in the U.S. It is also common for non- Southerners to believe that most Southerners’ speech is generally the same, i.e. drawing features from the same basic pool. Feagin (1979, xvii) says that part of what motivated her work is her “surprise at Non-southerners’ assumptions that all Southerners talked alike.” Even some Southerners believe that the dialect of the South sounds generally the same throughout the region. Bender (2004, 2) also emphasizes that the wide variation in Southern speech is “a diversity of which the general educated public outside of the South and outside of the world of language scholarship often seems to be unaware.”

At the same time, people also generally recognize that it is possible to perceive the accent of Southerners as being on a continuum of “stronger” versus “weaker” or “milder”. Informal oral surveys have pointed that almost everyone agrees that some accents are stronger than others. When pressed to outline what it is about the accents that earns this impression, speakers typically find it difficult to articulate exactly what it is. Presumably, when people apply the adjectives strong, weak, mild, and (unfortunately) worse to accents, these are a reference to how close or far a given instantiation of a variety is from a broadcast-English style or their imagined “unaccented” American English. In a reference to Cajun English, Bender (2004, 6) asks, “Is the degree of Cajunness understood in part as a cultural distance from the mainstream, indexed by the distance of one’s Cajun speech from Standard English…?” Similarly, one could also ask if the degree of one’s Southernness is indexed by the distance of Southern features from an imagined Standard American English. Following Ochs (1992), the term index is employed to mean the use of one or more linguistic features to point to a social meaning or aspect of identity. Speakers within a given dialect area vary in their participation in local changes or dialectal features to express various aspects of identity or community membership (Hall-Lew 2005; Dodsworth 2005). Frequency or type of feature use may also vary for other, less conscious reasons such as level of contact with speakers of other varieties of English, etc.

Even if speakers themselves are not consciously indexing “more” or “less” Southern, this is still part of the message they are sending. Since the interpretation by listeners forms a large part of what meaning is, it is valuable to seek out the perceptions of listeners and to gain insight into how listeners interpret what speakers project about their particular version of what it means to speak like a Southerner.

Which among the Southern speech characteristics of monophthongization of the diphthong /ɑ^ɪ/, velar fronting in the –ing suffix (ING), the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), or so-called “drawl” contributes more to the percept of a stronger Southern accent? There are five aspects of the language of the southeastern U.S.: 1) acoustic movement (according to the Southern Vowel Shift) of high front vowels; 2) acoustic movement of mid front vowels; 3) _{monophthongization of the (ay) variable¹; 4) the alternation of (ING); and 5) the tendency to turn} some monophthongs into diph- and triphthongs. Following Feagin (1987) and Thomas (2003), there is a production of vowels as diph- and triphthongs, as the Southern “drawl”.