As a Southern native, naturally I have always had a large interest in the speech patterns in the Southeast of the United States and figuring out exactly where the accent comes from. This blog for my Grammar class at Michigan Tech has finally given me that opportunity to look into this passion and finally figure out exactly why I talk the way that I do. More importantly, it has given me a chance to raise a question that has been bothering me for quite some time: the speech biases that have been imposed in the schooling systems in the United States. This will look into exactly what is considered "proper" English today and how people are expected to speak when finally entering the corporate world.
The Southern accent started appearing when Puritan dissenters were fleeing oppression from Charles I in East Anglia. They brought their distinctive "twang" to Massachusetts (“Linguistics 201: The Dialects of American English” 2) . Eventually, their decedents began to migrate south, and thus, the Southern vocal patterns were born. Today, the 16 million or so descendants of these Puritans and many of their neighbors still speak with some form of this derived speech with a flat sounding, nasal lengthening of vowels along the Southeast corner of the United States. Northern speech came mostly from the less-educated, poorer classes from the South (as those were who eventually colonized the northern states). The use of double negatives and other slang terms that are still used today. “Aint” is the older, “correct” version of English which was avoided by the upper classes who chose the innovative single negatives preferred by British upper classes. So, in a way, the speech of the poorer classes are what influenced how those in the North speak.
Decreolization (the speech of African Americans gradually becoming more like their southern white neighbors) became more prominent between 1619 and 1808 when slaves were being brought over from West Africa. Upper-class white children raised by slaves began to take on an English form of the slave’s drawl. They also started disregarding the use of the to-be verb and emphasizing aspect rather than tense as West African languages typically do. As Steven Pinkner states in “The Language Instinct”, “Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture.” Language is something that is learned from those who raise you. As the slaves spent more time with the children than children’s parents usually did, it was evident that the children would eventually start to speak like them.
Later in history, the speech patterns continued to stay similar to these Western African language characteristics, but started to mix with Dutch influence. Miller 1972, describes a series of examples where there is an absence of copula in the language (a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate). The first instances of this are found in a Ku Klux Klan pamphlet describing, “Look out liberals: Wallace power gonna get you”. Other main features of this derived speech from the Dutch include diphthongalization; or more pronunciation of the [o] in words such as caught and bought, and a low fronted [a] in words instead of a back [A]; this develops that classic “twang” that southern accents are known for.
Several different slang terms have derived from the South over the years as well. The word “cuss” formed from “curse” which originally had a high class, [r]-les pronunciation. Other words came about such as conniption fit, scrimp, pesky, snicker, tacky, and varmint (from vermin). They also developed their own words and phrases for things such as bucket for pail, “sitting image of”, and y’all for you all. In the eighteenth century, contradictions of which language of the world was to be dominant expanded and intensified. With England’s union with Scotland in 1707 and Ireland in 1799 increased the cultural authority of the English language and increased the pressures of linguistic unification.
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