About African languages and influence…we may not have a polyglot of languages in most cases.
In his manuscript about the African heritage of American blacks, Stanley B. Alpern painstakingly sorts through the evidence in diaries, memoirs and official documents. Perhaps West African is too vague a geographic designation. The region that “sent more slaves to the New World than any other part of Africa” he calls Kwaland because it is “inhabited mainly by tribes speaking Kwa languages, a subfamily of the Niger-Congo linguistic group.”
It is a three hundred mile-deep coastal region stretching from eastern Ghana to eastern Nigeria.
Those particular people brought more than a language to the new world.
That region grows yams, sorghums, cowpeas (that is, black-eye peas) and watermelons.
Thurmond= SLIGHT? What CNN are you watching? The man has marbles AND mush in his mouth. My daddy grew up in Charleston and doesn’t understand him. In fact no one in that half of the state understands him.The only reason they keep voting for him is that they’ve never heard an untruthful word pass his lips, at least not one they could understand.
everytime i speak to someone from up north i now say what a wonderful accent you have. there is always a long silent time before they answer.
you see accents are like experts. an expert is someone who is not from here and acts like they know more then you.
I’ve lived in Savannah my entire life and have no discernible “Southern” accent. Most people insist I’m from the Mid-west depsite my arguements to the opposite. What I hate, though, is the dreaded “Gone With the Wind”-type accents you hear in most Southern-based movie. Example: the old lady talking to Forest Gump at the bus stop.
I am not above saying “ain’t” & “y’all” on occasion. I used to work with a woman from Philadelphia who had a strong, almost “Brooklyn”-type accent who was fond of saying “youse guys”. She could not understand “y’all”. I explained that “y’all” was a contraction of “you all”. She couldn’t explain what “youse” meant. Just a WAG, it’s the plural of “you”. (which is “you”, btw)
When I was young, I remember thinking that my grandmother had a strong Southern accent.
Then I met someone from Ireland, and realized that some of the ways she pronounced words and the way my grandmother pronounced words were exactly alike. (My grandmother’s father was Irish; her mother was Dutch.)
Plus, I took a Southern Culture-type class one summer at Samford University, and my professor told us that some Southern accents are very Irish-and-Scottish influenced.
Of course, people from Cullman, AL (originally a German settlement if I have my story straight) talk very very different. And there’s a great disparity between Northern Alabama and Southern Alabama accents. And there seems to be quite a bit of difference between Western Alabama (where I live) and Eastern Alabama.
Everybody who speaks English speaks with an accent. It’s no more or less of a problem to identify the origin of southern (U.S.) accents than it is to identify the origin of the accent of any other English speaker. There’s no such thing as a privileged accent in English from which all other accents are merely deviations.
BINGO! We have a winner. I think Wendell nailed it.
I’m from California. Once many years ago, on a trip to the UK with my folks, I got to chatting with an English bloke, and he said, “You’re from California, aren’t you?”
Well that kinda blew my mind. A “California Accent”? Never even occured to me. Of course, the speaker never thinks he has an accent!
I had the opposite reaction, Aesiron! I don’t live in Appalachia, yet I frequently say “yonder” and “reckon,” though never “hit.” But I hear people from Eastern Kentucky say it all the time. In fact, I worked with a woman who talked about her husbad Mack all the time. It was weeks before I realized his name was Mike.
I always thought I had a mainly midwestern accent, but I have friend in Iowa and they talk nothing like me! But like Mr. Blue Sky, I have a friend in Savannah, lived there all her life, whom I outrank in the drawl department.
Some folks in Western Kentucky have an old South sort of accent; its sounds to me like Georgia or Mississippi, but is probably closer to what old Southerners in Nashville sound like. Nobody else here talks like that; I’d say we’ve got more of the mountain-based Southern accent than the liquid vowels.
I’m reminded of a description in Gone With the Wind where it’s noted Scarlett and the others around Tara speak with “brisk” upstate accents. Of course, everything would be brisk compared to old Charleston and Savannah.
Gullah was mentioned by barbitu8 – do you ever hear it spoken? I’ve listened, while on vacation, but haven’t detected any, even when hanging around the basket-weavers. (And not just at the downtown market either!)
I’ve lived all my life in Eastern Tennessee and have been told by various friends and family that my accent’s all over the place. A cousin from Illinois said I had a thick Southern accent, a friend living here but born in Philadelphia told me that I don’t have a discernible accent, a friend from Maryland’s said I’ve got a slight Southern accent, another from California concurs.
Then there’re people I’d met while working retail. One remarked that I’d always sounded like a Northerner to her (she was from Oklahoma) after learning my mother was born and raised in Brooklyn and one customer even said I sounded Canadian.
Well, going on to why the south has the accent it does… I think we should redefine the question as “Why the south and the north have such different accents” because as we all know everyone has an accent to everyone else. Anyhoo IMHO the reason is because the north had more different languages coming in so it “evolved” faster and thus became different from the southern accent.
As a born-and-raised Western Kentuckian, I’ll agree with this. My cousins from Mississippi talk just like I do. We often joke that in the South, all words have at least two syllables, no matter what. That being said, my accent is really pronounced compared to some of my friends, and I can exaggerate it a bit beyond that to get the stereotypical “idiot redneck” voice.
And for the record, I use a good bit of those “East Tennessee” words on a daily basis. I’ve been to East Tennessee one weekend a year for the past 12 years, but I can assure you I was using them before I ever set foot there.
I think the “upcountry” ones (Appalachians to Arkansas and Oklahoma) are heavily derived from the Scotch-Irish settlers. When I hear a Protestant from Belfast, I sort of hear a bit of Smoky Mountains in it.
Anyway, I always thought the ethnic origin of the typical inland white Southerner was heavily Scotch-Irish (Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson et al.), as opposed to mostly English - which was the ancestry of the tidewater Virginian or South Carolinian (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe et al.).
Why only a Protestant? There is no recognised difference in accents between Catholics and Protestants from the same area (apart from differences in what a few letters of the alphabet are called, that is.)
Anyway, I would say that Derry and Donegal accents do have a bit of a twang which resembles the Southern U.S. twang. I don’t hear many similarities between Belfast and Southern U.S. accents though.
