A friend of mine said he recently read a linguistic study suggesting that a few isolated rural populations in the American south still speak what is essentially Elizabethan English. In other words, he’s saying that what we think of as “hick speak” is actually closer to the English of Shakespeare’s time than is British English today.
I was unable to turn up any info on the web, so…
Does anyone have the faintest clue whether or not this theory actually exists in print somewhere that I can get a hold of it? More importantly, can anyone speak to its validity?
It seems far-fetched to me, but I’m fascinated by the idea.
Thanks.
No, it’s not true, and if you search the archives here you’ll see it’s been debunked numerous times - most recently (and eloquently) by flodnak in the “hillbillies” thread.
I don’t think the theory holds water. However, you do hear some archaic words in the rural South that don’t turn up elsewhere.
The best example is probably “victuals” (pronounced “vittles”). Even in the South, it’s not heard much today (except in jest) but the word did hold on down here longer than it did elsewhere in the U.S.
I really think what sets southern English apart from the English spoken elsewhere is the African influence. Even the folks who eventually wound up as hillbillies would have picked up that influence. Few (if any) moved directly from Ulster into the mountains. The typical hillbilly ancestor would have spent some time working as an indentured servant in flatlands of eastern Virginia, North Carolina or South Carolina before moving up into the hills. In the flatlands, they would likely have worked side-by-side with slaves, or at least would have encountered them on a regular basis.
Shakepearean English would most likely have had a Midlands accent rather than the melodramatic ac-TORS inflexion, that seems to have been used in Shakepearean interpretations.
UK accents have become less and less differant as the last century progressed so I would speculate that the accent would have been so dissimilar to other regions as to seem to be almost another sub-language to many others in the UK in Shakespears day.
The plays, being performed at the Globe, might even have needed some slight rewriting to accomadate the differant London accent of the day.
Again I will assert that accent convergance has partly been because of mass media.
I have produced cites, as asked, on this but got no feedback.
Much of Great Britain’s power came from the sea with much of the fleet being based around the Southern UK ports such as Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dartmouth, Torbay,and Chatham so that Navy slang would have originated from the Cornish tongue which was a separate Gaelic derived language.
There are some places that have a distinct Devon and Hampshire accent that one might think surprising at first, such as some of the Caribean islands, and I would think that this accent is possibly one of the more influencial in US history since much emigration from Britain in the early colonist years took place from those Southern UK ports.
Try the Lumbee/ Tuscarora tribes in North Carolina. Local folklore has it that they are the descendants of the ‘Lost Colony’, and that when they were ‘re-discovered’ in the swampy area of southeast North Carolina (along the NC/SC border, about 1/2 way between Wilmington and Charlotte) in the 1700’s they were speaking Elizabethan English, wore Clothing based on Elizabethan styles, and had blue eyes. They also had surnames like Chavis. Locklear, and Oxendine. A person can drive a mile down a road in Robeson County (NC) and hear noticable differences in dialect.
ashcrott Since your friend asserts that he “recently read” a linguistic study, why not ask him what it was and from where? Be prepared for an excuse that he “can’t remember” where he read it or "can’t find it’ right now. sic semper, urbanis legendus.
Aschrott, the theory does indeed exist. I’m looking for one of my English books for you, since I was taught that in places like the most remote mountain areas of the South, that people do speak more or less what people did in Shakespearean England because there is less cultural influence than in more populous places. They don’t sound like Shakespearean actors, however, since the accent is entirely different. The grammar and some word choices are supposed to be nearly identical though. I don’t know how prevalent the theory is, but it is popular enough to be included in one of UNH’s English classes.
This is one of those Language Myths, debunked in the book of that title edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin Books, 1998). On a par with the Eskimos’ 20 (or 50? or 100? or 500?) words for snow.
It may have started with a leetle nugget of truth. Such as identifying a few words still spoken up in the hollers that had become obsolete in the rest of the English-speaking world. From there people’s imaginations elaborated that into the whole Elizabethan language. Considering that the mountain peoples’ ancestors didn’t come over until Jacobean times at the very earliest, I don’t know why the popular myth keeps calling their dialect “Elizabethan.”
Casdave, your guess about Devon speech is right on — certain islands of the Chesapeake Bay in fact maintained documented examples of Devon dialect into the 20th century. (And this has a much sounder basis in fact than the “Elizabethan” hillbilly myth.) You always hear Walter Ralegh mentioned in this connection, since he was from Devon.
I’ll leave hazel-rah to discuss your cites since she’s the expert on this, not me However, if it IS the case that UK accents have become more similar - and I know there is disagreement amongst linguists even on that assumption - I do wonder if it’s possible to separate the effects of mass media from the increasing mobility of British society which has taken place over the same period of time.
Back to the OP, I think it is in the Bauer and Trudgill book Jomo Mojo mentions that some researchers decided to test the Elizabethan-speech-in-Appalachia theory by presenting residents in the area with examples of actual Elizabethan speech.
The result? They couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Despite the presence of a few archaicisms, their speech is no closer to “Elizabethan” than anyone else’s in America.
This is the cite casdave gave in the other thread about mass media’s influence on dialects which I am referring to. I’m sorry I missed it, I skipped to the second page when I went back to that thread.
Anyway, in that same book Jomo Mojo just mentioned, Language Myths, there is a chapter on the myth of mass media influencing accents/dialects. I don’t have the book with me right here, as I’m not at home, but basically there is no evidence of any form of media having any lasting effect on accents or dialects other than short-term adoption of catchphrases.
I have a lot of respect for the BBC (or I did until they cancelled Dr. Who, anyway) but that link doesn’t list any sources, and Melvyn Bragg is not a linguist himself. And it’s kind of contradictory… the heading is “Black English in Brixton” but then the paragraph below says the dialect is not determined by geography? What is Brixton? A state of mind?
I’m not dead set on my position, I’m just skeptical. I’ve seen a lot of linguistic misinformation on TV specials and general-interest magazine articles about language.
The problem with saying that there is no evidence for media influence on accents is, as Ruadh points out, isolating its effect and quantifying it definitaively against all the other possible influences.
That said the differances are easy to pick up from old recordings and changes in the use of language are fairly easy to spot.
Here is one example of the way the media hs changed the use of a word,
During the Falkalands campaign British troops had to make their way on foot over rough terrain and considerable distances.
The media who were with them described this in what they thought was UK armed forces slang calling it a ‘Yomp’ .
They were mistaken though, the true word should have been ‘stomp’ and was itself an example of black humour as any UK serviceman of the time would have told you that going out and stomping around usually meant to go out on the town and clubbing.
The word yomp was used to mean to eat food (particularly canteen type food - scran) in a hurried wolfish manner.
This mistaken and altered use of the word seems to have stuck, and it’s only source to the public was media based.(aside from ex-servicemen)
If you listen to the sound clips in those cites I gave, much of the original BBC broadcast is there and one of them states that prior to around 1930 people at one end of the UK had little idea of how those in another part of the UK spoke, but that the advent of Radio changed all that, along with the explosion of cinema.
The idea that there was a ‘correct’ way of speaking English was not even on the horizon of most folk until then.
People were not particularly mobile in those days so changes in accents would be more likely to be media influenced than by movement.
Although Melvyn Bragg is not a linguist he is a meticulous man and would not make points he could not back up, he is generally recognised as a man of letters and has been described in biographies as Britains cleverest man - hype, I suppose, but not by all that much.
Thanks for the book title, Jomo. I will definitely keep an eye out for a used copy (or who knows, maybe even spring for a new one).
Do they suppose that this was an issue of grammar, vocabulary, accent, or all of the above?
I am particularly interested in the accent end of things. I agree that the existance of a “time capsule” dialect in the American south is implausible, but is it not possible that some of these far-flung dialects at least contains as many elements of the sound of archaic English as does modern British?
My current favorite book, “Albion’s Seed”, by David Hackett Fischer, traces the folkways of the first four groups to colonize America (English groups, I mean): The Puritans, the Virginia colonists (Cavaliers fleeing the Roundheads), the Quakers, and the Scots & Irish border people who became the frontiersmen. He has chapters on language ways, with lists of particular words used by each group.
I’ve got to re-read it to brush up, but I do remember that the classic Southern accent, as spoken by Robt E. Lee, is actaully a southern England aristocratic accent… And most of the frontier jargon is Scotch & Irish border-people-speak.
Not to mention the fact that most of the immigrants to the Southern mountains were Ulster Scots, and not English. I don’t imagine the Ulster Scots spoke in “Elizabethan” tones.
In fairness, the OP didn’t specify that the “Elizabethan” accent was to be found in the mountains.
That’s not what I was getting at, Jomo Mojo. Let me try again, with emphasis in the appropriate place:
In fairness, the OP didn’t specify that the “Elizabethan” accent was to be found in the mountains.
It makes more historic sense that a lowland, tidewater Southern accent (as opposed to a mountain accent) would be related to Elizabethan English. (Since the tidewater regions would have a larger percentage of settlers with English, not Scottish or Irish, ancestry.)
I’m telling you, Spoke-, this myth has been circulating for many years, and it’s usually the Appalachian or Ozark dwellers who are alleged to have the “Elizabethan” speech. The myth has been familiar in this form to linguists for a long time. It looked to me as though the OP had half-remembered a slightly garbled version of it.
Well, let’s clear up what we’re talking about. You say accents here, but the example (yomp) you give is lexical. I agree that we pick up new words and phrases from mass media, but they tend to be faddish- they don’t last long enough for me to consider them “changes in dialect.”
Now as we become positively saturated with media, and it becomes more a focus of our lives, I can see this cycle of adopting timely words and phrases becoming a feature of a dialect (the adoption of popular media terms and phrases, not the terms and phrases themselves), but I still don’t think mass media will have much of an effect on the accents or grammar of a dialect. Just lexicon, and only in the short term. As I said, this isn’t enough for me to say that mass media levels dialects. This is a pretty hot topic linguistically, but that’s the side I come down on.
I didn’t listen to the audio, because it’s not in a format I can listen to.
However, if it IS the case that UK accents have become more similar - and I know there is disagreement amongst linguists even on that assumption - I do wonder if it’s possible to separate the effects of mass media from the increasing mobility of British society which has taken place over the same period of time.