Why do Southerners (U.S.) speak with a ‘drawl’?
Especially in the ‘deep south’ the drawl is heavy – to my ears it makes the drawl-speakers sound like they are a bit slow in thinking.
But how did it develop? It seems unique and not like a British accent, so if they were immigrants from Britain, why didn’t they adopt the ‘middle american’ TV newscaster standard ‘accent’ like most of the country?
Essentially, it is a lingusitic “echo” of the french colonists that first settled the area.
Regards
FML
Here is a starting point for you. Third paragraph down from the section title I linked to is most directly relevant to your question.
-FrL-
A lot depends on exactly where in the South you are as well. A huge amount of the South was settled primarily by people from northern England (Yorkshire and Lancashire especially) while Appalachia and points west tended to have a stronger Scots-Irish* settlement, thus the accents are similar but different. The North (this is way oversimplified) had a lot more non-British settlers- particularly Germans and Dutch (as well as some Puritans in New England who’d spent their formative years in the Netherlands)- to blend into their accent, plus they were settled in different waves.
*When teaching some seminars in genealogy I learned a lot of people think Scots-Irish means people of Scottish and or Irish descent. It actually refers to a very specific group who in the UK are known as the Ulster Scots. Ulster is the northeast of Ireland and includes all of what’s now Northern Ireland with bits of the northern Republic of Ireland as well; in the 17th century it was largely depopulated by war and then almost completely depopulated by confiscation and order of King James I & VI, and the land was given to Scots to settle, so basically it became a Scottish colony. It’s people lived in Ireland, but were ancestrally/linguistically Scottish (and predominantly Protestant), thus their accents would have been different from those of the Irish Catholics (which of course weren’t uniform to begin with).
A Southern accent (which is, as I’m sure someone will soon note, actually a number of different accents) is no further from or closer to the accents of the people who settled in the U.S. than any other American accent. (For that matter, modern British accents aren’t much closer to the accents of, say, Britain in about 1600. They have also evolved since that time.) It’s a mixture of their accents. It’s evolved in its own way in the U.S. It’s no different in that way than the rural northwest Ohio accent that I grew up speaking (which I think sounds very much like the standard American accent you expect broadcasters to speak). It’s also a mixture of the accents and has evolved in its own way in the U.S.
From personal experience, having lived in Georgia my entire life, there are a number of people here who will exaggerate their accents depending on their company. Around other southerners their accent will remain normal, but in the presence of “them damn yanks” the drawl and slur will become nearly unintelligible. It’s almost as though they use the drawl as a mark of pride, a way of identifying with the stereotypical “laid back, simple man” image of the south.
Of course, this is entirely anecdotal, applies to only a small portion of the people I’ve met, and does nothing to explain the development of the accent in the first place. It’s just something I’ve noticed and found interesting.
Cite? The French settled only a small part of the region concerned, mainly Louisiana.
We have discussed this in GQ two times that I was involved in and there is alot of info there.
My main interest then was to what extent the African Slaves influenced this Accent.
The best answer to this aspect of the question that I see in these two threads that I get is brianmelendez’s answer in the 2003 thread citing a quote from The Dialects of American English, he offers that some small piece of the traditional Southern accent is from slaves but not much:
*Black English was most influenced by the speech of the southern whites.
Features carried over from early Southern English into Black English:
–loss of final consonants, especially sonorants: po(or), sto(re) like aristocratic southern English.
– use of double negatives, ain’t, as in early English.
–loss of ng: somethin’, nothin’, etc.
Black English, in turn, gradually influenced the speech of southern whites–especially the children of the aristocratic slave owners. Given the social prejudices of the Old South, this seems paradoxical. However, remember that throughout all the slave owning areas, black nannies helped raise white children, and the children of blacks and whites played freely together before the Civil War. Since language features acquired in early childhood tend to be kept throughout life, Southern English naturally became mixed with Black English.
Let’s look more closely at how Black English developed on the basis of West African Dialects. Whenever a group of adults is forced to learn a second language, the language learned retains many features of the original native language. Thus, the English of black slaves retained many features that were African and not present in English at all. The children of the slaves learned this form of English as their native language. Thus, on the basis of language mixing, a new dialect, called a creole, was born. This process–at least in some small degree-- characterizes the English of all Americans whose parents spoke English as a second language. But in the case of African Americans, due to the social separation they lived under from the very start, the differences were stronger and more lasting.
Main features carried over from West African languages.
–No use of the linking verb ‘to be’ or generalization of one form for it.
–emphasis on aspect rather than tense: He workin’ (right now) vs. He be workin’. This is found in many West African languages.
–I done gone (from Wolof doon , the completive verb aspect particle + English ‘done’).
–Regularization of present tense verb conjugation: He don’t, he know it.
–voiced th in initial position becomes d: dis, dey; in medial position it becomes v: brother > brovva. final voiceless th = f with =wif
A large number of West African words came into Standard American through the medium of Black English: bug (bugu = annoy), dig (degu/ understand), tote bag (tota = carry in Kikonga), hip (Wolof hepicat one who has his eyes wide open), voodoo (obosum, guardian spirit) mumbo jumbo (from name of a West African god), jazz (? Bantu from Arabic jazib one who allures), banjo (mbanza?), chigger (jigger/ bloodsucking mite), goober (nguba /Bantu), okra (nkruman/ Bantu), yam (njami/ Senegal), banana (Wolof). Also, the phrases: sweet talking, every which way; to bad-mouth, high-five are from Black English–seem to be either American innovations or loan translations from West African languages.
The speech of African Americans gradually became more like the speech of their southern white neighbors–a process called decreolization. (And the speech of the whites became slightly more like that of the blacks). However, in a few areas, the original African English creole was preserved more fully. There is one dialect of Black English still spoken on the Georgia coast, called Gullah, which is still spoken there by about 20,000 people; it is thought to represents the closest thing to the original creole.
After the Civil War, Black English continued to evolve and change, especially in the creation of new vocabulary. After the 1920’s millions of blacks migrated to northern cities, where various varieties of Black English continue to develop.
*
My people! A great book on the migrations is Albion’s Seed.
There is very rarely an answer as to “why” a group of people speak a certain way. We can often point to where they picked up this variable or that variable, and we can say that that variable is associated with such and such a group so that’s why another group uses it, but this variable is not and so forth, but the “why” is often elusive, except that their peers also talk like that.
The thing about the Southern “drawl” is that no one has been able to (scientifically) pin down exactly what composes it. There are a of variables particular to dialects Southern English, most notably with vowel quality and certain grammatical constructions (double modals (i.e., “might could”), ‘liketa,’ ‘bless your heart,’ and so on), but none of these seem to correlate with what laypeople refer to as the “drawl.” It seems to be about speed, but I’ve never heard of a study that found actual differences in speech rate between Southerners and non.
And, jimmmy, the website you quote has a few problems, mainly that it totally ignores the huge debate that is going on within sociolinguistics as to the provenance of African American English. The two main schools of thought are the Creolists and the Anglicists. The Creolists believe that AAE came about through a creole that was formed by the slaves, and that AAE has been slowly approaching the white standard over time through a process of decreolization. The Anglicists believe that African slaves learned the white vernacular when they first were brought over and have been slowly moving away from the white standard over time. Both schools have their data to back up their positions. A third school of thought has recently emerged, via Walt Wolfram and Erik R. Thomas’s The Development of African American English, which is the Substrate Hypothesis. This theory proposes that there are certain aspects of West African languages that remain in the English of those learning it as a second language. Your link seems to conflate the Substrate Hypothesis and the Creolist Hypothesis.
There are also just some basic misunderstandings on that site. *Store *going to sto’ is referred to as r-lessness and is common in many, many dialects of English, including creoles spoken by people of African decent in the Caribbean, and does not happen just at the end of words, like *park *going to pa’k. So, to say that AAE got it from Southern English can only be just a guess. Double negatives, “g-dropping”, and *th *going to t or d are also incredibly common in dialects of English across the globe. Saying what came from where is tricky at best.
liberty3701 someone else provided that in 2003 as we struggled partially with the sub-Question if Southern Accents had anything to do with African slaves? And this College Level course from the University of Washington System seemed reasonable to me.
What do you say is the answer to that at the larger level of the OP - did the development of Southern Accents have anything to do with African slaves?
Wow – you really have to watch what you say around here! Thanks for the acknowledgment, jimmmy.
To a degree, we do it to confound those damned yankees.
FWIW, in the previous thread someone asked if they could blame okra and collard greens on a West African heritage. The answer is “yes.” Okra stew is one of the more common dishes where I was in Cameroon, and cooked greens (though not specifically collards) are the staple vegetable. Even if West Africa’s influence is not there linguistically, it’s there on the table.
My dad claimed that in the areas of west Ulster colonised by English planters the accent noticably varies from that in the areas that Scots planters colonised. I have no cite and he’s no longer with us to provide more information.
At face value, it’s a good cite and people who don’t already have a background in the subject would have no reason to doubt it’s veracity, so that’s why I wanted to clear some stuff up.
As for how much African Americans influenced the Southern dialects, I’m not very well-versed in that particular question. I’ve read articles that claimed, as an aside, that slaves left their linguistic mark on Southern speech, but I’ve never looked up the actual studies, so I don’t know what variables they’re talking about or what evidence they had. The cite you had didn’t say anything about that direction of influence other than it happened. Clearly, African Americans have left a mark on Southern culture, but I don’t know how much of it was linguistic.
I have a theory on this. I think it’s partly due to the heat.
When I’ve visited hot places, I noticed that people often move more slowly. In modern times we have air conditioning, but go to a poor place like Mexico or India. People tend to pace themselves, and with good reason: they can drop from heat stroke etc.
And in that vein of economizing energy, I don’t think they “finish” their sounds. For instance, take a word like “hi.” If you slow it down, the ‘i’ sound is really a blend of two sounds: ah and ee. But you’ll hear southerners greet you “Hah!”
So that explains 100% of the phenomenon. OK, not really, but I think it’s part of it.
I think that that’s very unlikely. To prove something like that, you’d have to do a survey of the world’s languages and see if there was a general correlation with the speed of speech and the average temperature of the place where the language is spoken. It’s not even clear, as liberty3701 has already said, that people in the southern U.S. speak any slower than those in the northern U.S. I’m not even sure that it’s possible to define the speed of speech.
Interesting. When I first read this, my first thought about a drawl wasn’t about speed, but that Southerners pronounce words differently, hence my post. dictionary.com points out that the vowels are prolonged, however. As I stated, I don’t think they pronounce ‘both parts’ of some vowels, so for that reason, logically they should be able speak a bit faster.
But if it’s the case that a vowels are prolonged, then either they’re speaking the other parts of a word faster to make the overall speed equal or, by definition, they’re speaking more slowly overall.
I would think speed of speech would be easily defined: number of words divided by the time it takes to say them. Give a group of Yankees a paragraph to read aloud and the same to a group of Southerners and time them. Assuming temperaments, intellect, etc. are the same, the times should be similar.
Personally, I think there’s a difference: people in the South aren’t in a hurry as much as Northerner. I could be talking to someone with a PhD…they’re seem more laid back here. I recognize there may be vast amounts of subjectivity in that assessment, however.
As for the heat, my first year in DFW (1999), IIRC we had 50+ days straight when the temp reached 100F or more. I’d leave the house in the morning and it would already be 85F…and being plenty humid besides, I was a wet dishrag most of the time outdoors. I found myself moving more slowly as well.
Morae per second?
