jimmmy: The text quoted by brianmelendez (The Dialects of American English) is fascinating but highly flawed. The part linked to gives no author or source at all.
Notice that all of the statements about “Black English” are based on the premise that slaves lived only in the South. With the exception of coastal areas, the North had a far longer history of slavery. Addressing the effect that that had on dialects was ignored.
Creole as a language is not quite as simple as the author would have the reader believe. The Gullah language is primarily spoken off the coast of South Carolina, not Georgia. More faster is not academic usage nor is the spelling yall. when referring to the dialectical contraction of you all.
For these reasons and others, I would take what is said in this particular article with a grain of salt.
The traditional “broadcast” dialect is from the Mid-West. That’s where the original broadcasting schools were. Nevertheless, there is no “standard” dialect.
I have no doubt that those that we interact with change our dialects just as they always have! That includes our vocabularies. Does anyone remember talking about wanting to earn beau coup money in the 1960s and 1970s? Remember where that came from?
IANALinguist, but the claims on that site are not made out of whole cloth. One of the first thing I noticed when learning Fulfulde (a trade language related to Wolof and spoken throughout West Africa from Senegal to Cameroon- prime slave trade locations) was the word “don” (pronounced: dun), which means “there, existing” but is used as part of the present tense. “He goes” would be translated “He ‘don’ go”. Now, there are times when you use a “don” construction and times when you use the past tense for the present, and I’m not too clear of the rules behind this difference, but it may have to do with completed actions or habitual actions. Not sure. Anyway, the similarity of the word an how it is used is striking. I’m not sure if that means something, but I’ve always wondered.
It’s also true that Fulfulde at least does not have different conjugations for first person, second person and plural nouns. Also, there is no word “to be” in Fulfulde- all ajectives are treated as verbs and “don” does whatever work verbs don’t do.
> Notice that all of the statements about “Black English” are based on the
> premise that slaves lived only in the South. With the exception of coastal areas,
> the North had a far longer history of slavery. Addressing the effect that that
> had on dialects was ignored.
The North didn’t have a longer history of slavery. It’s true that there was slavery in much of the North in the mid-eighteenth century, but there wasn’t as much of it, and it disappeared by the early nineteenth century. Slavery started in the U.S. (well, in the British colonies before it became the U.S.) in South Carolina and Georgia where the climate was best for the large plantations where slavery thrived.
Right, that’s pretty cool. But those are aspects of African American English, not Southern English. I don’t know how much African languages affected general Southern dialects, since those examples are not used by (most) white Southerners.
And, no, it’s not the heat; it’s not being more “relaxed.” And you can measure rate of speed of speech.
It’s not the heat it’s the humidity. (Not really, but just always wanted an excuse to say that [and yes, I’m familiar with the “It’s not the heat it’s the stupidity” variant].)
While not about southerners obviously, I thought that the movie Gangs of New York was a mediocre-at-best movie but that Daniel Day Lewis was absolutely brilliant. My favorite thing about his performance (and the reason I mention it here)- and I don’t know how much was his research and choice and how much was Scorcese’s dialect coaches- was the way you could hear in Bill the Butcher’s speech the “missing link” stage between an accent that was still slightly lower class British (among other things) and the embryo of the stereotypical working class New Yorker accent. In the HBO John Adams miniseries I’m not sure if they were trying for the same effect or if they just had a lot of British actors, but there was also the “sort of British/sort of American” accent. I’m not familiar with any movies that have done this with the south, though there are accounts that southerners had a different and recognized-as-southern accent by the late 18th century (by which time many families had lived here for well over a century- George Washington, for instance, was the third generation of his family on both sides to be born here and his great-grandparents had emigrated as young men from Lancashire).
The New Orleans yat dialect (from the phrase “where y’at” [where are you at]) is famously more similar to NYC and Boston than to, say, Nashville or Atlanta. One reason is the far more polygenetic makeup of New Orleans (French, French-Canadian, Spanish, African, famine Irish*, and later Germans and southern Italians/Sicilians in addition to the English speaking citizens) whereas most of the south is English speaking and African.
Gullah’s been mentioned, but it’s an absolutely fascinating dialect. A professor at one university I worked at and a maid at another university I worked at, natives of coastal South Carolina and Brunswick, Georgia respectively, both spoke it as first language and both literally had to learn it as second language the same as a kid growing up in a barrio has to speak English. It’s not the sing-song cadence of the Caribbean but something different altogether, with bits of English thrown in. (Many people don’t know that some slave buyers were actually very selective about the regions of Africa they bought slaves from, and that was particularly true in South Carolina where a lot of rice was grown; planters specifically wanted slaves from what’s now called “The Rice Coast” of Africa [Sierra Leone and Senegal] as they already knew how to plant/tend/harvest the crops, far moreso than their white masters [Englishmen or their descendants who’d never seen a rice field usually] and far moreso than Africans who traded cattle and casava and other crops for rice rather than growing their own.)
Washington, being from the Northern Neck, would probably have had an even more recognizable accent that just “Southern” (at least as a young man. He had travelled pretty extensively by the time he got to be an adult). I’ve heard the Northern Neck accent described as being very similar to the Cornish accent in England. The folks on Tangier Island are even more recognizable - they’re practically incomprehensible once they get going - and they have a sizeable Cornish influence, too, IIRC.
Interesing theory, but the people taking rapid-fire Spanish in the Virgin Islands don’t agree with it. My 4 years of high-school Spanish classes didn’t help.
The islands have a sub-tropical climate with high humidity, although temperatures are moderated by trade winds. Temperatures in summer average from 79-88°F (26-31°C) and between 72-82°F (22-28°C) in winter. Rainfall is erratic with occasional droughts. http://www.iexplore.com/world_travel/British+Virgin+Islands/Climate
The islands are hot and humid throughout the year, with most rain falling between August and October. The busiest tourist season is from December to May, during the northern hemisphere winter, and outside of these months rooms are cheaper and the islands less crowded. Between April and August the waters are calmer and underwater visibility is best for diving and snorkeling. http://www.iexplore.com/world_travel/U.S.+Virgin+Islands/Climate
Not sure which ones you’re talking about, but since they’re close to each other I guess we can average those.
It’s more complicated than latitude/longitude, of course. IIRC from science class, when you’re on land close to water, that water tends to moderate the climate, i.e. smaller temperature swings. And in this case they mention trade winds, so it will probably feel less oppressive. Living in a landlocked area is like being on a brick that the sun cooks all day and the heat is released from that again at night, i.e. not much relief.
Not true. It started in Virginia (1619- by accident [a Dutch ship that had captured a Spanish slaveship sailed into a hurricane and had to put in for Jamestown for emergency repairs, trading “a cargo of twenty neegars” for supplies and labor). From then on Virginia always had the highest slave population until 1865. In 1860 Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi all had higher slave populations than South Carolina (though SC and Georgia were both “up there”). (Mississippi had the highest percentage of slave-owning families- slightly more than half the state lived in a family that owned at least one slave.)
Does anybody know if there’s a native San Franciscan accent? Just curious.
When the movie Hairspray came out one of the biggest complaints was “what accent is Travolta going for exactly?” Apparently there is a Baltimore accent and it’s nothing like the odd voice Travolta was doing. (Walken of course sounded like Walken- though his sounding like Walken as a janitor in Louisiana (not the New Orleans part) in Joe Dirt was one of the few funny things about the movie.
Joe Dirt: Your accent sounds like New York.
[Walken’s character]: No. I’m from here. Born and raised. Not here. Over in… Kansas.
Joe Dirt: Is this your wife? [points to a picture lit by altar candles]
Walken: No. Yeah. Ex-wife. She was shot. Six times. New York City. I mean… Kansas.
Virginia may have had the highest number of slaves, but South Carolina had the highest proportion of slaves. There were times in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when there were more slaves than non-slaves in South Carolina. Virginia had the highest number of slaves because it had a much larger population. Slavery was more central to the South Carolina economy. The first slaves in the U.S. may have been in Virginia, but soon slavery became more common in South Carolina. Virginians were also more ambivalent about slavery. This is why when the southern states began seceding from the U.S. before the Civil War, it was the Lower South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida) that left first. The Upper South (Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina) were more reluctant and only joined later.
What about the copula ko in Fula? E.g. Ko mi Pullo ‘I am a Fula’. Anyway, ‘exist’ is the other meaning of ‘be’, so between don and ko it looks like the meaning of ‘be’ is pretty well covered. Except that a copula isn’t needed for stative verbs, as you noted.
I can easily see how don could make a perfective aspect, if interpreted like the English phrase ‘there it is’ (referring to a fait accompli, a completed action).
That must be why Gullah and Krio are so similar. I’ve heard they’re somewhat mutually intelligible. Krio is an English-based Africanized creole language spoken in Sierra Leone.
