Conversation

Sometimes referred to as talking, chatting, visiting, jawing, small talk, or repartee, conversation involves the oral exchange of ideas, opinions, and sentiments. Loosely structured, it often flows along according to whims and inclinations with little purpose beyond visiting or “passing the time of day.” Allen Tate, in an essay titled “A Southern Mode of the Imagination,” argued that northern conversation was about ideas, whereas “the typical southern conversation is not going anywhere; it is not about anything. It is about the people who are talking.” An aspect of regional manners, Tate wrote, southern conversation is a way “to make everybody happy.” Ellen Glasgow in The Woman Within insisted that in the South “conversation, not literature, is the pursuit of all classes.” In the frontier South with dwellings miles apart and life lonely and often harsh, lengthy visits were common, and hospitality was extended even to strangers. Church meetings, court days, political rallies, funerals, and even hangings became occasions to socialize, to hear the news, and to discuss mutual concerns. At the country store loafers congregated, and in cold weather they clustered around the warm stove to play checkers or cards and swap yarns.

Southerners have long taken pride in being, and listening to, great talkers, making folk heroes of preachers, lawyers, politicians, and storytellers. Whether conversing in a lowly cabin, a white framed house, or a mansion, they reveled in loquaciousness. Young ladies mastered the art of “small talk”; matrons loved to gossip about household matters, child rearing, and sensational happenings. Thomas Nelson Page commends “the master of the plantation” as a “wonderful talker” who “discoursed of philosophy, politics, and religion.” When discussing hospitality Page reports, “The conversation was surprising: it was of crops, the roads, politics, mutual friends, including the entire field of neighborhood matters, related not as gossip, but as affairs of common interest which everyone knew or was expected and entitled to know.” In Charleston, New Orleans, Natchez, and other cities planters and professionals met in their social and literary clubs, welcomed distinguished guests, and engaged in enlightened repartee, sometimes over dinner or while sipping old wines.

Swapping stories, Vicksburg, Miss. (William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Blacks, meanwhile, developed distinctive conversational skills. Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men (1935) recalled from her childhood in Eatonville, Fla., the men who gathered at the country store or on the front porch to exchange tales, and her works are filled with examples of black conversation, including the “lying” sessions when stories were swapped. Writers such as Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker structure their works around conversational lore.

In more recent times, for both blacks and whites, the front porch (the “gallerie” to Cajuns) attracted the family and their friends. Shaded perhaps by tall trees and equipped with rocking chairs and sometimes palm-leaf fans or ceiling fans, it was a place to relax, to watch passersby, and to welcome relatives, neighbors, the postman, a salesman, the minister—whoever happened to stop and “sit a spell.” In French Louisiana the visitor might be offered dark-roast coffee; in other areas, iced tea or lemonade. The mint julep sometimes encouraged joviality on plantation verandas. With the advent of radio, television, and air-conditioning, the front porches were enclosed or gave way to cooler interiors out of the heat and dust, and no longer were people as likely to pass the time with simple conversation.

WALDO W. BRADEN

Louisiana State University

Roger D. Abrahams, Southern Folklore Quarterly (vol. 33, 1968); Waldo W. Braden, The Oral Tradition in the South (1983); Merrill G. Christophersen, Southern Speech Journal (vol. 19, 1954); Everett Dick, The Dixie Frontier: A Comprehensive Picture of Southern Frontier Life before the Civil War (1948); Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (1949); Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (1968).

 

Creolization

The earliest African slaves in the Lowcountry and on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia spoke various African languages that were often mutually unintelligible. The common language that they acquired was an English-based pidgin. An analogous situation occurred in southeastern Louisiana, where a French-based pidgin arose. Pidgin languages develop as a means by which speakers of diverse languages may communicate with one another. A pidgin has no native speakers: it is a second language by definition. But it became a native tongue when it was passed on to the American-born children of those enslaved Africans. Once a pidgin acquires native speakers, it is said to be a creole language. As a native tongue it must serve not merely the restricted functions of a pidgin but all the functions of a language. Gullah is a creole language developed by the descendants of enslaved Africans in South Carolina and Georgia. In Louisiana a French creole usually called Louisiana Creole developed.

The process of linguistic change in which two or more languages converge to form a new native tongue is called by students of linguistic change “creolization.” The creole language Gullah continued to evolve—both in inner form and extended use—in a situation of language contact. There was reciprocal influence of African and English features upon both the creole and the regional standard. The English contribution was principally lexical; the African contribution was principally grammatical.

The process of linguistic change provides a model for explaining other aspects of the transformation from African to African American culture. What might be called the “creolization of black culture” involves the unconscious “grammatical” principles of culture, the “deep structure” that generates specific cultural patterns. Such “grammatical” principles survived the Middle Passage and governed the selective adaptation of elements of both African and European culture. Herded together with others with whom they shared a common condition of servitude and some degree of cultural overlap, enslaved Africans were compelled to create a new language, a new religion, and indeed a new culture.

Not only was the structure of the new language a result of the creolization process, but the structure of language use was as well. The African preference for using indirect and highly ambiguous speech—for speaking in parables—was adapted by Americanborn slaves to a new natural, social, and linguistic environment. This aspect of the creolization process is strikingly evident in their proverbs. By employing the grammar of African proverb usage and the largely English vocabulary of the new creole language, African Americans were able to transform older African proverbs into metaphors of their collective experience in the New World. Some African proverbs were simply translated into the new vocabulary; others underwent minor changes. Still others retained the semantics of the African proverbs but completely transmuted the rhetoric into metaphors more meaningful to the new environment.

Naming patterns exemplify another way in which Gullah-speaking slaves preserved their African linguistic heritage while also combining aspects of it with English. The traditional African custom of “basket naming,” or bestowing of private names, continued into the 20th century. As late as the Civil War, all seven West African day names, as well as other African basket names, appeared on slave lists in the South Carolina Lowcountry. But African continuities were not manifested solely in the static retentions of easily recognized African names. On the contrary, behind many of the apparently English names of the slaves were African naming patterns. In many cases African meanings were retained with direct translation of names into English. Day names, in particular, were frequently translated into their English equivalents (e.g., Monday). But the creolization process, by which African means of using language were applied to a new tongue, produced such fresh seasonal basket names as Christmas. Similarly, black names revealed the adaptation to new places of the African pattern of naming after localities.

The creolization process was vividly exemplified in black storytelling. The folk narrative tradition of African Americans, like that of their African ancestors, was eclectic and creative. They took their sources where they found them, remembered what they found memorable, used what they found usable, and forgot the forgettable. Both inherited aesthetic grammars, and the realities of the new environment played mediating roles in that process. Animal trickster tales constituted the most numerous type of folk narrative among African Americans, as among Africans, but African Americans did not merely retain African trickster tales unchanged. On the contrary, the African narrative tradition was itself creative and innovative both in Africa and in America, where it encountered a strikingly different social and natural environment. The African American trickster tales indicate the black response to that new environment and efforts to manipulate it verbally and symbolically. In addition to animal trickster tales, the slaves narrated a cycle of human trickster tales in which the trickster role was not played by a surrogate slave—the rabbit—but by a real slave, John. Both animal and human trickster tales manifested continuities with African themes and with African traditions of indirect speech.

The study of linguistic creolization is a relatively recent phenomenon; the application of creolization theory to the study of African American culture represents a promising approach to understanding the transformation of diverse African cultures into African American culture.

CHARLES JOYNER

Coastal Carolina University

Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1978); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1982); Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949, 2002); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974).

 

Dictionary of American Regional English

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) seeks not to prescribe how Americans should speak or even to describe how people across the country do speak in formal or standard contexts. Instead, it documents the varieties of English that are not found throughout the country—those words, phrases, pronunciations, and grammatical features that vary from one region to another, that are learned at home rather than at school, or that are part of oral rather than written culture. The plan for the dictionary was devised by Frederic G. Cassidy and Audrey R. Duckert. It was carried out by Cassidy, Joan Houston Hall, and others. A unique feature of DARE is the use of maps in the text (with state sizes adjusted to reflect population density rather than geographic area) to show where particular words were collected during interviews with 2,000 people across the country. Whenever possible, editors assign regional labels that describe where the word or phrase is used. The DARE fieldwork, local newspapers, memoirs, and oral evidence provide good indications of both regional and social distributions.

Frederic G. Cassidy, original editor and co-conceiver of the Dictionary of American Regional English (George E. Hall, photographer)

Analysis of the maps and of the regional labels used in DARE entries makes it clear that the South (by which DARE means southern and eastern Maryland, eastern Virginia, eastern and central North and South Carolina, southern and central Georgia, Florida, central and southern parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as east Texas) still retains thousands of language features that reflect its distinctive cultural background and history. The region known as the South Midland, extending from the South as far west as Missouri, Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma, and northward into the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, is the next most frequent regional label in DARE. And when labels referring to subregions such as the Southeast, South Atlantic, and Gulf states are also included, there is no question that the “South,” as defined in this Encyclopedia, is easily the most distinctive region of the country in its words, phrases, pronunciations, and grammatical constructions.

A very few examples are included here to illustrate some of the distinctively southern terms found in DARE: battercake, corn dodger, hopping John, hush puppy, and red-eye gravy for foods; cooter, hoppergrass, mosquito hawk, peckerwood, and piney-woods rooter for animals; cup towel, flying jenny, mourners’ bench, play-pretty, and rawhead and bloodybones for aspects of material culture; fixin’ to, for to, hisn/hern, might could, and y’all for grammatical and syntactic features; and co’cola, hep, janders, nekkid, and sallet for pronunciation variants. The index to the published volumes of DARE allows readers to go from the lists of entries labeled “South,” “South Midland,” and so forth directly to the dictionary’s entries.

Based on face-to-face interviews carried out in all 50 states between 1965 and 1970 and on an extensive collection of other materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, newspapers, government documents, ephemeral notes, and in recent years, digital resources), DARE provides historical documentation for every headword and sense (there are approximately 50,000 senses in the first four volumes), and it dates every quotation used. Quotations from such prominent southern writers as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Joel Chandler Harris, as well as from many lesser-known southerners, are used to provide illustrations of usage. This excerpt from Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, for instance, is used at the entry for cup towel (a dish towel): “The sheriff stood over a sputtering skillet ... a battercake turner in one hand and a cuptowel in the other.”

Four volumes have been published to date: A–C (1985), D–H (1991), I–O (1996), and P–Sk (2002). The fifth volume of text (Sl–Z) is expected in 2009, to be followed by a volume of ancillary materials (including fieldwork data, contrastive maps, a cumulative index, and the bibliography) and an electronic edition.

JOAN HOUSTON HALL

University of Wisconsin

An Index by Region, Usage, and Etymology to the Dictionary of American Regional English, vols. 1 and 2 (1993) and 3 (1999); Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary of American Regional English (1985– ); Joan Houston Hall, in Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century (2004); Allan Metcalf, in Language Variety in the South Revisited, ed. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (1997).

 

Fixin’ to

Fixin’ to has developed in Southern American English as a phrase having numerous pronunciations, a complex origin, and a variety of meanings, the most familiar one indicating the immediate futurity of a proposed action. Thus, in I am fixin’ to go and She is fixin’ to fix supper the going and the fixing supper are soon to occur. In grammatical nomenclature fixin’ to is a phrasal auxiliary verb (it has also been called a “quasimodal,” “almost modal,” or “semiauxiliary” verb) that precedes and modifies a main verb. It has been well known in southern lore and everyday speech for almost two centuries, its first recorded usage being in 1829, in the Virginia Literary Museum (I’m fixing to go).

Fixin’ to has evolved new forms, functions, and meanings from existing words, following a universal tendency in languages. Its pronunciation often changes to fixin ta and may also be heard in the South as fikin ta, fisin ta, fikin na, or fix ta. During the Great Migrations of the early 20th century, fixin’ to moved out of the South with African American speakers who developed new forms and new pronunciations, such as fixin na, fin na, fit’n ta, fin ta, fit na, fi’in, and fin.

Fix maintains its original meaning, “to make firm, stable, or hold steady,” as well as meanings that later developed from this (“to fasten or attach,” then “to repair,” and then “to prepare”). Since preparing points toward a future occurrence, the meaning of futurity is applied to fix in the South. Sheisfixin’ to fix supper thus illustrates two distinct meanings: “She is getting ready to prepare supper.”

As a phrasal auxiliary fixin’ to precedes the main verb in a clause to influence the meaning of the time relationship. For instance, I’m fixin’ to leave (“I’m about to/getting ready to leave”) or I was fixin’ to leave when she arrived (“I was about to/getting ready to leave when she arrived”) signifies an imminent event intended to happen in the immediate future, indicating a psychological readiness as well as a physical one. I’m fixin’ to go home (“I’m going to go home”) gives a sense of future determination and immediate action, but when not intending immediate action, a speaker can use fixin’ to to convey a false promise or the subtle implication that an action is being (or has been) delayed. A speaker who says I was just fixin’ to do that may have been only procrastinating or perhaps did not intend to perform the action at all. Then the use of fixin’ to approaches irony.

Thus, fixin’ to may express futurity, immediacy, priority, definiteness, certainty, preparatory activity (psychological or physical), procrastination, or ironic contradiction. A speaker can manipulate these notions, and the interpretation of any given instance is determined by the context of the speaker and audience. Fixin’ to is therefore a highly complex form unique to the English language, one that cannot always be simply replaced by getting ready to, about to, or another phrase. Because of its great usefulness, southerners will probably resist any effort to replace it in their speech.

MARY ZEIGLER

Georgia State University

Frederic G. Cassidy, ed., Dictionary of American Regional English, vol. 2 (1991); Marvin K. L. Ching, American Speech (vol. 62, 1987); Mary B. Zeigler, Southern Journal of Linguistics (vol. 26, 2002).

 

Folk Speech

Folk speech has two distinct senses. The first refers to popular, vernacular, often local speech that differs from the standard, formal, textbook, and usually more widespread variety of a language. Although some writers have used the label to identify largely nonurban, uneducated speech, and some folklorists have incorporated this definition into their work, even the best-educated and highest-status speakers of a region may use this first sort of folk speech. It includes variation in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

For pronunciation, linguistic geography profusely documents regional differences in individual words (e.g., greazy is more common in the South than greasy) as well as in general trends (e.g., the fact that southerners pronounce e before n or m like i, so that ten and hem are identical to tin and him). There are extensive differences in grammar, as in the past tense of verbs (Iseen him yesterday), and linguistic studies have also verified the popular perception that southerners’ vocabulary often differs from that of other Americans. The southerner’s use of y’all is perhaps the best example. Even the meanings of words shared with other regions are often distinct. A southerner who offers to carry you somewhere means to “give you a lift,” not hoist you up in his or her arms and transport you.

The American Dialect Society, which was founded in 1889, has been an institutional focus for the study of this first type of folk speech, and its publications American Speech (1925– ), Dialect Notes (1890–1939), and Publication of the American Dialect Society (1944– ) are among the most important. The study of folk speech in the South has often focused on the legacy of, or deviations from, British speech patterns in Appalachia or other rural areas. The nature of African American English, the influence of other languages, and the relationship between speech and social class have also been central concerns. Projects such as the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States show the broad distribution of speechways across the region. The specific vocabulary of the South is being richly documented in the Dictionary of American Regional English, and many items there qualify as folk speech in either the first or both of the senses here. Smoky Mountain vocabulary and grammar are thoroughly treated in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.

The second type of folk speech is more in keeping with modern folklorists’ definition of folklore in general—that it has artistic expression. It is not highfalutin, in the most common sense of “artistic,” but it is something beyond the ordinary, something that calls attention to itself, making the listener think that the speaker is being playful or creative. While many examples of such speech may be innovative, it is still deeply rooted in the traditions of an area, and the South is perhaps the best-known and best-studied region for such folk expressions, proverbs, euphemisms, similes, metaphors, and the like. For example, raining like an old cow pissing on a flat rock in Arkansas gets much more immediate notice than It’s raining very hard. In short, the first is artistic expression, or folk speech of the second type.

Many expressions, proverbs, and the like are in fact folk speech in both senses of the term. They often differ from more widely distributed language (sense 1), but they also call attention to themselves through audacity, cleverness, subtlety, or other devices associated with folk linguistic artistry (sense 2). Speech that is based in and is uniquely valued by its own community is folk speech; however, that which is regional but is everyday talk is not, in the second sense of the term.

Thus, a southerner who says He’s so high he couldn’t hit the floor with his hat (that is, “drunk”) is using folk speech, but one who says I’m fixin’ to leave ‘getting ready’ or I might could go ‘might be able to’ is not, since the latter usages are ordinary in most southern speech communities. Nonsoutherners, however, who often take a romantic and/or prejudicial view of everything southern, tend to perceive any talk by the region’s natives as artistic folk speech. Many have similar attitudes toward African American English or some foreign-accented speech, varieties that outsiders view as performances rather than the ordinary usage of some speech communities. Such varieties are often the target of imitations, another indication that speakers who believe they use more mainstream varieties often assign folk value to the ordinary usage of others. In short, according to sense 2, well nigh anything a southerner says might be folk speech to a nonsoutherner.

Folk speech can be a word, a phrase, a style of speaking, or even less than a word. “Folk noises” have hardly been studied, though chants, calls, and imitations have figured in a few works, and the “rebel yell” is a famous folk cry. The elongated vowel in shiiiiit is clearly an extension of the so-called southern drawl into a specific word, one known and imitated even outside the South, particularly in situations in which the word expresses disbelief.

Also little studied, until recently, is folk speech having to do with stylistic tendencies. For example, the classical tradition in southern education left behind both place-names (Sparta, Athens) and personal names (Cato, Cicero). This, combined with a traditional knowledge of the Bible and a desire for “big words,” produced a genre known as “fancy talk” in African American speech and influenced southern pulpit styles in general, some examples of which combined learned words with rhythmic cadences and even rhyme:

!

Never before had the universe received this annunciation, and never before had any man or woman received the salutation.

In the area of phrases and proverbial phrases, southern folk speech (and the study of it) shines. Vance Randolph, George P. Wilson, Archer Taylor, and Bartlett J. Whiting have compiled noteworthy collections, although not all of these deal only with southern speech. Among proverbial comparisons there is the pattern as X as a Y (or X-er than a Y and other obviously related forms), as in busy as a one-armed paperhanger, and so X that Y, asin so tight [that] he wouldn’t give a dime to see the Statue of Liberty piss across New York Bay. Most collections combine the grammatical forms cited above with the others—X enough to Y and too X to Y (both related to so X that Y), and to X like a Y (often interchangeable with some forms of as X as a Y). There are other minor comparative forms: look like a sheepkilling dog, run around like a chicken with it shead cut off, make more noise than 99 cows and a bobtailed bull.

Though comparisons dominate, a few other forms based on nouns (thestraw that broke the camel’s back), verbs (come a cropper), and prepositional phrases (in hot water) are included in most studies, along with other expressions not so easily classified grammatically. Some might be identified as threats (I’m going to jerk a knot in your tail); wisecracks and comebacks (Your feet don’t fit no limb, saidtoone who asks who?); exclamations and warnings (Katy bar the door!); insults (You don’t amount to a hill of beans); taunts (Redhead, cabbage-head, 10 cents a pound, directed to a red-haired person); boasts (Hooo-eee! I’m half horse and half alligator!); and miscellaneous sentential items (Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first!). Such a classification is practical rather than theoretically exhaustive, and many of these items, although collected in southern venues, are surely more widespread.

Although the content of southern folk speech reveals a preoccupation with rural, traditional matters, newer items display changing attitudes and concerns. Growing evidence suggests that southerners more than any other Americans may assign particular importance to folk speech, in response perhaps to the negative image some outsiders have of southern speech in general. Nevertheless, southern folk speech is important to the region, usually has a distinct local flavor, and will likely be around as long as the culture exists.

DENNIS PRESTON

Michigan State University

Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino, eds., Language Variety in the South Revisited (1997); Frederic G. Cassidy et al., Dictionary of American Regional English (1985– ); James B. McMillan and Michael B. Montgomery, Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English (1989); Michael B. Montgomery and Guy Bailey, Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (1986); Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, eds., Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (2004); Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders, English in the Southern United States (2003); Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech (1953).

 

Grammar, Changes in

The grammar of English in the American South has been evolving since the early 17th century, when the region began to be colonized by immigrants from southern and western England. Some grammatical features of Southern English can be traced to the language of these early settlers; others were introduced by English speakers arriving later from northern England, Scotland, and northern Ireland. Although American English in its early stages had the reputation of being relatively uniform (compared with British English), dialects began to emerge as settlement patterns developed; contact between European immigrants, African slaves, and Native Americans affected the language of different regions; and new grammatical features arose. In the South, distinctive variations became especially evident in such urban focal speech areas as Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans; in the mountains of the Appalachians and Ozarks; and in isolated coastal areas of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Chesapeake Islands of Virginia and Maryland, and Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. All these regional varieties have continued to evolve, so that, contrary to popular belief, not even isolated coastal regions or the most remote mountain communities retain intact the English originally brought to them.

Southern English has also been subject to social forces, some of which have reinforced speech differences. Among the consequences of the slave trade and plantation culture were the emergence and the evolution of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a means of maintaining black identity. The Civil War and Reconstruction reinforced distinct southern speech varieties. Other forces favored the sharing of linguistic features. Industrialization in the late 19th century led to urbanization and migration from the countryside. World War I and especially World War II brought many southerners out of comparative isolation. The advent of air-conditioning has more recently encouraged migration to the South. The civil rights movement led to greater integration and increased levels of education. As a result of these and other social forces, some stereotypically southern features are expanding, while others are declining or becoming associated with social or ethnic varieties.

Expanding Grammatical Features.

Some of the most salient grammatical features of Southern English remain strong and may even be spreading.

Second-person-plural pronouns. No feature is more closely identified with southern speech than you all (with the accent on the first syllable) and y’all to refer to more than one person, as in Are y’all coming over tonight? Some evidence suggests that y’all is being used increasingly by young southerners and by people of all ages in other parts of the United States. At the same time, you guys, once restricted to the North, is gaining favor among some southerners as an informal form of addressing multiple listeners. You’uns, a form having the same meaning and once common in Appalachian parts of the South, is disappearing rapidly.

Double (or multiple) modal verbs. English generally does not permit two modal auxiliary verbs (may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would) to occur together, but southerners frequently combine them, as in I might could do it, to express a degree of tentativeness, indirectness, or politeness. Double modals are holding strong in the South and sometimes show up outside the region as well, especially among African Americans, whose linguistic roots are in the region.

Fixin’ to. The expression fixin’ to means something like about to or preparing to, asin I was just fixin’ to leave. Its use is widespread among all regional and social groups in the South, and it is often acquired by nonsoutherners who move to the region.

Declining and Restricted Features.

Some features that are evident in records from earlier centuries have become less common or are now associated with certain ethnic or social varieties in the southern United States.

Invariant be. In Southern English the uninflected form be (occasionally bes) may be used as a main verb or an auxiliary, where general usage requires am, are, is, was, or were. It was common in colonial America, but in modern Southern English its use has declined among whites. In AAVE, where it signifies habitual action, it may be used with singular or plural subjects, especially in the construction be plus a verb plus -ing, asin They [or he] be working in Texas. Along similar lines, omitting the main verb be, asin You ugly, is declining in usage among whites in the South, though use of the feature is still evident in AAVE.

Third-person zero suffix. English generally requires an -s ending for verbs in the present tense when they have a third-person singular subject. In Southern English, the suffix may be omitted, somewhat more often if the subject is a pronoun, as in She stay in Texas. Evidence of this feature has been found in written records from 16th-century England and the 19th-century American South. It is now more common in AAVE than in general southern speech.

Zero plural. The English plural is generally formed by adding an -s to nouns. When certain nouns are preceded by a number, Southern English allows the -s to be deleted, as in I walked six mile to school every day. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) showed that in the 1970s this feature was more than four times more likely to be used by the oldest speakers than by the youngest speakers in its survey, suggesting that it is disappearing.

Zero possessive. English generally uses -’s on nouns to signal possession. Southern English occasionally omits the -s suffix, as in The man hat is on the floor. Today this is commonly associated with AAVE.

Third-person-plural -s and plural was. General English has no ending for verbs in the present tense when the subject is you or a plural noun or pronoun. Southern English sometimes adds an -s to the verb if the subject is a noun, as in My brothers works at night (but not They works at night). The feature was present in the English of Ulster Scots settlers. In addition, past-tense were may be replaced by was, asin We was all at home. Research shows these usages are declining today and are associated with working-class speech.

Liketa or liked to. Southern English uses liketa preceding a past participle verb to mean nearly, asin I liketa died. Associated now with rural working-class speech, liketa has been declining among younger generations.

A-prefixing. The structure a- plus a verb plus -ing, asin He come a-runnin’, was once common in both British and American dialects, but it is declining in general southern speech. LAGS found the feature to be associated with older, less-educated speakers. It may still be heard in the Appalachian region and in other relatively isolated communities, such as the islands of the Outer Banks in North Carolina.

Irregular relative pronouns. Whereas English generally requires a relative pronoun in such expressions as thepeople who/that live in the South, Southern English may omit the who or that. In addition, what is occasionally used as a relative, as in the people what live in the South. These features are now declining.

Nonstandard preterits and past participles. Many varieties of English have nonstandard irregular verb forms, as in I seen him do it, or I’ve knowed them for years. Verb forms were in flux in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and some British relic forms, such as clum ‘climbed,’ holp ‘helped,’ knowed ‘knew/known,’ and riz ‘rose/risen,’ may be heard in the South, though their use is declining. LAGS reveals that younger people and those of higher socioeconomic status are less likely to use such past-tense and past-participle forms as come ‘came,’ growed ‘grew/grown,’ eat ‘ate/eaten,’ drownded ‘drowned,’ or run ‘ran.’Incontrast, dove ‘dive,’ is used more often by younger, better-educated speakers, even though it was once considered a nonstandard form.

Perfective done. In Southern English done sometimes replaces have as an auxiliary verb, as in I done forgot what he wanted. Documented in early 19th-century usage, this feature is declining. Like nonstandard preterits, it characterizes the speech of older, working-class southerners.

Other Grammatical Features of Southern English.

Some grammatical features are limited to regions within the South; Appalachian English, for example, has possessive forms ending in -n at the end of a phrase, as in Is this yourn? Some are limited to AAVE; for example, remote-time been (stressed) connotes distant past, as in She been write the letter (i.e., a long time ago). Some, such as ain’t, double negatives (It ain’t gonna do no good), or them in place of those (How do you like them apples?), are common not only in the South but in other regions as well. In spite of the varieties of ways in which southern grammar is changing, there is no evidence that it is disappearing as a distinguishing attribute of southern speech.

CYNTHIA BERNSTEIN

University of Memphis

E. Bagby Atwood, A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States (1953); Cynthia Bernstein, in English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (2003); Patricia Cukor-Avila, in English in the Southern United States (2003), ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders; Crawford Feagin, Variation and Change in Alabama English: A Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community (1979); Michael Montgomery, in From the Gulf States and Beyond: The Legacy of Lee Pederson and LAGS, ed. Michael B. Montgomery and Thomas E. Nunnally (1998); Lee Pederson et al., eds., The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, 7 vols. (1986–92); Edgar W. Schneider, in English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (2003); Jan Tillery, in Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Michael Picone and Catherine Evans Davies (forthcoming); Jan Tillery and Guy Bailey, in English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (2003).

 

Illiteracy

Inability to read and write in any language has been the conventional definition of illiteracy and the basis of most illiteracy statistics. The concept of “functional” illiteracy was advanced during World War II as a result of the U.S. Army experience with soldiers who “could not understand written instructions about basic military tasks.” The South has exceeded the rest of the nation in illiteracy, whether defined in functional terms or as the inability to read and write in any language. Information from the U.S. census of 1870 illustrated the South’s heritage of illiteracy. No area of the region had less than 12 percent illiteracy. The cotton-culture regions, particularly the river valley and delta areas and the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, were 40 percent or more illiterate. The South was agricultural, and agriculture then depended not on science but on traditional practice—learning by doing rather than by reading. The 1870 census found 4.53 million persons 10 years of age and older unable to read in the nation; 73.7 percent of them resided in the South. Four-fifths of blacks were illiterate at that time.

The agricultural economy rested upon a sparsely distributed population, the use of child labor that discouraged school attendance, and a prejudiced and often fatalistic people who lacked the means for upward mobility in the expanding industrial system of the nation. The church was more important as a social institution than the school; word of mouth, song, and story were prominent means of cultural transmission. Under these conditions illiteracy served to conserve tradition and retard cultural change, whereas a more general literacy would have accelerated adaptation and change. Said a Jasper County, Miss., man, “My grandfather—he raised me—figured going to school wouldn’t help me pick cotton any better.”

When the education of a generation of children is neglected, the deficiency persists throughout a lifetime. Teaching adults to read has not been as effective in eliminating illiteracy as have mortality and out-migration from the South. The neglect of a generation of schoolchildren during the Civil War (those 5 to 14 years of age in 1860) resulted in higher illiteracy rates for the native white population in 1900 (who then were 45 to 54 years of age) than for either the preceding or succeeding generation.

A decline in illiteracy has occurred in the South and the nation. As educational benefits were extended to blacks through both public and private schools (including schools sponsored by religious groups, such as the Congregational Church, and by private foundations, such as the Rosenwald Fund), illiteracy rates dropped.

The change in illiteracy in Georgia from 1960 to 1970 illustrates the source of gains and losses of illiterates in a state. The number of Georgia illiterates in 1960 was reduced by 45 percent by 1970. Some 22,530 were estimated to have died during the decade, and 23,840 were lost through out-migration. The Adult Basic Education Program of the state taught 14,380 to read during the period. However, 6,290 new illiterates, aged 14 to 24 years in 1970, entered the category. This new group testifies to the failure of the family and the school to inculcate literacy skills. The National Center for Education Statistics in 1992 showed that the South still scored lower than any other region on literacy measures.

The 2000 census showed that 9 of the 11 states with less than 78 percent high school graduates are in the South. In 1980 the South had approximately 398,000 illiterates, according to estimates based on the 1980 census and the November 1979 Current Population Survey. The distribution by color was white, 44.9 percent; black, 51.4 percent; other nonwhite, 3.7 percent. By age, illiterates were distributed as follows: 14–24 years, 9.2 percent; 25–44 years, 17.0 percent; 45–64 years, 32.2 percent; and 65 years and older, 41.6 percent. These are individuals unable to read and write, according to census definitions; functional illiterates are more numerous.

In general, illiterates have lower learning capacity, are more likely to be welfare recipients, and have higher rejection rates for military service. If female, they have higher fertility rates, and instances of infant mortality among illiterates are always higher. There is more illiteracy in rural than in urban areas.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS

Emory University

Sterling G. Brinkley, Journal of Experimental Education (September 1957); John K.

Folger and Charles B. Nam, Education of the American Population (1967); Eli Ginzberg and Douglas W. Bray, The Un-educated (1953); Historical Statistics of the United States to 1970 (1975); Carman St. John Hunter with David Harman, Adult Illiteracy in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation (1979); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports; Sanford Winston, Illiteracy in the United States (1930).

 

Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States

Directed by Lee Pederson of Emory University, the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) is a constituent of the American Linguistic Atlas or Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada project. It reports the results of an extensive survey of regional and social dialects of English in eight southern states: Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas (as far west as the Balcones Escarpment). It is the most comprehensive source of information available on the English of the South. Fieldwork for LAGS was begun in 1968, and the last of seven interpretive volumes that describe the research and summarize its results was published in 1992. The LAGS basic materials provide primary texts (in the form of responses to questionnaire items) for the study of English in the region and a description of the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic contexts necessary for their interpretation. The LAGS interpretive volumes inventory dominant and recessive patterns of linguistic usage in the Gulf states, identify and characterize the primary regional and social varieties of the region, and identify areas of linguistic complexity that require further study. More generally, LAGS provides a historical baseline for Southern English against which future linguistic developments can be measured and from which earlier varieties can be reconstructed. That baseline encompasses roughly the period between 1880 and 1940, the decades during which most LAGS informants were born (note, however, that the oldest informant was born in 1870 and the youngest in 1965). Both the design and the implementation of LAGS reflect its historical focus.

Tape-recorded interviews (or field records) with 1,121 informants in 699 localities in 451 counties comprise the basic data for LAGS. The informants include 594 men and 527 women, and 239 are African American (blacks were interviewed in all areas where they exceeded 20 percent of the population in 1930, before the effects of the Great Migration were fully realized). Both the average age (62.24) of informants and the overrepresentation of the less-educated (38.62 percent have an eighth-grade education or less) reflect the historical orientation of LAGS.

A series of analogs reduces the 5,300 hours of tape-recorded speech in the LAGS field records to graphic formats at various levels of abstraction. The protocols are the primary and most concrete analog of the field records. Containing phonetic transcriptions both of target items that were elicited by an 800-item questionnaire and of other useful phonological, grammatical, and lexical data that occurred during interviews, the protocols serve as comprehensive guides to the field records; their 121,000 pages of phonetic transcriptions are a major source of evidence on Southern English as well. Each protocol is conveniently summarized in an idiolect synopsis, a one-page abstract of its phonological, lexical, and grammatical substance, and the entire contents of all of the protocols are captured in the concordance, an alphabetical listing in normal orthography of every phonetically transcribed item and its place of occurrence in the LAGS protocols. University Microfilms published the protocols and idiolect synopses, along with the LAGS questionnaire and guide to phonetics and protocol composition, as LAGS: The Basic Materials on microfiche and microfilm in 1981; The Concordance of Basic Materials followed in 1986.

These microform texts serve as the input to still another analog, a set of computer files that rewrite LAGS data in ASCII format. When the computer files are combined with a series of mapping programs (both available from the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Georgia), they allow users to create their own maps and provide a kind of automatic linguistic atlas in electronic form. These files also form the basis of the seven interpretive volumes published by the University of Georgia Press. Those volumes include a handbook, which summarizes the LAGS methodology, informants, and communities; a general index, which summarizes the contents of the concordance; and a technical index, which summarizes the contents of the computer files. The other four volumes, the Regional Matrix and the Regional Pattern (vols. 4 and 5) and the Social Matrix and the Social Pattern (vols. 6 and 7) summarize many of the substantive results of LAGS and provide a useful overview of regional and social variation in the English of the Gulf states. The LAGS interpretive volumes (4–7) include information both on the distribution of individual linguistic features and on those combinations of features that produce regional patterns. Map 3, for instance, shows the regional distribution of chigger and red bug, two synonyms for a tiny bug in the grass that burrows into the skin and causes itching. Map 5 shows how LAGS uses the distribution of chigger in combination with three other features (red worm [a worm for fishing], an intrusive uh between the b and r in umbrella, and a strong r pronunciation in March) to help identify and delimit a Highlands pattern in the English of the Gulf states, a pattern that is also characterized by the use of such terms as French harp ‘harmonica,’ tow sack ‘burlap bag,’ barn lot ‘barnyard,’ and green beans (as opposed to snap beans). Using quantitative distributions of similar combinations of lexical, phonological, and grammatical features, LAGS identifies 20 subregional patterns that comprise two basic regional configurations, Interior and Coastal. The Eastern Highlands serves as a focal area (i.e., core or cultural hearth) for the former, and the Central Gulf Coast/Lower Delta serves as the focal area for the latter.

LAGS also identifies 20 types of social markers in the English of the Gulf states; these often interact with regional patterns in complex ways. The social markers reflect categories of race (black and white), sex, age, and education either in isolation or in combination. For example, LAGS identifies 31 features as characteristic of African American speech, with about half of these further subcategorized by age and education; 35 features are identified as primarily white. The occurrence of monophthongal or flat /ai/ in right (pronounced something like raht), a white social marker, illustrates the complex relationship between social markers and regional patterns. While the vast majority of the LAGS informants who have this feature are white (91.66 percent), as Map 6 shows, flat /ai/ also has a complex regional distribution, occurring primarily in the Eastern Highlands and the Ozarks; in the Piney Woods of south Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; and in Texas. This kind of interaction between social markers and regional patterns gives southern speech much of its richness and complexity. Among the many virtues of LAGS is its capacity for capturing those interactions. LAGS thus maps and provides the raw material for researchers to chart the almost infinite detail of Southern English, and its data on the social patterning deepens our understanding of language change and variation in the region’s speech.

GUY H. BAILEY

University of Missouri–Kansas City

Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery, American Speech (vol. 74, 1999); Michael Montgomery, American Speech (vol. 68, 1993); Lee Pederson, in American Dialect Research, ed. Dennis Preston (1993); Lee Pederson et al., eds., Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, 7 vols. (1986–92).

Map 5. Highlands Pattern 4 (Source: Lee Pederson, Susan McDaniel, and Carol Adams, Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, vol. 5, Regional Pattern [1991], p. 73; cartography by Borden D. Dent)

Map 6. Map 50 (Source: Lee Pederson, Susan McDaniel, Guy Bailey, and Marvin Bassett, eds., Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, vol. 7, Social Pattern [1992], p. 151; cartography by Borden D. Dent)

 

Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States

The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) is the largest segment of the American Linguistic Atlas or Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada project, which was designed to survey the regional and social differences in spoken American English. LAMSAS covers the region from New York state south to Georgia and northeastern Florida, and from the eastern coastline as far west as the borders of Ohio and Kentucky. Along with Hans Kurath’s Linguistic Atlas of New England (conducted in the early 1930s and published 1939–43), LAMSAS treats the primary settlement areas of the earliest states of the United States. LAMSAS consists of interviews, the transcriptions from which are in fine phonetic notation, with 1,162 selected, native informants from 483 communities (usually counties) within the region. Interviews often required six to eight hours to complete; they were conducted with a questionnaire of 104 pages, averaging seven items per page, designed to reveal regional and social differences in everyday vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Field-workers often avoided asking questions directly, in favor of more conversational interviews rich in local lore. In the days when the primitive machines that were available could record only short segments, phonetically trained field-workers wrote down in fine phonetic notation words and phrases that matched the intentions of the questionnaires. Initial fieldwork was conducted by Guy Lowman, aveteran of the New England survey, beginning in 1933. After Lowman’s death in a car crash in 1941, Raven McDavid largely completed the remaining interviews in upstate New York, Georgia, and South Carolina by 1949.

The speakers selected for LAMSAS and other atlas interviews were longtime residents of their communities, generally of middle age through the oldest living generation. They came from three different social strata: folk speakers (with little education or social involvement), common speakers (with a high school education and more social activity), and in about one-fifth of the communities, cultivated speakers (with a college education or its equivalent in experience and with wide exposure to high culture). Forty-one African American speakers were interviewed in the South Atlantic area, which represented forward thinking at the time, though not yet equal representation in numbers. LAMSAS thus records the English spoken along the Atlantic Coast in the second quarter of the 20th century among people of different social positions and degrees of education. It provides a benchmark for varying forms of the English language for a particular region at a particular time, with special reference to the development of the language in the late 1800s, when most of the interviewees were born and grew up. The significance of LAMSAS is thus principally historical. Along with the New England atlas, LAMSAS is also the key to making the best use of all the other regional atlas projects, which document the English spoken in secondary and tertiary American settlement areas (such as the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States). The Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States describes the methods, speakers, and communities of the project. LAMSAS, therefore, occupies a place beside other major projects in the history of the English language, and its survey data provided the basis for the first truly detailed delineation of southern speech. Unlike the Dictionary of American Regional English, a complementary project that seeks to record all identifiable “dialect” forms, LAMSAS seeks to define the typical, everyday language of Americans as that speech differed among the speakers of its region.

Even before LAMSAS interviews were complete, Hans Kurath published his Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949) on the basis of New England and existing LAMSAS data (for the South, this included Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina). This volume described the basic pattern of American English dialects in three largely east-to-west bands, Northern, Midland, and Southern, which largely correlated with 18th-century settlement patterns. These dialect regions were confirmed in Kurath and McDavid’s Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (also based on atlas data). Southern dialects were further subdivided into Upland Southern (also known as South Midland or Upper Southern) and Coastal Southern (also known as Plantation Southern or Lower Southern). Coastal/Plantation Southern was found across the survey area in places where the land could support plantation agriculture, while Upland Southern/South Midland speech was found in areas that generally could not, whether because the land was mountainous or too poor in quality to support large-scale agriculture. Raven McDavid wrote numerous articles using LAMSAS evidence, for example, showing the complex interrelations between the pronunciation of /r/ and South Carolina society and defending the speech of African Americans against popular stereotypes while demonstrating its status as a dialect of American English.

LAMSAS data is now becoming available online, along with information and data from other surveys of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, at <http://www.lap.uga.edu>. Speakers’ responses, in standard spelling (for some items also in Atlas phonetic transcriptions), are recorded in separate data tables for each question. Each response is accompanied by coding to identify the speaker, comments by speakers and field-workers, and information when necessary on the special status of a response (i.e., if it was suggested, heard, collected from an auxiliary informant, or otherwise doubtful or noteworthy). It is possible to browse the responses given for different questions, to search for words and phrases across all of the questions so far entered into the database, and to make maps online of where LAMSAS speakers said particular words and phrases. The size and detail of the LAMSAS digital database has enabled new kinds of linguistic analyses, for example, complex statistical processing and implementation of geographical information systems. Both the paper records and digital presence of LAMSAS and the American Linguistic Atlas Project are maintained at the University of Georgia, under the direction of William A. Kretzschmar Jr.

WILLIAM A. KRETZSCHMAR JR.

University of Georgia

William A. Kretzschmar Jr., American Speech (vol. 78, 2003); William A. Kretzschmar Jr., ed., Dialects in Culture: Essays in General Dialectology by Raven I. McDavid Jr. (1979); William A. Kretzschmar Jr. and Edgar W. Schneider, Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data: An Atlas by the Numbers (1996); William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson, eds., Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (1993); Hans Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949); Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr., The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (1961).

 

Linguists and Linguistics

The formal study of language in the South has flourished for three-quarters of a century, led by linguists, academic institutions, projects, and conferences that have documented, analyzed, and mapped the region’s languages. In 1989 a book-length bibliography listed nearly 4,000 published books, articles, reviews, and notes on the history, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, place-names, personal names, and other aspects of the region’s English; the number of items approaches 5,000 today. This literature reveals the English of the American South to have a multiplicity of varieties unmatched by any other region of the country, a far cry from outside perceptions and portrayals of Southern English as uniform.

Shortly after fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada commenced in 1928, the project began work in the South Atlantic states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina interviewing mainly older, less-educated, and less-traveled speakers in an effort to document thousands of individual usages and to employ these both to map regional variations and to outline dialect areas, especially as these reflected settlement history. Fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States lasted from 1933 to 1974, under the direction of Hans Kurath, first of Brown University and then the University of Michigan, and later of Raven I. McDavid Jr. of the University of Chicago. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, directed by Lee Pederson of Emory University from 1968 to 1992, encompassed eight states from Florida and Georgia to Texas and completed atlas work in the southern states.

Among the more eminent scholars of language of an earlier generation working at southern institutions and making major contributions to scholarship on the region’s language have been James B. McMillan (University of Alabama), Norman Eliason (University of North Carolina), Claude Merton Wise (Louisiana State University), Lee Pederson (Emory University), Archibald Hill (University of Texas), and Juanita Williamson (LeMoyne-Owen College). The most prolific and influential linguist to write on the region’s English was the South Carolinian Raven I. McDavid Jr. of the University of Chicago. A number of the contributors to this volume are linguists well known for their more recent research into southern language(s). Until very recently nearly all academics studying the South’s English have been natives, but this is increasingly less so today. Indeed one of the earliest to document local variations in African American speech (in the 1830s) was the German Francis Lieber, professor of political economy at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) and founding editor of the Encyclopedia Americana. While these and other academics have made major scholarly contributions, it is noteworthy that the region’s language has always fascinated a wide spectrum of lay-people, who have engaged for decades in collecting, debating, exploring, and speculating about the meanings and origins of words and other usages, both in print and elsewhere.

The earliest universities to offer doctoral-level study in the field were the University of North Carolina and the University of Alabama, both of which established departments of linguistics in the 1940s. They were followed by the University of Texas, Georgetown University, the University of Florida, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, and Louisiana State University. These and other institutions provide advanced training in the complete range of linguistic specialties, theoretical and applied.

A major advance in the region was the creation in 1969 of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL), whose object is the scholarly study of language in all its aspects. SECOL, which for many years held semiannual meetings (now annual), is currently headquartered at Auburn University and publishes a scholarly journal, Southern Journal of Linguistics, through the University of Mississippi. The Linguistic Association of the Southwest, whose territory overlaps with that of SECOL, was founded in 1972 and publishes Southwest Journal of Linguistics. Three major conferences in the Language Variety in the South series have gathered a wide array of scholars to present current research at the University of South Carolina (1981), Auburn University (1993), and the University of Alabama (2004).

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY

University of South Carolina

William A. Kretzschmar Jr. et al., Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (1993); James B. McMillan and Michael B. Montgomery, Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English (1989); Michael B. Montgomery and Guy Bailey, eds., Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (1986); Lee Pederson et al., Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (1986).

 

Literary Dialect

Serving as comic device, signifier of social status or regional background, and component of literary realism, the tradition of representing dialectal speech in American literature came into its own in the second quarter of the 19th century. Early works drew on several regionally associated varieties of American English but are most strongly and most often connected to depictions of southern speech, black and white. These representations, beginning with the American humor tradition, often functioned as comic tropes or as attempts at realistic speech. Some of them, however, reinforced social distance between the dialect speakers and the presumed standard-speaking author and audience, as a way of poking fun at or condescending to less-educated, lower-class, rural speakers, particularly African Americans and southerners of all races.

The decline of the southern frontier, already taking place a generation before the Civil War, and the resulting nostalgia for disappearing ways of life led to the “old southwestern” humor tradition, with Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri comprising the “southwest” or southern frontier. With this came the first major wave of American dialect writing. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835) was among the first and most influential of this genre. The frontier settings and themes of its sketches were supported by the speech of uneducated frontier characters, with characterizations and descriptions that were well received by audiences and critics. One Longstreet character, Billy Curlew, exemplifies the colorful speech used in these frontier characterizations: “Well dang my buttons, if you an’t the very boy my daddy used to tell me about,” exclaims Billy upon meeting the narrator of “The Shooting Match.” Other writers soon contributed to the genre, including George Washington Harris of Tennessee, William Tappan Thompson of Georgia, Charles F. M. Nolan of Arkansas, William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, Henry Clay Lewis and Thomas Bangs Thorpe of Louisiana, and Hardin E. Taliaferro and Johnson Jones Hooper of North Carolina, all best known for works that appeared in the 1840s or 1850s. They represented southern frontier characters speaking a nonstandard dialect, which emphasized these characters’ lack of sophistication, social status, and education. For example, Thompson’s Major Jones character, who appears in many sketches, often finds himself in urban settings where the country-bred Jones stands out in part because of his speech. In one sketch, he visits the “opery,” but he “couldn’t hardly make out hed nor tail to it, though [he] listened at ’em with all [his] ears, eyes, mouth, and nose.” Jones concludes that “a body what never seed a opery before would swar they was evry one either drunk or crazy as loons, if they was to see ’em in one of ther grand lung-tearin, ear-bustin blowouts.” The lack of sophistication was further highlighted by the contrast between the dialectal speech of the characters and the standard speech of the narrator. This popular convention of the prewar humor genre highlighted the social distance between the authors, who were generally educated, upper-class members of their communities—Longstreet was a superior court judge, for example, while Thorpe was a newspaper editor and politician—and the “folk” characters who peopled the stories. That distance was echoed within the audience of the literature, who, unlike many featured characters, had access to literacy and reading materials.

After the Civil War, southern speech continued to be well represented in American dialect writing. “Local color” writers focused on the idiosyncrasies, including speech, of particular regions and their inhabitants, contributing to the development of dialect writing as well as to the rise of realism in American fiction, in part through local color writers’ attempts to reproduce realistic scenes and speech. The popularity of writers such as George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin of Louisiana, Mary Murfree of Tennessee, Martha Strudwick Young of Alabama, Ruth McEnery Stuart of Arkansas, and Joel Chandler Harris of Georgia (whose Uncle Remus stories were known worldwide) resulted in the increasing use of dialect as a mimetic device (a literary device used to imitate reality). For example, Cable’s characters speak a variety of English steeped in Louisiana French Creole, as exemplified in the speech of the title character of his 1883 novella Madame Delphine, who asks a friend to care for her daughter should any harm befall Madame Delphine: “I wand you teg kyah my lill’ girl.”

Toward the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th, the American realistic short story and novel evolved, as did the use of literary dialect, with characters and situations that lent themselves to portrayals of realistic speech. Writers associated with the local color movement and the rise of realism, including Cable, Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt of North Carolina, and Mark Twain, whose native Missouri was part of the “old Southwest,” led the late-century use of dialect to enhance realism in fiction, perhaps best exemplified by Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In the 20th century the work of Jesse Stuart of Kentucky, Lexie Dean Robertson of Texas, and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty (both of Mississippi), among many others, featured realism in southern literary dialect.

Realism was not the only goal of literary dialect in late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction. Some authors used dialect to mark characters as nonstandard or inferior in relation to narrator, author, or audience. One device, “eye dialect,” involved the use of alternative spellings that look different on the page but do not represent alternative pronunciations (for example, wuz for was or whut for what), which sometimes contributed to negative characterizations. While some writers have used eye dialect in ways that do not necessarily stigmatize the speaker, the device can also function simply to mark a speaker as “other,” particularly as a less-educated or socially or racially inferior person, without providing any real information about that person’s dialectal pronunciations.

Both black and white authors have frequently represented the speech of southern blacks. The portrayal by whites sometimes had less to do with realism in characterization than with the reaction of white writers and audiences to changes in the social order during and after Reconstruction. This is seen especially in works of the plantation tradition, an offshoot of the local color movement. In this tradition, which capitalized on white nostalgia for an idealized version of the antebellum South, white authors such as Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia and Thomas Dixon of North Carolina used black dialect primarily to differentiate African Americans from whites in the service of glorifying slavery and rationalizing continuing racial inequality. The “frame narration” in such work re-creates and reinforces the distance between a white speaker who introduces, or frames, the tale and the African American narrator who tells it, as well as the distance between the African American narrator and the predominantly white audience. Almost invariably, tales in the plantation tradition portray former slaves as longing for the old plantation days and characterize them as submissive and childlike. The use of black dialect that was endemic to stories of the plantation tradition and in minstrel shows became in many white minds inextricable from reality and accepted as symptomatic of black inferiority. This powerful and persistent image has resulted in serious critiques of African American literary dialect as depicted by white authors, including Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Ambrose Gonzales of South Carolina, and Faulkner, with some scholars charging these authors with resorting to stereotype to portray black speech, while others defend the authenticity of their dialectal representations.

Associations with minstrelsy and the plantation tradition led many black writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to avoid representations of dialectal speech in their work, with Chesnutt being a notable exception. His “conjure tales” of the 1880s and 1890s mimic the formal conventions of the plantation tradition while subverting its goals and themes by indirectly condemning slavery and criticizing southern racial relations, all in the guise of the plantation tradition. Chesnutt’s narrator, Julius McAdoo, a former slave, recounts tragic tales of slavery days in a dialect designed to disguise or otherwise make palatable the subversive nature of the stories to their white audience. For example, when Julius’s white employer, John, responds skeptically to a story by Julius highlighting the need for white “masters” to be tolerant and fair and asks if he has made it up, Julius responds, “No, suh, I heared dat tale befo’ you er Mis’ Annie [John’s wife] dere wuz bawn, suh. My mammy tol’ me dat tale w’en I wa’n’t mo’d’n knee-high ter a hopper-grass.” A similar exception was Zora Neale Hurston, who re-created the speech and rich oral traditions of close-knit African American communities in Florida in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). However, several of Hurston’s African American contemporaries, most famously Richard Wright, railed against her representations, arguing that her work perpetuated the stereotypes established and maintained by the plantation tradition and minstrelsy.

The tradition of representing southern speech in literature continues into the 21st century. Contemporary writers of fiction and poetry, including Alice Walker of Georgia, Pat Conroy of South Carolina, Lee Smith of Virginia and North Carolina, Sonia Sanchez of Alabama, Denise Giardina of West Virginia, and James Alan McPherson of Georgia, draw from the rich linguistic traditions of their home regions, while playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks of Kentucky and Shay Young-blood of Georgia bring contemporary southern speech to the stage and to new audiences. Literary dialect remains important to students of southern language and culture because the attempts by authors, whether to reproduce realistic speech or to differentiate characters by means of their dialect, offer meaningful information about southern life and the artistic representations of it. It can reveal how older forms of speech and language, as well as popularly held attitudes toward southern varieties of American speech, change over time, as reflected in the literary dialect of texts and in how audiences and critics respond to it.

LISA COHEN MINNICK

Western Michigan University

Cynthia Goldin Bernstein, ed., The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics (1994); Walter Blair and Raven I. McDavid Jr., eds., The Mirth of a Nation: America’s Great Dialect Humor (1983); Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, eds., Humor of the Old Southwest (3d ed., 1994); Sumner Ives, in Tulane Studies in English (1950); Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999); Lisa Cohen Minnick, Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech (2004); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994).

 

McDavid, Raven I., Jr.

(1911–1984) LINGUIST.

Raven Ioor McDavid Jr. was born and raised in Greenville, S.C. He graduated from Furman University in 1931 and received his Ph.D. in English in 1935 from Duke University, with a dissertation on the political thought of John Milton. In 1937 he attended a summer linguistic institute at the urging of his commandant at the Citadel military academy, his first teaching position.(The commandant thought that McDavid, because of his heavy southern accent, needed remedial training in elocution.) He was selected as a model informant for a dialectology class at the institute, was intrigued with what he heard there, and proceeded to become the foremost student of southern speech—and of American English more generally—of his time.

McDavid entered the field of linguistics just at the point of its rapid development as a modern academic discipline. After his initial spark and further institute training, he embarked on a survey of South Carolina for Hans Kurath’s American Linguistic Atlas Project. World War II intervened, but after working in the Army Language Section during the war, McDavid became Kurath’s chief field-worker. During the next 15 years he spent a great deal of his time in the field with informants from Ontario to Florida; he eventually completed more than 500 interviews (averaging six to eight hours each), a record unmatched by any other American dialectologist. At the same time McDavid wrote prolifically, including landmark articles, his abridgement of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language (1963), and, with Hans Kurath, a volume that still serves as a standard reference, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (1961).

Raven I. McDavid Jr., a groundbreaking dialectologist who believed that contemporary speech was a product of the cultural circumstances of its speakers, of their social and economic life, and of the historical development of that life (Bill Kretzschmar, photographer, archive of the Linguistic Atlas Project, University of Georgia)

His first major academic appointment was at Case Western Reserve University in 1952. In 1957 he moved to the University of Chicago, the institution with which he was most closely identified. In 1964 McDavid succeeded Kurath as editor in chief of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, and in 1975 he accepted responsibility for the Linguistic Atlas of the North-Central States. He directed editorial work on both projects until his death in 1984. Recognition came late for McDavid, but in time he won major funding for his atlas projects from the National Endowment for the Humanities and received honorary degrees from Furman, Duke, and the Sorbonne. The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States began appearing in print in 1980 from the University of Chicago Press. The university’s Joseph Regenstein Library produced microfilm copies of the Basic Materials volumes from the North-Central and Middle and South Atlantic atlas projects.

McDavid’s experience in the field shaped his thought. He always insisted on the importance for linguistics of primary data, of real speech by real people, as opposed to rarefied theory. He believed that contemporary speech was a product of the cultural circumstances of its speakers, of their social and economic life, and of the historical development of that life, and that an accurate understanding of our speech-ways could have a positive effect on the well-being of all members of society.

These ideas made McDavid a primary force in the development of socio-linguistics. His first landmark article, “Postvocalic /-r/ in South Carolina: A Social Analysis” (1948), shows a mature handling of the complex correlations between South Carolina culture and speakers’ pronunciation of /r/ after vowels. Another benchmark, “The Relationship of the Speech of American Negroes to the Speech of Whites” (1951; written with Virginia G. McDavid), provided a corrective to common misapprehensions about the speech of African Americans long before Black English became a popular research area in sociolinguistics. McDavid was in the vanguard of those examining the effects of population movements and urbanization upon our speech, and, in an effort to carry benefits from dialectology to a wide audience, McDavid also promoted applications of his research, especially for the public schools. McDavid studied the speech of all regions of the United States but never forgot his roots in the South: his extensive bibliography is studded with both technical and popular essays such as “The Position of the Charleston Dialect” (1955), “Changing Patterns of Southern Dialects” (1970), and “Prejudice and Pride: Linguistic Acceptability in South Carolina” (1977; written with Raymond K. O’Cain).

WILLIAM A. KRETZSCHMAR JR.

University of Georgia

Anwar Dil, ed., Varieties of American English: Essays by Raven I. McDavid Jr. (1980); William A. Kretzschmar Jr., ed., Dialects in Culture: Essays in General Dialectology by Raven I. McDavid Jr. (1979); Raven I. McDavid et al., eds., Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, fascicles 1 and 2 (1980, 1982); H. L. Mencken, The American Language, ed. R. McDavid (1963).

 

Narrative

Narrative and narration are scholarly terms for storytelling. Oral and written narratives abound in the South in a wide range of types, two primary ones being personal experience stories and oral folk narratives. The latter are stories that are passed down from generation to generation or within a community and can focus on a series of events or practices. Narratives may have a limitless variety of topics: occupation, history, belief, recreation (hunting and fishing stories are commonly told throughout the South), process (how to do something or, rather, how I/we do something), scariest experiences, most important events, holiday practices, cultural practices (birth, death and burial traditions), family stories, and gender-related stories.

In the South, narrative still plays a major cultural role. People share stories for a variety of reasons, but whatever their reasons may be, noted southern literature scholar Fred Hobson has written that southerners have a “radical need to explain and interpret the South.... The rage to explain is understandable, even inevitable given the South’s traditional place in the nation—the poor, defeated, guilt-ridden member, as C. Vann Woodward has written, of a prosperous, victorious, and successful family. The Southerner, more than other Americans, has felt he had something to explain, to justify, to defend, to affirm.”

The history and culture of the South make narrative important to its people. Narratives of the South maintain a dedication to the sense of place, and cultural landscape and lifeways are generally included in these stories. From southern literature to the daily gatherings of southerners at work, at the grocery store, and elsewhere, narratives circulate, and we expect, need, and appreciate them.

Hearers of narratives expect a story to flow in a way that is usual for their culture; in the Western literary and storytelling tradition, this means that the story has a beginning, a middle, and an end and progresses in a linear fashion. In 1967 William Labov and Joshua Waletzky identified the elements of personal experience narrative: an abstract, orientation, temporal organization of complicating structure, evaluation, validation, explanation, transformation or resolution, and a coda. The abstract provides a way for a speaker to insert a narrative into a conversation in a seamless fashion and is the transition to a story. It usually comes in the form of “Back when I was growing up...” or a similar phrase. The orientation of a narrative provides the necessary background of the story—the “who, what, when, where” information; an example from the well-known Tar Baby story would be “One day atter Brer Rabbit fool ’im wid dat calamus root...” The complicating action is set forth through the temporal organization of events—one event follows another. After Brer Rabbit happens upon the Tar Baby, a series of mishaps occurs during which he utters the famous line, “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.” A narrative also includes an evaluation of actions or events and a validation of the event that enhances its credibility; this validation may include either praise or blame for the reported events. These aspects generally take the form of an utterance about the truth of the story. The explanation considers the event’s causes. The narrative can undergo transformation whereby objective events can be deleted and subjective ones inserted. Finally, the story ends when the speaker or writer provides through a coda a bridge back to the place in the conversation where the abstract began. In the Tar Baby story, these are the final lines: “‘I’ll speck you’ll take dinner wid me dis time, Brer Rabbit. I done laid in some calamus root, en I ain’t gwineter take no skuse’ sez Bref Fox, sezzee.”

Narratives almost always revolve around a central figure or important event or sometimes both of these. The people depicted in folk narratives of the South become characters as much as people in actual life are, and their actions, while rooted in truth, at times are slightly exaggerated—hence what Labov and Waletzky call the transformation. A single narrator might be down-home or folksy or sophisticated or funny or serious, depending upon his or her audience and intention in sharing the story. Personal experience or oral folk narratives are told for a variety of reasons, whether didactic, informative, entertaining, or cautionary, and are shaped by the teller’s intent.

In southern narratives, just as in the literature of the American South, sense of place is an important factor. For example, the southern climate is favorable to reptiles, and nearly every southerner has at least one story about the ways in which the teller deals with a snake or repels snakes. In sharing a story, narrators often give the basic information about where a story takes place, but they also share information about other things. Oral historians examine narratives for historical elements, while folklorists investigate narratives to document a cultural practice or a cycle of stories that might circulate in an area or region. Linguists study narratives as pieces of discourse, looking for common patterns or differences. Linguistic markers such as umm and uh, repetition of words or phrases, hedges (expressions such as kind of and rather), pronoun shifts (as from first to second person), deixis (words that indicate location and reference), and linguistic evidentials (phrases such as they say, which provide evidence or pseudoevidence for a statement) can help linguists understand how and why certain narratives function as they do. Further, oral narratives can provide much important phonological and lexical data for linguists. A narrator’s choice to use Standard American English or to opt for nonstandard dialect elements also conveys important information about a narrative and a narrator—especially if the narrator intentionally chooses a nonstandard form in order to fit in with the audience.

Different forms of narrative are found among different cultural groups in the South. Shirley Brice Heath studied groups in three small communities in the Piedmont Carolinas: working-class whites in a traditional mill village, working-class blacks, and the middle- and upper-middle-class whites who set the community standards. All three groups had different styles of storytelling and different ways of teaching children the rules of storytelling for their particular culture. Narratives of working-class whites always had a moral, were “truthful,” and could be told only with the main character (or a family member) present. Working-class blacks valued verbal skills and embellishments in their stories, which were expected to be entertaining, though they might stretch the truth. Other research reveals that, depending upon the region within the South, African Americans and whites have different views of storytelling and narrating and the truth. In rural northern Louisiana, for instance, older white men, when asked to share a story, sometimes begin with a phrase such as “You don’t want to hear these lies now, do you?” or “These are just a bunch of lies.” In general, however, the stories that follow are true.

In both urban and rural areas of the South, speakers share narratives daily for many reasons, and what is apparent from the study of these stories is that they are important to both the tellers and the listeners. Stories are shared and circulated: there may be variation in the story as it is told multiple times by the original narrator or others, or there may be stability; yet the core elements in most cases remain the same, with the variations illustrating the importance of personalizing a story.

LISA ABNEY

Northwestern State University

John Baugh, Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival (1985); Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (1982); Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983); Barbara Johnstone, Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America (1990); William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, in Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. J. Helm (1967).

 

North Carolina Language and Life Project

The North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP) was established at North Carolina State University in 1993 to provide a research and outreach center for languages of the American South. The goals of the NCLLP are (1) to gather information about language varieties in order to understand the nature of language variation and change, (2) to document language varieties in North Carolina and beyond as they reflect the cultural traditions of their speakers, (3) to provide information about language differences to the public and to educational communities, and (4) to use research material for the improvement of educational programs about language and culture. Initial funding came from the William C. Friday Endowment at North Carolina State University, with subsequent external funding from such federal agencies as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities supporting many of its research and dissemination efforts.

Since the inception of the NCLLP, its staff has conducted more than 1,500 sociolinguistic interviews with residents of North Carolina and other regions connected to language varieties spoken in the Old North State. These interviews cover topics from history and remembrances to current livelihood and lifestyle changes. Archives of NCLLP interviews, as well as copies of those for most southern states recorded by Dictionary of American Regional English field-workers from 1965 to 1970, are available at the project office.

NCLLP staff members have engaged in community-based sociolinguistic research projects on many regional, social, and ethnic varieties of Southern English. These include studies of Outer Banks English; African American English in remote communities (in the Appalachian Mountains, the Coastal Plain, and the Outer Banks); the varieties of English spoken in tri-ethnic communities having people of Native American, European American, and African American ancestry in several areas in North Carolina; and the emerging varieties of English spoken by Latinos in rural and metropolitan areas.

(l–r) David Esham of Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks with sociolinguistic researchers Natalie Schilling-Estes and Walt Wolfram (Walt Wolfram)

In addition to its sociolinguistic research, the NCLLP engages in public outreach programs related to language diversity. These activities have led to the production of television documentaries that range from a general profile of language variation across North Carolina (Voices of North Carolina in 2005) to documentaries on particular dialects, such as the English of the Outer Banks (The Ocracoke Brogue in 1996; The Hoi Toider Brogue in 2005), the Highlands in western North Carolina (Mountain Talk in 2004), and the Lumbee (Indian by Birth: The Lumbee Dialect in 2001). The NCLLP has produced compact disc collections of local narratives and trade books on Lumbee English and Outer Banks English. It has constructed exhibits on dialects at local museums and cultural centers in partnership with local communities and created an experimental dialect awareness curriculum for middle school students throughout the state. Staff members routinely give presentations and conduct workshops on language diversity in the public schools and to local civic organizations, particularly preservation and historical societies.

WALT WOLFRAM

North Carolina State University

Mountain Talk, North Carolina Language and Life Project documentary (2004); Voices of North Carolina, North Carolina Language and Life Project documentary (2005); Walt Wolfram, Clare Dannenberg, Stanley Knick, and Linda Oxendine, Finein the World: Lumbee Language in Time and Place (2002).

 

Oratorical Themes

The mythical southern orator is a white male said to possess qualities that distinguish him from speakers heard in other regions. This regional persona speaks emotionally, in ornate symbolic language with expansive gestures and a thunderous voice, about sacred themes. Confederate ex-general John B. Gordon speaking against Reconstruction policies embodied this mythical presence. Exhibiting a “rare physical vigor,” this scar-faced veteran dramatically trumpeted “Dixie,” “our soil,” “sacrifice,” “our fathers,” and the “spirit of Lee.” Prideful public performance became the hallmark of the southern orator, no matter that John C. Calhoun talked “impersonally” with “few gestures” and that Joseph Brown rejected “sickly sentimentality” for unadorned speech about financial prosperity.

Conceived in Old South culture and created in suffering and defeat, this ostentatious persona tried to shield the region from federal encroachment, economic exploitation, social change, and outside criticism, while maintaining traditional thought and policies at home. Even as veterans of the Confederacy died and their children and grandchildren forgot the war, this fictive image of the raging public warrior persisted, providing speakers with stock rhetorical forms of delivery, argument, and language and with topics for their oratory.

A second type of southern oratory consists of the real-life performances of whites, blacks, males, and females of different postures and persuasions from the 1800s on. White males held communicative dominance in the region, developing the authoritative strategies of white superiority, southern manhood, and southern ladyhood. Some women spoke effectively in public, but always in a manner considered suitable to their low social status. More recently, although women had won the vote and a wider voice in society, defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the South demonstrated that many persons still preferred traditional social and rhetorical roles for women and men in the region.

Until the 1960s black men and women experienced few safe and meaningful opportunities to speak in the general cultural institutions. As slaves, blacks confronted coercive sanctions with both a defensive posture of accommodation and an aggressive assertion of exploitation. Former slaves from the South did become influential orators in the northern antislavery movement. Drawing on their southern experiences, they offered dramatic testimonials about slavery. Frederick Douglass, a former slave from Maryland, became one of the 19th century’s greatest orators. With the physical gifts of a great orator—tall in stature, melodious in voice—Douglass won converts to abolition throughout the North and in Britain. During Reconstruction some blacks spoke a new rhetoric that rejected racist stereotypes and called for equal opportunities. The black church became the most significant forum for black public speaking. Audience interaction with the preacher and the use of biblical language, musical rhythms, and sometimes even chanted sermons—all in a passionate religious setting—characterized speaking in the black church. After the judicial and legislative decisions of the 1950s and 1960s, blacks had increased opportunities for open communication. They marched in streets and talked in churches, on campuses, and over television about constitutional rights, basic freedoms, human dignity, economic opportunities, and cruel discrimination.

Prior to the Civil War, white leaders saw the threat to their slave society and responded with a “rhetoric of desperation.” They differed on the nature and future of the Union, and a new sectional awareness emerged. Confronting social and economic change, orators perfected defensive rhetorical forms dealing with the recurring themes of constitutionality, states’ rights, regional pride, Old South culture, white superiority, agrarianism, and God. Equally important was the omission from public discourse of the topic of civil rights for blacks.

During Reconstruction most white speakers supported the restoration of white rule in state government. Initially, some leaders refused to participate in Reconstruction politics and thereby legitimize the political role of former slaves. A few whites called for submission to northern conquerors as a means of reclaiming economic security and political control and, as a consequence, were ostracized from public office for a number of years. To resist Reconstruction laws and to restore white authority, the majority of white orators constructed regionally appealing arguments from mythic themes of the Old South, white superiority, threats to southern womanhood, regional pride, states’ rights, constitutional claims, violence, economic prosperity, and regional security. Supplementing these stock southern appeals were emotional references to God, sacred principles, and past loyalties, as well as to Civil War experiences, including heroic acts by soldiers, sacrifices of women left behind, regional suffering, and economic ruin.

From 1800 to 1954 whites relied on racial authority, hoping to hold blacks in their rhetorically impotent status as obedient listeners. At the same time, to communicate with northerners, white orators practiced a “rhetoric of accommodation,” a stance opposite to their Reconstruction discourse of resistance. This conciliatory posture combined a regional loyalty oath with an emphasis on sectional prosperity. Listeners heard the same orators talk of Old South themes of “southern honor” and New South appeals of “practical progress” for the “new age.” Between 1880 and 1946 a number of southern demagogues, noted for their fiery delivery, belligerence, magnetism, assumed infallibility, and monopolizing strategies, governed the region. During the 1940s, when courts ruled that blacks could participate in white primaries, these demagogues and other, less dogmatic whites began a new round of intimidating bribes and threats.

The most dramatic change in southern oratory occurred from 1954 to the 1980s, as the Supreme Court ruled against racially segregated public schools and the Congress passed civil rights legislation. Blacks challenged the dominant rhetorical status of whites. A pluralistic public speaking emerged, with a variety of views being stated on questions of race, economy, political parties, crime, national defense, ecology, industry, and education. Blacks were able publicly to communicate feelings, convictions, and aspirations previously kept private. Blacks and some whites directly confronted the morality, expediency, economy, and legality of racial discrimination. Many blacks abandoned their former accommodating posture and developed more candid and assertive language, strategies, topics, and arguments appropriate for newly won freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr. used oratory as a key weapon in the civil rights movement. He drew from the communication styles of the black folk church and combined biblical themes with national egalitarian ideals. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington echoed Lincoln’s language in the Gettysburg Address, portraying the South as the locale of a hoped-for racial reconciliation.

To oppose social changes resulting from legal and judicial decisions, many whites escalated their defensive rhetoric of white superiority, black inferiority, constitutional interpretations, states’ rights, God, free enterprise, and racial segregation. Increasingly, however, whites were forced to share the public forum with blacks. As more blacks registered to vote and campaigned for office, whites for the first time since Reconstruction were required to communicate directly and respectfully with the new minority audience. Although awkward initially, white orators experimented with rhetoric appropriate to their new, less-powerful status. In the 1970s a few governors actually called for an end to racial discrimination. Some writers have called this new white male speech an “oratory of optimism,” but a more accurate characterization would be a public admission of the expediency of social change and shared authority.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at a civil rights march on Washington, D.C., August 1963 (U.S. Information Agency, Press and Publication Service [NWDNS-306-SSM-4c (51)13])

CAL M. LOGUE

University of Georgia

Waldo W. Braden, ed., Oratory in the New South (1979), Oratory in the Old South, 1828–1860 (1970), Southern Speech Journal (vol. 29, 1964); Kevin E. Kearney, SouthernSpeech Journal (vol. 31, 1966); Cal M. Logue, Quarterly Journal of Speech (vol. 67, 1981); Cal M. Logue and Howard Dorgan, eds., The Oratory of Southern Demagogues (1981); John D. Saxon, Southern Speech Communication Journal (vol. 40, 1975).

 

Perceptions of Southern English

The South is the touchstone for the perception of differences in American English. When surveyed, respondents from all over the United States identify it as the region with the most distinctive speech. Studies confirm the existence of a stereotype of a distinctive southern speech, but is southern speech itself readily identifiable? Research shows that Americans can indeed identify southern speech as unique and that they can identify it on pronunciation alone.

The linguistic salience of the South is not purely geographical, however. Map 7 shows that when southeastern Michigan respondents rated the 50 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C., on a 10-point scale for language correctness, the states in the South were rated lowest, although New York City and New Jersey were rated low as well.

These findings suggest that an overwhelming linguistic concern among Americans is the distribution of good English and bad English. The most important locus of bad English is the South. Good English is the white-bread stuff of the mythical national newscaster variety, which is supposed to have its origins and provenance somewhere in the Midwest. As Map 7 shows, Michiganders clearly believe they speak this variety.

One cannot, however, paint a completely negative picture of southern English. To do so would ignore one-half of the findings uncovered by years of scholarly research on language attitudes. Typically when respondents are asked how they feel about language, they exploit two dimensions. The first is the one discussed above: language is correct or incorrect, and speech either reflects the practices of the dominant culture and stands for conservative, mainstream educational norms or it does not. Many nonsoutherners believe they are speakers of that norm and that southerners are not.

Not all speakers, however, place exclusive value on such a standard. Many, perhaps especially speakers of varieties that are denigrated and who experience prejudice themselves in nonlinguistic ways as well, value nonstandard, small-group, and local varieties of language for the solidarity and identity they provide. Respondents have also been asked, therefore, to rate regions for language pleasantness as well as correctness. Map 8 shows the results of such an investigation of university-enrolled southern respondents, primarily from Alabama. These southerners appear to feel as strongly about language pleasantness (and believe that they have it) as Michiganders do about language correctness, but the ranking of southern speech as pleasant does not result exclusively from in-group solidarity; even many nonsoutherners have a tendency to rate southern speech highly for pleasantness. For example, Michigan residents rate southerners as more casual, friendlier, more down-to-earth, and more polite than they rate themselves.

Map 7. Perceptions of Language Correctness. The 50 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C., rated for language correctness (1 = least correct, 10 = most correct) by southeastern Michigan respondents (results are shaded by means score ranges)

Map 8. Perceptions of Language Pleasantness. The 50 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C., rated for language pleasantness (1 = least pleasant, 10 = most pleasant) by southern (chiefly Alabama) respondents (results are shaded by means score ranges)

Since Michiganders obviously are not dissatisfied with the local Michigan speech as a variety of correct English, what is the source of their preference for southern varieties in the pleasantness dimension? Young Michiganders assign a kind of prestige to southern speech, which they imagine has more value than their own for casual interaction. Thus, one American linguistic option appears to be to use a popularly identified Standard English in settings that require it and to prefer varieties that are perceived as nonstandard in settings that require casual use. Southern English appears to function very well for the latter.

The studies outlined above all focus on southern speech as an abstract or global fact, but studies of attitudes toward southern speech have also looked at specific features. At the grammatical level, the stigmatized construction I done told him was strongly associated by Texans with the South, along with other indicators of nonstandardness. Raters said it would more likely be used by a person with less than a high school education and associated it with male, rural, and working-class speakers. Raters also said it would be preferred by younger and older rather than middle-aged speakers.

Pronunciation features of Southern English have been even more thoroughly investigated. One study looked at the following:

d for z before negative contractions (isn’t pronounced as idn’t)
i for e before m and n (ten pronounced as tin)
the presence of a y-glide before oo (news pronounced as nyuz)
a for i before ng (thing pronounced to rhyme with rang)
the loss of the diphthong so that time sounds like Tom
the “drawling” or lengthening of vowels before r.

For language correctness, a southern voice was rated significantly lower than a northern one for every pronunciation feature above, but most dramatically for z replacing d, and a replacing i before ng. This study makes it clear that not all authentic southern features have equal value for the perceiver. In another study, several southern vowels were rated as less educated than northern equivalents.

bait pronounced as bite
beet pronounced as bait
the vowels of boat and good pronounced further forward in the mouth
bet pronounced as bait
bit pronounced as beet

Studies of the perception of southern speech have provided new methodologies for linguists, particularly methodologies that focus on the influence of single linguistic features. Many of these features can be studied within the area of phonetics, making full use of newer acoustic and synthesizing techniques and technologies.

In conclusion, southern speech is the regional variety perceived as most distinct in the United States, and linguistic prejudice seems to be the prime reason for that evaluation. On the other hand, analyses of perceptions have shown that, even for northern speakers, southern speech has a strong, general affective appeal or “pleasantness” in addition to its strong solidarity appeal for southerners themselves.

DENNIS PRESTON

Michigan State University

Nancy Niedzielski and Dennis R. Preston, Folk Linguistics (1999); Dennis R. Preston, in Focus on the USA, ed. E. Schneider (1996), in Language Variety in the South Revisited, ed. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (1997); Dennis R. Preston, ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, vols. 1 and 2 (1999, 2002).

 

Personal Names

Personal names document the settlement history of the South. Surnames and given names of British and Irish colonists (the most numerous), the Spanish, the French, Germans, Sephardic Jews, and others are linked to the towns, counties, and other places they founded. But personal names do much more than substantiate historical facts; they convey a southern ethos.

Commemorative given names have long been popular in the South. Surnames of the first families of the South, such as Byrd, Carroll, Clay, Jefferson, Pinckney, Spencer, Taylor, Warner, and Washington, are bestowed on yeoman and patrician, men and women alike, and are numerous in any southern telephone directory. In particular, the first and third presidents have had great influence on names. George Washington Cable was the novelist of the Louisiana Creoles; George Washington Harris, a journalist and humorist of east Tennessee; and George Washington Carver, an accomplished black botanist and inventor. (Washington was also adopted as a surname by many African Americans after emancipation.) Jefferson Davis, the first president of the Confederate States of America, was named for the famous president from Virginia, as was Thomas Jefferson Wertenbacker, the historian.

Southern naming practice has consistently honored military heroes. Andrew Jackson Hamilton was a governor of Texas and Andrew Jackson Montague a governor of Virginia. Francis Marion Cockrell, a Confederate general and Missouri governor, pays tribute to the Swamp Fox. Robert E. Lee’s name has been perpetuated by many southern lads; Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the protagonist of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, possessed the heroism if not the gallantry of his namesake. French and Latin American heroes are also honored: Florida governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and the distinguished Confederate hero Simon Bolivar Buckner illustrate such christening. Some southern magnificoes have been remembered ironically. The shiftless and nocturnal Gowrie Twins, Bilbo and Vardaman, in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, satirize the two Mississippi politicians for whom the boys are named.

The most common type of commemorative naming, however, does not invoke the heroic or illustrious but passes on a family name, like an heirloom, from one generation to another. Often a surname is given as a first or middle name, for example, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Reese Witherspoon, Davis Smith, Bobby Brown Travis, or James Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican, who was called by his mother’s maiden name.

In naming, as in southern architecture, the classics have been influential. Many southerners have borne a first or middle name of Greco-Roman origin, Augustus being among the most popular. This practice reveals the South’s respect for antiquity as well as its hope that Herculean feats would be replicated in Dixie. Without rival, onomastically speaking, was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (born in Georgia, later a senator from Mississippi), the South’s “Redeemer Politician” and later Supreme Court justice. Although diminishing in recent decades, this naming custom flourished for centuries. Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox distinguished himself on the battlefields of Virginia; Civil War heroine Phoebe Pember was from Charleston; Cassius Marcellus Clay (after whom the pugilist more popularly known as Muhammad Ali was named) was a famous Kentucky abolitionist; Augustus Baldwin Longstreet portrayed the South movingly in fiction and was an educator. Virginius Dabney was an award-winning journalist; Cleanth Brooks, a highly respected literary critic; and Thomas Dionysius Clark, an eminent historian. Virgil H. Goode represents Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. In southern literature, characters with classical names perpetuate a noble tradition (Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) or suggest mythic models (Phoenix Jackson in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”). In the popular arts, Homer and his biblically christened partner Jethro offered bardic entertainment, mountain style.

Although long known as the Bible Belt, the South does not surpass the North in using biblical first names, but the practice remains strong. Such names have been borne by senators from North Carolina (Jesse Helms), Alabama (Jeremiah Denton), Tennessee (James Sasser), and Georgia (Rebecca Latimer Felton) and by Maryland congressman Elijah E. Cummings. Some southerners have been named for religious figures. Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, whose father was a circuit-riding Methodist preacher, carried the name of the early leader of that denomination. Martin Luther King Sr. and his more famous son, the civil rights leader, were named for the Protestant reformer, and many other young southerners have later carried King’s first name.

If southern names reflect the grandeur and formality of tradition, they also embody the folksy congeniality cherished by the region, a practice that may be waning because of the homogenization of culture in the United States. More than in other parts of the nation, names in the South are diminutives, ending in -y or -ie, making them appear friendlier, less pretentious. The Carter brothers Jimmy and Billy typified in name and character an affection for popularism. Other similarly named southern dignitaries in the U.S. House of Representatives now and in years past include Ronnie Flippo (Alabama); Andy Ireland and Ginny Brown-Waite (Florida); Larry Hopkins (Kentucky); Lindy Boggs, Billy Tauzin, Jerry Huckaby, Bobby Jindal, Charlie Melancon, and Cathy Long (Louisiana); and Jamie Whitten and Bennie Thompson (Mississippi). Several southern congressmen court votes with chummy, monosyllabic first names: Zach Wamp (Tennessee), Mac Thornberry (Texas), and Ric Keller (Florida). Southern governors also sport short, memorable first names: Jeb Bush (Florida), Sonny Perdue (Georgia), Ernie Fletcher (Kentucky), and Rick Perry (Texas). Some in America would recognize the name of William Franklin Graham, although Billy Graham is much more of a household name. Nor are these folksy names considered inappropriate for someone of status. Diminutives such as Bubba (which approximates a young southerner’s pronunciation of brother), Buddy, Lonnie, Sissy, Sonny, and Stoney are recorded legal given names.

Many southerners have a double given name, with one or both parts often a diminutive or shortened form. Such names suggest the southern ideals of youthful vigor and inviting informality. Among males, characteristic doublets are Billy Bob, Danny Lee, Eddie Ray, and Larry Gene. For belles, popular names are Bonnie Jean, Connie Ann, Ellie Mae (Jed Clampett’s daughter in The Beverly Hillbillies), Kelly Lynn, Kerry Leigh, Suzy Kay, or Tammy Jo. A subpattern for females combines a male and a female name—Billy Sue, George Jean, Johnnie Mae, Ronnie Gayle, Tara Lyn, Tommy Ruth, or Willie Jean.

Jimmy Carter (Thomas J. O’Halloran, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-u9-33286-19], Washington, D.C.)

An extreme example of unpretentious names is the use of initials in place of first names in the South. Sometimes these initials stand for first names (J. R. of Dallas fame), but the initials are also given as legal first names—B. J., B. W., J. T., and T. W. Initial names discomfit the U.S. government, especially the military, which adds only after such initial first names for easier processing of recruits.

Perhaps more than any other section of the country, the South has been distinguished by picturesque names, including nicknames, especially for men. There are the ubiquitous southern Bubbas, Busters, Goobers, Macks, Pudgies, Slicks, and Zacks. In one Tennessee Williams play alone (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) we encounter Gooper, Big Mama, Big Daddy, and Sookey. From politics come William “Fishbait” Miller, the longtime doorkeeper of the U.S. House of Representatives; Goat Harris, an official in Durham, N.C.; Foxy Robinson, the water commissioner of Laurel, Miss.; Shag Pyron, a former Mississippi football star and highway commissioner; and Scooter Borgman, who ran for city council in Hattiesburg. The world of sports, too, glitters with southern luminaries having unusual nicknames: Bear Bryant, Dizzy Dean, Mudcat Grant, Catfish Hunter, Bum Phillips, Vinegar Bend Mizell, and Oil Can Boyd. God bless them all.

PHILIP C. KOLIN

University of Southern Mississippi

John Algeo and Adele Algeo, Names (vol. 31, 1983); Timothy C. Frazer, Midwestern Folklore (vol. 21, 1995); Kelsie B. Harder, Bucknell Review (vol. 8, 1959); Philip C. Kolin, Names (vol. 25, 1977); Forrest McDonald and Ellen Shapiro McDonald, William and Mary Quarterly (ser. 3, vol. 37, 1980); Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, Names (vol. 31, 1983); Pauline C. Pharr, American Speech (vol. 68, 1993); Thomas Pyles, Names (vol. 7, 1959).

 

Place-Names

Place-names label the landscape, identifying both natural and man-made features. They are common to all cultures, and although the kinds of names may vary, nearly all consist of two parts, a generic and a specific. For example, the generic River identifies the kind of feature, and the specific Mississippi tells us what this particular river is called. Both the generic and the specific depend on the namer’s linguistic experience, and their order usually follows the grammatical pattern of the language (or the language from which the name is translated). In English, the specific usually precedes the generic, just as an adjective precedes the noun it modifies, while in French and Spanish, for example, the pattern is reversed. Names with the generic before the specific, such as Lake Pontchartrain or Rio Grande, show French and Spanish grammatical patterns, respectively. In many cases, however, the generic may precede the specific either in an attempt to make the name sound more elegant or because the combination seems to sound better in that order (Lake Murray, Mount Mitchell). Further, people in one part of the country, though they may speak the same language, often use different standards for choosing generics, especially for streams. In New England, brook is used for most small streams, while most of the rest of the country favors creek. In Tennessee, Kentucky, and western North Carolina, however, more than half of the small streams are branches. West Virginia has a large number of streams called runs, and most small streams in Louisiana are called bayous. Another regional feature name is cove, used for a mountain valley. This generic, though it appears sporadically in the West, is mostly concentrated in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. Key, for a small island, is limited almost entirely to Florida.

The place-names of the South reflect the speech, history, observations, and values of the people who have lived there. As artifacts of language that give the landscape its linguistic identity, they are a result of the significant contributions of Spanish, French, English, and various indigenous languages.

Names from indigenous languages are scattered across the entire region, and Spanish names are common in Florida and Texas, reflecting the importance of Spain in the early colonization of the Americas and the continuing influence of Hispanic culture in the Southwest. The Gulf Coast, especially Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley, were occupied by French speakers in the early naming days, resulting in a strong legacy of names from that language. Most states in the South are in areas that have been dominated by English speakers, and the history of settlement is clearly seen in naming patterns across the region, from the British orientation of the colonial period through the period of nation building that followed the Revolutionary War to the Civil War era and beyond.

Most place-names either grow out of descriptions of places or are chosen for commemorative reasons, as to honor individuals or other places. Descriptive names, usually of natural features, are functions of observation—what a feature may look like, what animals or plants may be associated with it, or what human activities may have taken place nearby. The other kind of name often reflects the values of the namers. The South has numerous names of both sorts.

Names of indigenous origin in the South come from many different languages and language families, especially Muskogean (Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, etc.), Iroquoian (Cherokee, Tuscarora, etc.), Siouan (Biloxi), and Caddoan (Caddo). These names appear mostly on rivers: beyond the largest of these (Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee), many other rivers in all of the states of the South have names traceable to indigenous languages: Atchafalaya, Chattahoochee, Kanawha, Kentucky, Ouachita, Pecos, Potomac, Roanoke, Santee, Tallahatchie, and Tombigbee, to name just a few.

Names of the states in the South reflect the historical development of the various regions. The earliest region to be named was Florida, which shows the Spanish pattern of naming features for the day of discovery. On Easter Sunday 1513, Ponce de León spotted a land covered with abundant flowering groves and called it Pasqua de Flores ‘Easter flowering.’ The other South Atlantic states trace their names to the British royal family. Virginia (named in 1584) is a Latin form honoring Queen Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen.” The colony of Carolina (originally spelled Caro-lana) received its name in 1629 in honor of King Charles I, although it was not settled until 1670 under Charles II. The colony was officially divided into North and South in 1735. Georgia, founded as a colony in 1732, honors King George II. The use of feminine Latinate forms, ending in -a, seemed appropriate for place-names and was extended throughout the nation (Louisiana, from Louisiane, honoring the French King Louis XIV in 1681; Columbia, from Columbus: the city in South Carolina in 1786, the District of Columbia in 1791, the river in the Northwest in 1792).

Most other states in the South are named for major rivers within or along their boundaries. These include Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Since West Virginia, which separated from Virginia during the Civil War, also has a royal name, the only southern state (other than Florida) that is neither a descriptive nor a commemorative name is Texas, whose name comes from Tejas, a Spanish rendering of a Caddo word meaning “friends.” Tejas appears as a name for the region as early as 1541 and Texas by 1683.

Values and concerns of local people are seen more clearly in county names. Many counties in states settled by British subjects before the American Revolution show British dominion, loyalty toward monarchs, or nostalgia for British counties and towns, and they remain today. In the Carolinas are counties recognizing the proprietary noblemen who were granted a charter for the original colony: Albemarle, Berkeley, Carteret, Clarendon, Colleton, and Craven. In Virginia and South Carolina are counties honoring the royal family: King and Queen, Prince Edward, Prince George, Prince William, Georgetown, and Williamsburg. In Virginia and the Carolinas names of towns, counties, or noblemen of Britain are echoed: Amherst, Bath, Beaufort (for Lord Beaufort, an English nobleman), Bedford, Buckingham, Camden, Chester, Chesterfield, Cumberland, Dorchester, Isle of Wight, Lancaster, New Kent, Northampton, Northumberland, Richmond, Scotland, Southampton, Stafford, Surry, Sussex, Westmoreland, and York.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the South expanded westward, and the political necessity of new counties required a large number of names. Many came from prominent Revolutionary War and early Federalist figures. George Washington, in addition to giving his name to the new capital city, is recognized in the names of 10 southern counties, matched by the number named Marion (for Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox”) and followed closely by Franklin and Madison, both with nine. Jefferson and Lafayette (usually as Fayette) have eight each. Most of these names are also common in those parts of the Midwest settled in the early 19th century.

By the time of the Civil War most counties throughout the South were already organized and named, but after the war many divided and reorganized and took names to commemorate southern heroes of the war and the years leading up to it. Nine southern states have counties named Lee, for example. In every southern state, more counties are named for local or state political figures than for national ones. This is not surprising, since state legislatures usually have naming rights to counties. Many other counties bear names of local historical importance, such as indigenous groups or natural features. Examples are Tuscaloosa(Ala.), Okeechobee (Fla.), Chattahoochee (Ga.), Prairie (Ark.), Rockcastle (Ky.), Point Coupee Parish (La.), Chickasaw (Miss.), Transylvania (N.C.), Cherokee (S.C. and N.C.), Lake (Tenn.), Palo Pinto (Tex.), Alleghany (Va.), and Mineral (W.Va.).

The names of towns and cities have origins even more diverse than those of counties. To take as examples the names of the state capitals, we see cities named for physical features (Little Rock, Baton Rouge—apparently from a red post used as a boundary marker), a Native American place (Tallahassee), a town in England (Richmond), a rail company (Atlanta, terminus of Western and Atlantic Railroad), local settlers (Frankfort, Austin, Charleston), Revolutionary War generals (Montgomery, Nashville), and near-legendary figures of American history (Jackson, Raleigh, Columbia, and of course, Washington, D.C.).

The South has a rich variety of names for both natural and cultural features, reflecting its nearly five centuries of European exploration and settlement and the centuries of habitation of indigenous peoples.

THOMAS J. GASQUE

University of South Dakota

William Bright, Native American Place-Names (2004); Virginia Foscue, Place Namesin Alabama (1989); Kenneth Krakow, Georgia Place Names (3d ed., 1999); Allen Morris, Florida Place Names (1995); Margaret S. Powell and Stephen D. Powell, Names (vol. 38, 1990); Robert Rennick, Kentucky Place Names (1984); Richard B. Sealock, Margaret M. Sealock, and Margaret S. Powell, Bibliography of Place-Name Literature: United States and Canada (3d ed., 1982); George R. Stewart, Names on the Land (1945), American Place-Names (1970); U.S. Boardon Geographic Names, Geographic Names Information System, Reston, Va.: Geological Survey, <http://geonames.usgs.gov/>.

 

Politeness

A common observation about southerners of all backgrounds is that they are “polite.” The South is known for its cultivation of traditional manners. The ethos of any group or region can be seen as having a particular balance of linguistic strategies designed to meet two basic, potentially conflicting needs of individuals when interacting: on one hand, to be recognized as sharing common ground with the group (“positive politeness”) and, on the other, to be free from imposition and to preserve individual autonomy (“negative politeness”). Positive politeness, sometimes referred to as solidarity politeness, is based on how individuals approach one another and highlights a lack of social distance; negative politeness is based on avoidance and serves to maintain or increase social distance. The linguistic dimensions of “southern courtesy” offer an opportunity to explore how the southern ethos combines expectations for both types of politeness in civil interaction. To highlight southern linguistic dimensions of politeness, it is useful to consider the potential for miscommunication with nonsouthern Americans who speak “the same language” but who operate within a different ethos having different expectations for how that language is appropriate to use in interaction. 174 politeness

Perhaps the most distinctive politeness strategy in the South, compared with the rest of the United States, is the greater use of the address terms Ma’am and Sir with the intent to show respect. This strategy is a classic form of negative politeness in which social hierarchy is linguistically signaled. A clear indication of this norm is that within the last decade legislation was proposed in Alabama and actually passed in Louisiana that mandated the use of these terms by elementary school students to their teachers. They are used not only in addressing someone as part of a question or request (as “May I help you, Sir?” or “Ma’am, would you mind passing me the salt?”) but also elsewhere, especially added to the response to a yes/no question (as “Yes, sir” or “No, ma’am”). A southerner can take failure to soften the bald yes or no with the address term as a serious breach of politeness or etiquette.

In the usage of Ma’am and Sir there is significant potential for miscommunication. It is not that nonsoutherners are not familiar with these terms and do not use them, but that they use them in much more limited contexts. Nonsoutherners associate them with addressing a person of an older generation or with marking a social hierarchy; for example, in a service encounter the server will ask, “May I help you, Sir?” and in the well-defined hierarchy of the military these address terms are strictly enforced. Within the context of an ideologically democratic American society, however, these terms have for nonsouthern speakers acquired the uncomfortable connotation of explicit social ranking, of “knowing one’s place,” a type of ranking nonsoutherners prefer to avoid. The problem arises when the nonsoutherner does not realize that the southerner is trying simply to be “polite” without necessarily intending to signal hierarchy, and the southerner does not realize that the nonsoutherner can be “polite” within a nonsouthern framework without using the terms, that is, with a stronger tilt toward positive politeness strategies.

Whereas Ma’am and Sir are gendered address terms, many southerners also have a set of honorific titles specifically for women. There is a longstanding tradition in the South to use Miss with a given name and Miz with a surname, regardless of marital status. This variation is found in both direct address and third-person reference. Thus, Jimmy Carter’s mother was known as both “Miss Lillian” and “Miz Carter.” The use of these forms is complex, socially graded, and highly contextualized, as is the case with other markers, and they are employed mainly for a woman a generation older than the speaker. While they may be most often used for an older woman, there is evidence that young student teachers are addressed by their pupils as “Miss Laura,” “Miss Susan,” and so forth. This set of two honorific titles for women, interestingly without a comparable set for men (although Mister can be used with either a given or a surname, especially to an older man), is another example of negative politeness, here used to show respect. The potential for misunderstanding across subcultures is similar to that discussed in the case of Ma’am and Sir usage, involving shared terms applied in different contexts with different interpretations. Non-southerners view Miss as a relatively old-fashioned honorific that signals unmarried status. They interpret Miz as the identical-sounding Ms., which, since the women’s movement and the publication of Ms. magazine, has come to indicate something like “a woman who doesn’t want to indicate her marital status,” a likely feminist. Ironically, the traditional southern Miz accomplishes the same purpose but without the same ideological baggage.

On the other hand, a form of southern positive politeness is reflected in the use, typically by women, of conventionalized terms of endearment, such as honey, sugar, sweetie, and so forth. These are much more common in the South than elsewhere between people who are not familiarly acquainted; they may even be used with people who are strangers in the context of service encounters, as by a cashier to a customer. The dimension of positive politeness that is invoked here is the reduction of social distance, in which the speaker claims the right to use a term of endearment with a stranger, in an interactional bid to claim conventional closeness. In this case, such usage does not necessarily lead to misunderstanding, unless a man being addressed in this way misreads the intent of the female speaker. Instead, the effect would normally be to bring the subcultural difference in discourse patterns into the addressee’s awareness, potentially triggering a positive or negative judgmental response.

A slightly different dimension of politeness is the degree to which one communicates in a “direct” fashion. Southerners are notoriously indirect, a classic negative politeness strategy. Such indirectness can appear in the overall structure of interaction, as in the length of time spent before getting to the main business of a conversation. A negative politeness strategy is probably most clearly demonstrated in the form of “indirect speech acts.” In these interactional moves the force of a request or order is softened, often through its grammatical formulation as a question. “Would it be too much trouble for you to carry me up the road a mile or so?” is an indirect form of the imperative “Give me a ride to the store.” Such strategies conventionally allow the addressee more freedom to refuse the imposition. Southern English even has a very common and distinctive set of grammatical constructions called “double modals” (such as might could) that combines and represents possibility and probability in a more indirect way than in nonsouthern formal English, which allows only one modal auxiliary before a verb. The past tense of the verb creates metaphorical distance (in the same way that a questioner uses a past-tense verb to hedge a direct request by saying, “I was wondering...” rather than “I want to know...”). Southern English allows the distance created by the past tense to be doubled in might could. Thus while the nonsoutherner has the sole option of saying, “I might be able to go,” the southerner can also say, “I might could go.” The speaker uses the grammatical potential of southern English to protect his or her own autonomy from a commitment to future action. Here and elsewhere a greater degree of indirectness than expected is a prime source of misunderstanding between people who speak the same language. On the part of the nonsoutherner, the communicative intent of a request or command may be missed, the strength of a commitment to action may be misjudged, and an interaction may be assessed as somehow vague or inscrutable. The southerner may experience the more direct style of the nonsoutherner as pushy and rude.

Finally, an important positive politeness dimension of southern courtesy is the elaborate ritual of social conversations. Such interactions have different phases, from the initial greeting, through the main body of the conversation, and to the parting. Important positive politeness strategies characterize the conversation: noticing and attending to the interlocutor (“Is that a new dress?”), exaggerating interest and sympathy (“I love your hair”), asserting knowledge of the interlocutor (“How’s your mama doin’?”), providing empathy and cooperation (“I know just how you feel”), and so on. Particularly among women, the greeting and leave-taking phases of an interaction can be much more complex and extended than in other parts of the United States. Such elaboration is often a manifestation of a greater cultural value attached to the verbal dimension of sociability. The potential for discomfort and misunderstanding across subcultures is substantial, as the impatient nonsoutherner who tries to cut these phases short risks being labeled “rude.” Such interaction is perceived as excessive by someone whose ethos does not require such elaboration to signal and maintain solidarity politeness.

Southern politeness, to the extent that it conforms to traditional manners of the sort found in etiquette books, is essentially a form of negative politeness that highlights social distance. This ethos is reflected in the frequent use of Ma’am and Sir as address terms, in distinctive honorifics for women, and in patterns of indirectness in interaction. On the other hand, positive politeness strategies, in which social distance is reduced as the individual is affirmed as part of the group, is found in the use of certain terms of endearment in service encounters and in the elaborated greetings and leave-takings of sociable conversation. Cultural practices are always changing, however, and some of the deference politeness practices, such as honorific titles for women, appear to be falling away. It is also important to keep in mind that every conversation is a delicate negotiation in which people shift strategies, within a broader ethos, as they attempt to achieve their interactional goals.

CATHERINE EVANS DAVIES

University of Alabama

Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987); Marvin K. L. Ching, in Methods in Dialectology, ed. Alan R. Thomas (1988); Catherine E. Davies, in Language Variety in the South Revisited, ed. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (1997); Barbara Johnstone, in English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (2003), in The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics, ed. Cynthia Goldin Bernstein (1994); Margaret Mishoe and Michael Montgomery, American Speech (vol. 69, 1994); Deborah Tannen, Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends (2005).

 

Preaching Style, Black

During the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s and for years after, many itinerant preachers found that their listeners for religious services often numbered in the thousands. To accommodate such large congregations, the camp meeting was institutionalized. These large-scale worship services were especially successful in the border states of Kentucky and Tennessee, where many clergymen from the North traveled. This new form of divine worship, sometimes attracting as many as 20,000 or more at events such as the one held at Cane Ridge, Ky., included black as well as white worshipers. Although this form of worship never caught on in the Northeast, it was highly successful in the South and Southwest. Many black ministers were inspired to preach at such gatherings, though at first only to other blacks, and a characteristic oral style of delivery emerged from this experience.

These sermons were characterized by the preacher’s chanting the Word of God rather than delivering it conventionally. The sermon began traditionally enough with a statement of the day’s text and its application to contemporary morals. Then, as the preacher got further into the day’s message, he began to chant his lines; the metrics and time intervals of the lines became more and more regular and consistent; and as he became further imbued with the Holy Spirit, the preacher’s delivery slid into song. The sermons were—and still are—characterized by an increase in emotional and spiritual intensity, expressed by the gradual transition from conventional pulpit oratorical style, through chanting, to highly emotional singing. Many black folk preachers are excellent singers and have had several years’ experience with church choirs, if not on the professional stage. Quite a number have been choirmasters, and nearly all these men have from an early age attended church services in which music played a major role. A musical sense has thus been acquired, and its rhythms, intonations, timbres, and verbal phrasing are inextricable parts of the tradition. Foreign visitors to black church services in the early 19th century remarked not only on the minister’s chanting but on the congregation’s equally emotional responses. Such witnesses were appalled by the unbridled emotionalism of such services.

The African heritage of black preachers influenced the style of their performances and of the congregations’ responses. The African folksong tradition of call-and-response was carried over; not only was the preacher directly in this tradition, but in holy services the congregants felt free to call out to the preacher, or to the other congregants, as the Spirit moved them. The service became, and still is, however, something more than the regulated, orchestrated, and patterned response of one individual or group to another; in black services each member of the congregation actually creates his or her own sacred communion simultaneously with the holy service that is proceeding. Members of the congregation call out spontaneously, and such exclamations may not have been anticipated by the minister.

During a service in which the preacher has been successful in arousing the Spirit of the Lord or in bringing his congregation to a high emotional level, individual cries are frequent, some of the congregation will enter an altered state during which they may lose consciousness or dance seemingly involuntarily, and the preacher will be visibly ecstatic as well. Many people laugh aloud; a few cry unashamedly. When the service is over, they will say that they have had a happy time.

Research on this phenomenon suggests that while much of the sermon cannot possibly be heard distinctly, something is being communicated, and the congregation will feel that it has received God’s Word. This may happen because many in the congregation know the Bible almost as thoroughly as does the preacher, and they creatively anticipate his message; also, in these services the congregation participates actively and creatively in the service and may for long periods be “hearing” their own celebrations.

Both preacher and flock share many common traditions, not only inherited Christianity but also an African American interpretation of that faith flavored by the experience of living in the South. Few preachers have had extensive seminary training, and many of their beliefs, like those of their congregations, are derived from popular traditions. For instance, many preachers prefer to use popular, folk versions of stories and parables in Scripture. Hence, although their Christianity is in the main “official,” it is heavily influenced by folkloric elements. In some urban areas these preachers are often known as “old-time country preachers,” though many of them have migrated away from the rural South to the urban North. The Reverend C. L. Franklin, for instance, became most famous after he left the South and moved to Detroit.

The ministers do not use manuscripts but believe that when they are in front of congregations, the Holy Ghost is using them to communicate his message to the people. This spontaneous preaching style is accurately and movingly reproduced by William Faulkner in the last portion of The Sound and the Fury. In those pages the Reverend Shegog from St. Louis delivers a moving sermon in a style indistinguishable from the authentic oral performance. Significantly, this sermon is placed near the novel’s conclusion; Faulkner recognized the great emotive and spiritual power that is the potential of this medium and chose to end his book on an affirming note.

Some white preachers also still preach in this mode; the style is not the exclusive property of one ethnic group. But most practitioners are black and usually Methodist or Baptist. The practice is characteristically southern, though many preachers have now moved to the cities of the North or to the West Coast. These preachers continue to evoke the South in their services. Many professional black singers have vocal qualities that carry heavy echoes of this preaching style. Examples are Aretha Franklin (daughter of the Reverend C. L. Franklin), Sarah Vaughn, and Lou Rawls. Much of the “Motown sound” owes a debt to southern country preaching.

The influence of black folk preachers on the nation extends well beyond the contributions of musical entertainment and the popular arts. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a “spiritual” preacher whose “I Have a Dream” speech was in large measure a sermon on racial equality; he is well known for this oral performance, which profoundly moved his listeners, regardless of their race or ethnic backgrounds. This art has been prominently practiced by Chicago’s Jesse Jackson, a southerner by birth and raising. His address to the Democratic National Convention (1984) was a spontaneous sermon, a moving oration delivered by electronic media to the nation and the world. More recently, one sees the survival and adaptation of this black preaching style in contemporary televangelists. West Virginia–born T. D. Jakes is one of the most prominent black televangelists, preaching from his church, The Potter’s House, located on some 50 acres in southwest Dallas, Tex. He bridges the gap between a rural, southern constituency and the upwardly mobile black (and white) middle class. He can speak, as one observer notes, with “a strong country contour,” pronouncing, for instance, Kenya as Keen-ya. He begins his sermon conventionally with a conversational tone, delivered from the pulpit, but when he steps down to the floor, he becomes a showman, influenced as much by Las Vegas as by black church tradition. Still, as in that tradition, his sermons bring the congregation to increasingly intense emotional levels as he hops around the stage, his voice rising and falling in a sophisticated version of a chant. As with earlier preachers, Jakes knows his Bible, and the Scriptures, along with his own personal experiences, give him his sermon lessons. He is likely to preach a message of self-betterment, perhaps shouting it, perhaps whispering of its promises. Men and women rise from their seats at the end and move in excitement, often with tears in their eyes—evidence of the continuing power of the black preaching style.

BRUCE A. ROSENBERG

Brown University

Richard Allen, in Black American Literature: 1760 to Present, ed. Ruth Miller (1971); Paul C. Brownlow, Quarterly Journal of Speech (vol. 58, 1972); Gerald L. Davis, “I Got The Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know”: A Study of the Performed Afro-American Sermon (1986); Charles V. Hamilton, The Black Preacher in America (1972); Henry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching (1970); Sridhar Pappu, Atlantic Monthly (March 2006); Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (1995), Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978); Joseph R. Washington Jr., Black Religion; The Negro and Christianity in the United States (1964).

 

Preaching Style, White

Whether by miter, robe, collar, licensing and ordination, honorific title, or even slicked-back hair, society sets its ministers apart from run-of-the-mill mortals. Naturally this obsession with difference includes that most basic element of identity: speech, especially in preaching, the principal public enterprise of ministers. Preaching is marked as special speech by particular stylistic traits or, more accurately, by a register, that is, a language variety used for a specific purpose and having a set of linguistic characteristics that define it.

While there is demonstrably an African American preaching style, the question of whether a specifically southern white preaching style exists is more complex and less explored. Unlike the scholarly interest and research on (southern-originating) African American preaching, research on southern white preaching styles is a virtual wasteland. Religion in general in the South has spawned much study, but the linguistic/rhetorical nature of preaching styles in white church traditions, southern or otherwise, has received relatively little scholarly attention, perhaps because the churches and preachers are such an eclectic lot.

Against a reality of diverse styles, two stereotypes of southern white preaching merit mention: folk preaching and loud preaching. The characteristics of folk preaching may be more common in the South than in more urban sections of the nation because of the South’s greater demographic rurality (the 2000 census places the East South Central Division [Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi] at 43 percent rural). Also, the folk preacher model is embraced by many white southerners. Baptists in Alabama and elsewhere developed a long tradition of bivocational farmer-preachers with little formal education but possessing folk wisdom and wit esteemed by pioneer and rural society, but the model does not play out universally. Although many top televangelists during their heyday in the late 1980s were white southerners, the preaching or presenting styles of the major ones differed mightily, from Jimmy Swaggart’s “country preacher” style, with its folk elements, to Pat Robertson’s urbane television talk-show format.

Some southern white preachers have certainly been stentorian in their exhorting, such as the late Southern Baptist leader W. A. Criswell, reputedly audible five miles away. Preaching at an extreme volume, though more frequent in rural and southern white preaching, is not a universal trait, even less so after the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 eventually brought the advent of sound systems to rural churches.

The eclecticism of southern white preaching results in part from settlement history. The lack of homogeneity in settlement patterns and religiocultural development across the South as a whole gave rise to a socially motivated multiplicity of styles. Founding groups of English, Ulster Scots and Lowland Scots, Germans, French, and other Europeans arrived with set linguistic homiletic expectations. These various Protestant groups lacked the formational matrix found in African American settlement history. That is, the slaves’ social experience of being separated from their individual tribal historical roots and forced to form new mixed tribe communities necessitated a synthesis of generic expectations of theme and delivery out of African oratorical antecedents and southern folk Christianity. In Geneva Smitherman’s words, “As the only independent African-American institution, the Black church [did] not have to answer to white folk!” Protestant settlers, on the other hand, brought their styles with them as they set up communities within communities, with social groups often highly tied to denominations such as German Lutherans; English Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians; and Scots and Irish Presbyterians. Constituting social networks, every denomination, denominational subgroup, or even loose association of like-minded congregants developed preferred styles, that is, a linguistic register recognized as effective preaching, serving not only to mark “the message” but also to create and sustain solidarity among the group’s members and to differentiate it from other groups.

Over time, as ethnocentric blocks blended somewhat into a community edifice (with certain groups, such as Catholic congregations, fairly well ostracized by Protestant suspicion and by their claims—and those of other groups—to exclusivity), so did the criteria for acceptable preaching/sermon presentation blend, but with enough distinct features that the Baptist sermon could still be distinguished from Methodist or Presbyterian ones, not only by emphasis and theology, but also by linguistic features as well as discourse and register. Within large denominations strong within the South, such as United Methodists and Southern Baptists, stylistic traits of preaching seem as adoptable as Arminian or Calvinistic theology: soft, upper-class, r-less, Coastal Southern pleading from pastors of large urban United Methodist churches, or loud, wrathful r-ful Inland Southern berating from conservative-camp Southern Baptist preachers.

However, certain parts of the South did approach the sort of closed, close-knit, beleaguered community that gave rise to typical African American preaching. One area that has been studied is Appalachia. Although Appalachia hosts a variety of denominations that differ fiercely in doctrinal principles (Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Pentecostals), it is generally accepted that rural churches and working-class ones in more urban areas often share what can be termed the Southern Appalachian Preaching Style. In Howard Dorgan’s study of preaching styles in rural Appalachia, he notes that sermons are often impromptu (with no written notes) and require that the preacher “have the spirit” in order to communicate the Word of God to the congregation. Rural Appalachian preachers rely heavily on rhythm, with sermons switching quickly from fast bursts of biblical rhetoric to singing and back to a trancelike preaching state. These cycles are repeated several times during the sermon. Like African American preaching styles, a dialogue similar to call-and-response patterns is demanded of the congregation, and an “amen corner” of exhorters near the pulpit reinforces the minister’s message.

A major point of southern white preaching not to be overlooked is that it is still largely a male enterprise. More conservative views in the South about women as preachers were strong even in colonial days and grew stronger over time. Even as the South became politically more separate over the issue of slavery, male slaves were afforded preaching opportunities denied to both black and white women. With the recent advent of several very popular southern women preachers, research is needed to understand the use of gendered linguistic resources in preaching, especially the extent to which female styles can or cannot be identified.

Considered as a register, preaching is unique in requiring both an overlay of “otherness” characteristics to separate it from regular, nonsacred speech and also rhetorically motivated intimacy strategies to ensure persuasive success. This otherness is achieved in strikingly different ways according to denominational expectations and conditioning. For example, southern preaching styles (not uniquely) range from the intoning of very formal written sermons prepared in the study and delivered with minimal extemporaneous comment in some denominations to almost completely extemporaneous rant-style messages delivered in a loud, physically altered voice, punctuated by panting, thought-marking ejaculations (haah), holy catchwords such as glory and hallelujah, and glossalalic outbursts.

The formal preacher may descend to the level of the congregation’s vernacular to promote oneness and earnestness, while the inspired preacher may attempt to elevate a segment of discourse by exploiting his or her most formal language features. Southern white preaching is therefore especially well equipped for stylistic variation because of the bidialectalism of the region. The formal southern white preacher can strike a plain-folks stance with a simple “Ain’t no way” or “He done good” and greater use of the monophthongized /ai/ (i.e., modification of long i as in It’s the sahns [signs] of the tahms [times]). The “Holy Ghost” preacher, conversely, may set a tone of intimate soul searching by “just talking to you from my heart” while correcting it don’t to it doesn’t and we ain’t to we haven’t and by pronouncing the signs of the times with the standard diphthong.

Much research into southern white preaching is needed to identify clearly the linguistic hallmarks of its varieties and their social meanings. Nevertheless, a rough taxonomy of the major styles of southern white preaching, often but not always associated with particular denominations or other groupings, can be described as follows:

1. 1. Inspired-Impromptu (in a range from simple notes and outline to no specific preparation): often loud, emotional, and combative, as the “Spirit leads.” Commonly, the more improvised the sermon, the more it invites and incorporates a “dialogue” between the
   preacher and the congregation, similar to the call-and-response patterns observed in African American preaching. Generally speaking, this type of sermon is more common among preachers lacking theological training, while the following three styles are taught in homiletics classes in formal theological study.
2. 2. Narrative-loaded: a sermon built around a short biblical text, with emphasis on a few key words, explicated usually by three points, with each point illustrated by one or more narratives of some length. This type of sermon is carefully written and many times memorized for no-note delivery.
3. 3. Doctrinal-treatise: a sermon built on topical scriptural use, with unemotional delivery until a climax is reached. At the climax of the sermon, the minister may, as it were, drop his persona of the theologian and “speak from the heart” in a more extemporaneous style marked by more informal vocabulary, including perceived solecisms such as ain’t for proof of sincerity.
4. 4. Expository-Exegesis: preaching that methodically proceeds verse by verse through a scripture passage or serially through a complete book of the Bible, with a chunk presented at each meeting (with time out for major theme Sundays such as Mother’s Day). The sermon might employ a mixture of methods as called for in order to unhull the meat of the passage in question and to keep the verse-by-verse exegesis from becoming unrelenting. Usually its fervor, as linguistically marked by greater volume, higher pitch, vocal stress, and tempo, rises according to the applicable value of the content.

These four styles are not presented as uniquely southern but are certainly prevalent across the South. This taxonomy represents a starting point for linguistic research into a neglected area of southern culture.

THOMAS E. NUNNALLY

Auburn University

JENNIFER REID

Auburn University

Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (1998); Howard Dorgan, Giving Glory to God in Appalachia (1987); Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (1998); Janice Peck, The Gods of Televangelism: The Crisis of Meaning and the Appeal of Religious Television (1993); Bruce A. Rosenberg, Can These Bones Live? The Art of the American Folk Preacher, rev. ed. (1988); Geneva Smitherman, in African-American English: Structure, History, and Use, ed. Salikoko S. Muifwene, John Russell Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (1998).

 

Pronunciation, Changes in

“Southern accents” are legendary in the landscape of American English. From the southern Appalachian Mountains to the former plantation areas to the coastal regions of the South, the region’s accents are as diverse as the population itself and as characteristic of the South as summer heat and grits. Although many people perceive southern accents as “old-fashioned” or even as uniform, they are actually dynamic, changing over time and space as the landscape and social demography also change. Many of the hallmark features of southern pronunciation have developed in the past century and a half.

The pronunciation of long i as tahd ‘tide’ and taht ‘tight’ is an important marker of southern identity. The southern long i is a sound midway between the ah sound in all and the a sound in the word at, usually represented as ah in dialect respellings. This prominent southern vowel pronunciation is frequently commented on by outsiders. In some parts of the Lower South, the long i is pronounced as ah before voiced consonants, as in side, but not before voiceless ones, as in sight. In contrast, in other parts of the South, such as the Great Smoky Mountains and Texas, people pronounce long i as ah before both voiced sounds (sahd ‘side’) and voiceless ones (nahs whaht rahs ‘nice white rice’). This quintessential southern pronunciation developed primarily after the Civil War and is still changing. For example, the pattern in which the southern long i appears before both voiced and voiceless consonants is now spreading outside the Appalachian Mountains and Texas to other parts of the South. Although the southern long i is still found in the urban centers of the South, it is competing there with the nonsouthern pronunciation ah-ee (tah-eed ‘tide’) and may or may not appear in the speech of young, urban southerners.

Another important southern pronunciation involves pronouncing short e and short i the same before nasal consonants, so that pen and pin both sound like pin, and gem and gym sound like gym. Like the pronunciation of long i, this change was not widespread until after the Civil War. It remains strong in the South, regardless of the social class or generation of the speaker.

In the South, the vowels /o/, /ʊ/, and /u/ are often pronounced somewhat toward the front of the mouth instead of at the back: for example, buh-oot ‘boat’ and bih-oot ‘boot.’ These vowel pronunciations emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century but did not spread across the South until after World War II. They are continuing to increase among younger speakers in the region. Another southern sound pattern is pronouncing long a and short e before /l/ the same (sale and sell both sound like sell); by the same token peel is often pronounced like pill.

Some changes in southern pronunciation are just beginning. For example, some southerners, especially younger, urban ones, now pronounce words such as cot/caught and Don/Dawn the same (as the first member of these pairs), much like people in the rest of the country. In traditional southern speech, however, these two vowels are pronounced differently. Traditional southern speech distinguishes between the short o in cot and the vowel sound of caught, which is made with rounded lips.

In terms of consonants, one change in southern pronunciation involves the loss of the initial h sound in words starting with wh-, suchas which and witch. For example, where and wear were once pronounced differently, but they underwent a change in the early 20th century and are now usually pronounced the same, so that which sounds like witch, and where like wear.

Another consonant undergoing change in pronunciation in the South is r after a vowel in words like car and fear. In traditional southern speech, especially in the Lower South, this consonant is pronounced as uh or is not present at all: cah ‘car’ and fe-uh ‘fear.’ In other areas of the South, such as the Appalachian Mountains, the r is pronounced in these words, and this pattern is now spreading across the South. However, the absence of r after vowels persists in African American varieties, both in the South and elsewhere.

One feature that has endured across time and cultural change is the southern pronunciation of greasy with a z (so pronounced as greazy), identified by one of the earliest published dialect studies in America (in 1896 by George Hempl) as distinguishing northern from southern pronunciation. The pronunciation with z is still widespread today.

Southern pronunciations have changed over time alongside cultural and demographic characteristics. Two important periods in the evolution of southern pronunciations occurred after 1875 and after World War II. After 1875 many southerners moved from the countryside to towns to work in cotton mills, in lumber production, in mines, in steel mills, and for the railroads, setting the stage for dialect contact between different groups of people and subsequent language change. After World War II many southerners moved to midwestern cities to work in factories, creating another opportunity for new dialect contact. Many migrants and even their midwestern-born descendants maintain quintessential southern pronunciations such as ah in side, but southern sounds appear to be fading with each new generation. In the South, rural populations continue to decline, and current and future changes in the culture and demography of the region will no doubt have effects on southern pronunciations. For example, southern sounds are not as typical of southern cities such as Atlanta, Raleigh, Richmond, Nashville, and Charlotte as they were before the mass migration of outsiders to these cities. However, southern pronunciations are not dying or decaying but, rather, are adapting to new situations and new blends of voices.

BRIDGET L. ANDERSON

Old Dominion University

Bridget L. Anderson, Migration, Accommodation, and Language Change: At the Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity (2007); George Dorrill, in English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (2003); Judy Reed, “Evolution of the Loss of /h/ before /w/ Word Initially in Texas” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1991); Jan Tillery and Guy Bailey, in English in the Southern UnitedStates, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (2003).

 

Proverbs

As expressions of collective experience, southern proverbs embody generalized wisdom. The proverb repertoire seems to serve some southerners as a set of universal laws against which individual experience is measured. With their characteristic use of metaphor and their claims of similarity and difference, southern proverbs remain close to both poetry and philosophy. Proverbs have served generations of southerners as guides to appropriate behavior and as informal channels of education. They are still in widespread use today.

Southern proverbs have their roots in the Old World, especially in Europe and Africa. Europeans and Africans alike adapted their traditions of proverb usage to a new natural and social environment in the South. The African preference for indirect and highly ambiguous speech, both as an aesthetic variation on drab everyday discourse and as a means of avoiding the sometimes painful effects and insults of direct commentary, had a counterpart in the South in the European proverb tradition. That tradition included British proverbs stretching from the 16th century’s “Beggars cannot be choosers” and the 15th century’s “eat us out of house and home” to the 14th century’s “Look before you leap” and the 12th century’s “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” European tradition also included such literary proverbs as St. Augustine’s “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” and the classical Greek proverb “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Biblical proverbs, such as “Cast your bread upon the waters,” “Pride goeth before a fall,” and “The love of money is the root of all evil” are particularly widespread in the South. In the colonial period southern folk tradition also absorbed proverbs from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, such as “A word to the wise is sufficient” and “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Like all forms of folklore, proverb wording is subject to variation, but structural patterns of proverbs are relatively fixed. The most common structural forms in southern proverbs are simple positive or negative propositions, such as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” or “Nobody’s perfect.” But double propositions (“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it” or “Young folks, listen to what old folks say, when danger is near keep out of the way”) are common in southern tradition, and triple propositions (“So I totes my powder and sulphur and I carries my stick in my hand and I puts my trust in God”) are not unknown. Multiple propositions provide an apt structure for making invidious distinctions, as “Man proposes, but God disposes.”

In their proverbs, southerners make distinctions by comparison and contrast. They emphasize the equivalence of things (“Seeing is believing”) or they deny it (“All that glitters is not gold”). Or they emphasize that one thing is bigger or of greater value than another, as in “His eyes are bigger than his belly,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” and “Half a loaf is better than none.” Proverbs purport to explain how things come about (“Politics makes strange bedfellows” and “New brooms sweep clean”) or to deny causation or justification (“Barking dogs don’t bite” and “Two wrongs don’t make a right”).

An important attribute of southern proverbs is their sense of authority, deriving partly from their detachment from common speech and partly from their allusive poetic nature. They are set off from ordinary discourse by such poetic devices as alliteration (“The proof of the pudding is in the eating” and “A miss is as good as a mile”); rhyme (“A friend in need is a friend indeed” and “Haste makes waste”); repetition (“All’s well that ends well” and “No news is good news”); meter (“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “A word to the wise is sufficient”); and parallelism (“Like father, like son” and “The more he has, the more he wants”).

Because of their poetic qualities (their allusiveness and ambiguity), proverbs may be cited with authority in a broad range of situations. Their flexibility has sometimes made proverbs seem contradictory to modern readers. Are two heads better than one, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Some proverbs used by southerners tout the virtues of cautious conservatism (“Look before you leap,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and “Haste makes waste”), whereas others, equally authentic, urge hearers to “Strike while the iron is hot” (similarly, “Time and tide wait for no man” and “He who hesitates is lost”). But proverbs are not really contradictory. Just as a language gives its speakers words with which to praise or to criticize as necessary, the southern proverb repertory enables southerners to offer whatever advice seems appropriate to a particular situation, to advise either action or inaction, and to do so through heightened poetic language.

In offering advice, a southern proverb might pursue either of two strategies. It might recommend acceptance of the situation or it might recommend action to relieve the situation. “Put up or shut up” and “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” are examples of the action strategy. Some proverbs counsel defensive action, such as “A stitch in time saves nine” and “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Some acceptance strategy proverbs suggest that the situation is normal (“Accidents will happen” and “Boys will be boys”); thus, no action is called for. Some urge their hearers not to overreact (“Look before you leap” and “Barking dogs don’t bite”). Others counsel patience, for troubles come and troubles go (“March comes in like a lion but goes out like a lamb”). Some even suggest that the hearer is responsible for the situation and must accept the consequences (“You’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it”). Yet other proverbs maintain that no matter how hard the misfortune may seem, it can be borne (“Every back is fitted to the burden”).

Though relatively simple in form, proverbs are perhaps the most complex of all folklore genres in their extreme sensitivity to context. The meaning and distinctiveness of the southern proverb does not lie in its form or content, but in the context of its use. And those contexts range as widely and deeply as southern life itself.

CHARLES JOYNER

Coastal Carolina University

F. A. DeCaro and W. K. McNeil, American Proverb Literature (1970); Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore (1975); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984); Wolfgang Mieder et al., A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992); P. Seitel, Genre (1969); Archer Taylor, The Proverb (1931); Archer Taylor and Bartlett J. Whiting, comps., A Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820–1880 (1958); Newman I. White, ed., Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 1 (1952).

 

R in Southern English

The pronunciation of r has been a stereotypical feature of southern speech since at least the early 20th century but has been widespread in the region since at least the 18th century. Southerners are often characterized as replacing r with a schwa vowel or deleting it altogether, so that here is pronounced heah, better as bettuh, part as paht, and four as foah or fo. Linguists call such pronunciations r-less, or non-rhotic, as opposed to r-ful, or rhotic, utterances, in which the r is pronounced. While r-lessness remains a stock feature of depictions of southern speech in movies and television shows and in the dialogue of fiction, the reality is far more complex and is also changing.

R is not indiscriminately absent in r-less speech. It is not absent at the beginning of a syllable, as in run. It is usually absent in only two places: before another consonant sound, as in part and bird, and at the end of a word, as in here, four, and better. Some southerners, mainly older whites from the Deep South and African Americans, also delete r when it falls between two vowels, as in carry. When r occurs at the end of a word, r-less speakers do not pronounce an r before a pause or when the next word begins with a consonant sound (cah trouble), but they often pronounce the r when the next word begins with a vowel (car engine). Many r-less southerners show some variability, with inconsistent r-ful pronunciations of words in which the r could be absent.

Not all parts of the South are r-less. Generally speaking, regions where the plantation culture once dominated, including the cotton belt, the Virginia Piedmont and some other tobacco-producing areas, and the rice- and sugar-producing areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana, are r-less. Other regions, such as the Appalachians, the Ozarks, the Pamlico Sound region of North Carolina, the Delmarva peninsula, northern Texas, and to a lesser extent the sandy “Piney Woods” belt of the Gulf states, are r-ful. Some r-ful speakers even add “intrusive” r where it did not occur historically: usually in unstressed syllables, such as idear, hallelujar, and holler (for hollow), but also in a few other words, as in warsh for wash or ort for ought. Such pronunciations are most common in traditionally r-ful areas, but they also occur in formerly r-less regions among speakers who are “restoring” r and have fallen into what linguists call hypercorrection. African Americans are largely r-less in most regions of the country both inside and outside the South. However, younger African Americans usually pronounce the r in words such as bird, certain, and turn in which there is no true vowel sound before the r but the syllable is stressed.

Linguists have proposed three theories for the origin of southern r-lessness. One is that English settlers brought it with them in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some settlers probably did show inconsistent r-lessness in unstressed syllables, as in better. In addition, an earlier process in which r disappeared before a consonant made with the tip of the tongue (t, d, s, z, n, or th) was certainly prevalent among settlers. It accounts for pronunciations such as bust for burst, hoss for horse, and catridge for cartridge and perhaps could have led to later full-fledged r-lessness. Another theory is that r-lessness began only in the latter part of the 18th century as an imitation of fashionable British usage, since planters with adequate resources sent their children to England for education. Other features of British English, such as the broad a in past, aunt, and similar words, were quite likely established in Virginia and elsewhere through prestige imitation, and r-lessness could have followed suit. A third theory is that r-lessness was due to African influence. European American children on plantations often had primarily slave children as playmates, and African Americans have always been the most r-less group. Furthermore, a large fraction of western African languages cannot have a consonant at the end of a syllable, so that r-lessness could have developed as slaves tried to learn English using the patterns of their native languages, passing them on to their children and thence to white plantation children.

In the past, r-lessness was prestigious and was spreading. However, studies in North Carolina, Alabama, and Texas have shown that it is the full pronunciation of r that is now prestigious, and young white southerners, especially females, are now quite r-ful. Possible reasons for this turnabout include migration of r-ful Appalachian natives to mill towns in r-less areas, migration of r-ful northerners to the Sunbelt, racial tension accompanied by reaction against r-less African American speech, and increased awareness of what is prestigious nationwide. It appears that, in the future, r-lessness will be restricted to African American speech in the South, a significant change from the past.

ERIK R. THOMAS

North Carolina State University

Crawford Feagin, in Development and Diversity: Linguistic Variation across Time and Space. A Festschrift for Charles-James N. Bailey, ed. Jerold Edmondson, Crawford Feagin, and Peter Mühlhäusler (1990), in Language Variety in the South Revisited, ed. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (1997); Maverick Marvin Harris, American Speech (vol. 44, 1969); Archibald A. Hill, Publications of the Modern Language Society of America (PMLA) (vol. 55, 1940); Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr., Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (1961); Lewis Levine and Harry J. Crockett Jr., Sociological Inquiry (vol. 36, 1966); Raven I. McDavid Jr., American Speech (vol. 23, 1948); Thomas Schönweitz, American Speech (vol. 76, 2001).

 

Randolph, Vance

(1892–1980) FOLKLORIST.

Vance Randolph’s academic training was in psychology (M.A., Clark University, 1915), and Randolph described himself most often as a “hack writer.” To be sure, for many years he supported himself by writing, often under a pseudonym, pulp fiction and nonfiction on a vast range of subjects. The shelf of books resulting from his long lifetime’s work in the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, however, is responsible for his continuing reputation as one of the nation’s premier regional folklorists. Driven by an encyclopedic, curious mind, he collected all facets of Ozark lore. His works on the region’s speech offer unparalleled insight and are the foundation of all subsequent scholarship in this field.

Randolph was born in Pittsburg, Kans., just west of the Ozarks, but he lived his adult life in small towns in Missouri (Pineville and Galena) and Arkansas (Eureka Springs and Fayetteville), where he assiduously sought out and perpetuated in print and on recordings the sayings, doings, singings, and believings of his Ozark neighbors. His first books, The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society (1931) and Ozark Mountain Folks (1932), are long out of print but remain notable excellent examples of what later were called folklife studies. His methods and definitions were often in advance of their time—he included, for example, discographical references to “hillbilly” records in his four-volume folksong collection Ozark Folksongs (1946–50) at a time when many scholars found such recordings unworthy of notice.

Randolph first achieved renown as a student of dialect when H. L. Mencken lavishly praised his numerous article-length studies published beginning in 1926 in two American Dialect Society periodicals, American Speech and Dialect Notes. His major work in this area, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech (1953), gathered material from more than 30 years of study and observation and covered Ozark grammar, pronunciation, archaisms, taboo terms and euphemisms, and wisecracks, along with the use of the dialect in fiction. The book also provided an extensive, scholarly glossary. Like others working on Ozark dialect until recent years, he frequently identified archaisms that could also be found in Renaissance-era English literature, but he kept any ideas about the Elizabethan character of Ozark speech in perspective with its other qualities, unlike his peers. Along with his massive folksong collection, the 1940s saw the publication of Randolph’s major study of folk belief, Ozark Superstitions (1947). In the 1950s Randolph published five volumes of folktales, including We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks. A collection of jokes, Hot Springs and Hell (1965), and Randolph’s huge bibliographic work, Ozark Folklore: A Bibliography (1972), were followed by his classic collection of bawdy humor, Pissingin the Snow (1976). Taken together, Randolph’s many publications provide a detailed and sympathetic portrait of Ozark traditional life and speech. Academic folklorists honored Randolph in 1978 by electing him a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

ROBERT COCHRAN

University of Arkansas

Robert Cochran, Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life (1995); Vance Randolph, The Ozarks: A Bibliography (1972, 1987); Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk speech (1953).

 

Southern Drawl

One of the most noticeable aspects of southern speech, particularly among whites, is what is called “the southern drawl.” (Drawling is much less frequent and less dramatic among African American speakers.) However, pinning down exactly what the drawl is, much less the details of who uses it, when, and why, is challenging. Despite the popular recognition of the term drawl and the explosion of studies of southern speech by linguists in recent decades, very little has been written about it.

One problem is that the term has been applied loosely to southern speech or a southern accent in general. For linguists it relates to the pronunciation of vowels in stressed syllables, and its salient characteristics include the lengthening of vowels, the changing of simple vowels into diphthongs and triphthongs, and the producing of noticeable changes of pitch on the drawled word. Diphthongs are combinations of two vowel sounds in the same syllable. The second one is called a glide, since the tongue glides from the initial vowel position to another position in the mouth. Triphthongs have more than one glide. The glide sound(s) inserted after a vowel that is drawled can vary for the same vowel, even in the same word, sometimes producing a diphthong with tongue movement toward the front of the mouth and at other times one with centering movement. For example, ask can be pronounced [æsk], [æisk], [æəsk], or [æiyisk] (roughly ăsk, ă-isk, ă-uhsk, or ă-i-yisk). The same vowel in the same word can occur as a simple vowel or become a diphthong or even a triphthong with the insertion of glides.

The drawl is sometimes characterized by extreme changes of pitch. In white southern speech, any vowel under stress in a one-syllable word can be lengthened, whether it is what is traditionally called a long vowel (wide, cake, moon), a short vowel (cab, bed, kid), or a diphthong (boy, cow). This lengthening can simply extend the duration of the vowel, or it can occur in conjunction with a change of pitch. Acoustic studies show that the drawled form of a one-syllable word is at least twice as long as the “plain” form (e.g., 300 vs. 140 milliseconds, 360 vs. 100 milliseconds).

Drawled words most often appear at the end of a clause or sentence. Words that are under sentence stress but that have even one word following before a pause or at the end of a sentence are less likely to be drawled, as They come and pay my bills for me (with plain, un-drawled pronunciation) versus Then [we] went down the hill (with drawled pronunciation). The drawl varies from speaker to speaker for reasons having to do with geography, demographics (age, sex, and social class), situation, topic, and self-identification. Moreover, the same speaker, in the same discourse, using the same word in the same environment, and under the same amount of stress, may drawl a word in one instance but not in another.

The drawl is associated more with women, with informality and intimacy, and with rural and small-town interests. It is used in exaggerated speech, such as baby talk and in “kindergarten teacher” style. Drawling is considered very feminine, even sexy. Because drawling is used by women in “hostess” mode, it is observed more often by outsiders than drawling by men is. Men use the drawl with their wives, children, close friends, horses, and dogs and in discussions of hunting, fishing, football, and similar topics to express solidarity and informality. Pediatricians often drawl with young patients in order to set them at ease. Avoidance of the drawl is found in more formal situations, in discussions of serious topics, and among professional men, especially in urban settings. Similarly, professional women are usually careful not to drawl in a business/professional context. Finally, the drawl is often used to establish one’s identity as a southerner. Some people who live within the South identify themselves more closely with being southern than do others, and for many complex reasons, some people who leave the South jettison all vestiges of southern speech—especially the drawl—while others not only maintain it but perfect it, polish it, and exaggerate it to make sure that their identity as southerners is clear to all. The variability of the drawl, then, while presenting difficulties of linguistic analysis, is a very useful part of a southerner’s repertoire and an integral part of the speech of many people in or from the region.

CRAWFORD FEAGIN

Arlington, Virginia

Crawford Feagin, in Variation in Language: NWAVE XV at Stanford, ed. Keith M. Denning, Sharon Inkelas, Faye C. McNair-Knox, and John R. Rickford (1987), in Towards a Social Science of Language: Variation and Change in Language and Society, ed. Gregory R. Guy, Crawford Feagin, Deborah Schiffrin, and John Baugh (1996).

 

Southern English in Television and Film

From the southern belles of Designing Women to the country bumpkins of Forrest Gump, depictions of southern culture and characters are frequently found in television programs and films and can reflect attitudes about the South and southerners. These media portrayals necessarily include representations of Southern English, some accurate and some less so, that can affect how southerners see themselves and how others see them. Writers and other creators of television and film often use references to (supposedly) regionally distinctive foods (grits and sweet tea) or observances (Mardi Gras and Civil War reenactments) to indicate “southernness,” but most often they use regional speech to indicate this sense to the audience, if not also something about character personality, intelligence, and other attributes. Though tremendously diverse in nature, portrayals share traits in their motivation and construction. Characters depicted through southern speech or as southern tend to fall into several types, many corresponding to stereotypical ideas about the South and southerners.

Precepts drawn from the analysis of dialects in literary works help us understand how television and films use Southern English. These consider the author’s skills, intentions, and knowledge of dialects. The use of dialect to construct character is an artistic tool and is not necessarily intended to be completely accurate. When dialect is addressed to an audience of nonsoutherners, the ability of the audience to understand regional language varieties must be considered since a completely accurate depiction may interfere with comprehension of the actor’s utterances. The goal may not be to convey all the nuances of a language variety realistically but to provide information about a character’s background or personality. Decisions regarding dialect depictions may be made by several persons, including scriptwriters, directors, and dialect coaches. Even southerners who make television shows and films may consider it necessary to share only part of the linguistic picture to achieve the desired characterization. Further, if those involved in the television or film production have only limited acquaintance with the language varieties in question, creating an accurate dialect depiction may be implausible.

Thus, several factors affect which features of Southern English are included in television or film dialogue, depending on the value of each feature as an indicator of southernness or in character development. To choose a linguistic feature not recognized as southern by at least some audience members would defeat the purpose of using Southern English. Features may come from any level of dialect, including phonology, lexicon, pragmatics, or grammar. In many cases scriptwriters use these features in ways deviating from the actual usage of any southerners. In others, the features may not be appropriate to the part of the South being depicted. For example, in Cold Mountain Nicole Kidman’s character from Charleston, S.C., shows no sign of the distinctive Lowcountry pronunciation but instead uses a more general southern accent. In cases such as these, the scriptwriter just might view the features as southern and therefore indicative of anyone from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

One of the most typical features used in depicting southerners is the loss of r after vowels. While still occurring in the speech of some southerners, this usage is becoming less prevalent and is found in only certain social groups and certain parts of the South. Despite this, many film and television creators think that any southerner, or at least female southern characters and those from upper social classes, should be depicted as not pronouncing r after vowels. Even the r-less pronunciation is not necessarily rendered as southerners would pronounce it. In many cases southerners fill the space occupied by r with a schwa (the uh sound), so that George is not pronounced joadge but joe-udge or joe-wudge instead. An example of this is found in the speech of Ruth Jamison in Fried Green Tomatoes, whose filmmaker attempts a type of characterization using a Southern English pronunciation, but one that is inaccurate. While nonsoutherners may not notice this, southerners may realize that the accent is contrived because of linguistic details such as these.

More noticeable uses of Southern English in television and films occur at the word level. Vocabulary choices may be stereotypically southern (I reckon, the frequent use of sir and ma’am, etc.). Stereotypically southern attitudes about history can be reflected in the use of phrases such as “the recent unpleasantness” or “the war of northern aggression” for the Civil War. In some cases, however, the depictions involve usages that are nonexistent or at best rare in southern speech. The most stereotypical icon of southernness is the pronoun y’all or you all, which television programs and films often use for only one person, thus deviating from the plural usage of southerners (as in Mandy’s You all got some ice? in the film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Sometimes the notion of you all is extended to other pronouns, creating what sounds to southerners to be completely unnatural constructions, such as Larry Steinberg’s we all and he all in the film Dill Scallion. This is a prime example of how accuracy is sacrificed for characterization, often because of a lack of knowledge about Southern English or simply attempts at humor.

A more subtle case of the misuse of southern features to convey character traits involves double modal verbs, most commonly might could. Linguistic research demonstrates that southerners who use this construction do so in very specific situations, particularly when speaking indirectly or wanting to make polite requests (as in Hoke’s speech in Driving Miss Daisy). However, the nuanced southern usage of might could is not often included in films and television, which more frequently utilize the form’s reputation as a typical southern verb phrase and ignore its situations of use by real-life southerners. While such features of Southern English may have the desired iconic effect of conjuring up “southernness” in the audience’s mind, they can also distort ideas of how southerners speak and, to some southerners, can appear contrived, even demeaning. Southern English sometimes simply indicates a character’s regional origins, but it can also depict a character as unintelligent, simpleminded, ignorant, or narrow-minded.

Iconic linguistic features are found in depictions of such stock southern character types as the Southern Belle, the Country Bumpkin, the Good Ole Boy, and others. The best known of these characters may be the Southern Belle (for example, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind). Often known for her coquettish manipulation of those around her; her capricious attitude toward beaux, friends, and fashion; and a tendency to be less than intelligent, the Southern Belle debutante stereotype is usually indicated through a high-pitched, r-less, “Old South,” upper-class accent. It may or may not be accompanied by other Southern English features. Another well-known stereotype, the Country Bumpkin, can come in many forms, as demonstrated by the poor farm boy Will Stockdale in the film No Time for Sergeants and the Clampett family in television’s The Beverly Hillbillies. The film character Forrest Gump can also be seen as an example of this stereotypical southerner. Frequently ignorant of the ways of life outside his or her home area, the oft-ridiculed Country Bumpkin, or rube, can be traced to vaudeville shows such as Arkansas Traveler and Hickory Bill and to early “hillbilly” films, such as those featuring Lum and Abner. In some cases, the Country Bumpkin also has a “salt-of-the-earth” honesty and common sense, as in Jed Clampett, Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show, or Ma Kettle of the Ma and Pa Kettle films. Another southern type that shares some traits with these salt-of-the-earth characters is found in the Smokey and the Bandit films and in the television series The Dukes of Hazzard. Bo “The Bandit” Darville and the Duke brothers can be seen as Good Ole Boys who are rebellious and mischievous but generally good natured and kindhearted. Whereas there is much variation in the speech of the Country Bumpkin and Good Ole Boy characters, their portrayals often include nonstandard features, which can be perceived by the audience as indicating poorly educated, lower-class, ignorant persons. Examples include the frequent use of ain’t and the absence of subject-verb agreement (as we was and he don’t).

Many television programs and films depict Southern English throughout, as do The Waltons and Steel Magnolias. In other cases, even the absence of southern features in a character’s speech can be a tool of characterization. In the film To Kill a Mockingbird, language use helps distinguish the enlightened, well-schooled Atticus Finch from the bigoted, uneducated Bob Ewell. Ewell’s language is riddled with nonstandard features and an accent that has come to indicate a closed-minded “redneck” character type (as in the rapists in A Time to Kill and Billy Hanson in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Gregory Peck (as Atticus Finch) has few, if any, Southern English features in his speech, which may help to indicate his liberal-mindedness and enlightenment.

Although the ways in which southern speech is depicted in films and television are myriad, these representations all aim to indicate that something about a character is “southern.” The skill and intent behind a given depiction can range from a valid endeavor to portray realistic southern language use (Sling Blade) to a farcical, derogatory use of stereotypical southern features to convey character ignorance (Poor White Trash). Between these two ends of the spectrum are many uses of southern language features and character types accomplished with varying degrees of nuance and effectiveness. The motivation and techniques behind their construction in television and films tell us much about attitudes toward southern cultures and language varieties.

RACHEL SHUTTLESWORTH

University of Alabama

Cynthia Bernstein, American Speech (vol. 75, 2000); Warren French, ed., The South and Film (1981); Sumner Ives, in A Various Language: Perspectives on American Dialects, ed. Juanita V. Williamson and Virginia M. Burke (1971); Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (1997); Nancy Niedzielski and Dennis Preston, Folk Linguistics (2000); Rachel Shuttlesworth, “Language Ideological Factors in Twentieth Century Artistic Depictions of Southern American English” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 2004).

 

Storytelling

A robust and vital storytelling tradition is part and parcel of the South’s persona, probably because of the persistent image of tale spinning as a form of entertainment made for front porch socializing and family circles in isolated areas characterizing the South. Southern narrators, given social approval for their verbal artistry, typically boast extensive repertoires of folktales, legends, jests, and anecdotes. Attracted by the lure of this trove, early folklore collectors flocked to isolated pockets of the Appalachians, Ozarks, and bayous to find centuries-old tales of international circulation. But the romantic draw of pristine back-sections aside, storytelling, much of which involves creative narrative-making of recent events in urban as well as suburban areas, holds social significance throughout the South.

Folklorists found in the South versions of Old World folktales, including tales having familiar motifs of remarkable adventures or quests, magical objects or incantations, and giants or other fearsome creatures. A subgenre of the tales associated with the American South, called “Jack tales,” revolves around the figure of a young crafty boy named Jack, sometimes with two older, but not as wise brothers, who outwits larger, dangerous antagonists. For the most part, the European Märchen types popularized by the Brothers Grimm lose their supernatural and fantastic elements in America. The tales reportedly become shorter, and often the actions or characters are made humorous. In African American tradition, the related trickster type is “John,” who fools his white bosses; the theme of the tale cycle also has a relation to the African animal trickster tales of Brer Rabbit and Anansi the Spider (called Miss Nancy or Aunt Nancy in coastal Georgia and South Carolina communities).

Although the early folklorists spotlighted the New World Märchen, this genre actually constitutes a minor part of most narrators’ repertoires. Folk humor frequently revolves around stereotypical, comical characters or “folktypes.” Typically, southerners have sheafs of stories using either the mountaineer (or “hillbilly”), the poor white, the black, the preacher, or the city slicker as the butts of humor. Using the veil of laughter, the jests deal with the concerns and tensions of southern society. There is the caution against hypocrisy in fundamentalist southern religion and the fallibility of the clergy underlying the popular series of preacher jokes, for example. An irony in this storytelling cycle is that preachers are celebrated for their verbal artistry, and indeed pulpit sermons often retelling biblical stories as modern-day legends are an important source for narrative structure.

Perhaps the most celebrated genre in the narrator’s repertoire is the tall tale, also called a “windy,” a “whopper,” or simply a “lie.” The tales can be brief exclamations, such as the following boast collected in Mississippi: “You think your tomatoes are big? Well, I had a tomato so big the picture of it weighed five pounds!” Typically though, tall tales are extended narratives, such as the embellished personal experience story. Folklorist Kay L. Cothran found many such stories in the Okefenokee Swamp Rim of Georgia, where narrators delighted in relating remarkable hunting and fishing exploits. The success of the tall tale depends greatly on its delivery and the convincing expression of the teller. According to folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, the tall tale “does not depend on belief in the details of the story, but rather on a willingness to lie and be lied to while keeping a straight face. The humor of these tales consists of telling an outrageous falsehood in the sober accents of a truthful story.” Depending therefore on common situations and themes, the storyteller creatively weaves characters and remarkable exploits together and then stretches the tale to the tallest limits his or her audience will tolerate.

The South’s particular folk heroes have a strong part to play in story and ballad. Yet the lines between folk and popular tradition often become blurred in accounts of Davy Crockett, Stonewall Jackson, Jesse James, and others. More common in today’s oral tradition are local characters given notoriety by storytellers. In the Mississippi Delta, for instance, a local outlaw, “Bad Man Monroe,” is the subject of many narratives told about his remarkable deeds, extraordinary size and strength, and difficult capture. Also in the Delta, moonshiner, outlaw, or lawman (depending on whom you listen to) Perry Martin remains an important folk hero to the river people. In southern Kentucky, the guerrilla actions of Beanie Short during the Civil War for the Confederate cause or, some say, for his own gain still circulate. Like the escapades of other legendary figures, they give rise to not one but a series of stories. Beanie Short’s legend includes accounts of buried treasure, ruthless activity, and tragic death. In the communities of the South, these legends compose the rich folk history of the locality and help give residents a sense of past and place.

Storytelling often occurs in “sessions.” In social centers people gather to hear and tell stories. The session provides entertainment and passes time, but by drawing people together, it also reinforces shared values and binds a group together. In the Okefenokee Swamp, for example, the storytelling custom of “talking trash,” says Kay Cothran, “comes from a time when men did not work by the time clock but by cycles of nature. Talking trash today is an act of identification with that older way of life, and whether one does it as a matter of course or as something of a rebellion, talking trash is a sneer at middle-class subservience to continuous gray work and a denial of that class’s identification of the materially unproductive with the counterproductive.” The “liar’s bench” at the courthouse, the hunting camp, or the general store may serve as an appropriate place for the activity.

The ages of participants are also contextual factors. Although the popular image exists of the grandfather warmly relating a tale to a child on his knee, storytelling occurs from early childhood on. In Mississippi, William Ferris found ghost stories limited largely to the repertoires of children and old people, whereas protest tales were found primarily among black adolescents and adults who encountered racial tension daily in their work.

Storytelling is a way of communicating ideas and concerns that may not be effectively articulated or desired in conversation. Often putting feelings and ideas on the fictive plane of a story helps clarify or act out personal and social concerns. Further, storytelling changes according to the needs and demands of the situation in which it occurs. The function of storytelling—be it entertainment, education, or social maintenance—depends on the intent of the narrator and the composition of the audience, as well as the place in which they interact and the nature of the material presented. As there are many contexts for people to gather, so there are many contexts for storytelling. Vance Randolph thought that the isolation of places like the Ozarks and the ample time on the hands of its residents explained the vitality of the region’s storytelling, but the existence of storytelling in new urban and suburban areas and in other modern contexts challenges that notion.

Since the early days of commercial recording, southern storytellers have been featured as entertainers. The telling of “The Arkansas Traveler” was released by Edison at least three times prior to 1920. Rural-styled entertainers like Arthur Collins and Cal Stewart (popularly known as Uncle Josh) captured on disc numerous folk narratives, often in the guise of “rube sketches.” The record, though, placed limitations on the storyteller’s performance. The story had to conform to a certain time limit, and the teller had to strain to get a clear reproduction of his voice. More often the trained voice, rather than the authentic, relaxed raconteur, found its way onto the early recordings.

Radio shows, however, like the Grand Ole Opry, gave many genuine southern folk humorists a chance to ply their craft effectively before a wide listening audience. Benjamin Francis (Whitey) Ford, popularly known as the Duke of Paducah, and Archie Campbell were 20th-century Opry humorists who combined theatrics and traditional texts in their performances. Campbell was especially adept at a tongue-twisting form of storytelling—the spoonerism. He built stories on the interchange of word sounds, such as “Rittle Led Hiding Rood.”

Television spread southern storytelling further. Hee Haw, for instance, regularly featured genial John Henry Faulk storytelling against the backdrop of a country store and Archie Campbell holding court in a barbershop. Out on a porch another of the show’s amiable raconteurs, the Reverend Grady Nutt, specialized in anecdotes and preacher jests. Their successors are Jeff Fox-worthy, Larry the Cable Guy, and other denizens of Blue Collar TV.

Hosting his own show was Mississippi’s ebullient Jerry Clower. He developed his narrating skill regaling customers with stories while working for a fertilizer company in Yazoo City. Clower achieved national popularity, but many storytellers are recognized and occasionally celebrated only in their home localities. Near Banner Elk, N.C., Marshall Ward and Ray Hicks performed Jack tales that have attracted folklore collectors. Solsberry in southern Indiana annually holds a liar’s contest featuring the Ray brothers, specialists in tall tales, from whom folklorist Brunhilde Biebuyck collected 200 tales. Some local storytellers, like Ed Bell of Luling, Tex., have gone beyond their hometown to present personal experience stories and tall tales at an occasional regional or national folklife festival.

Despite the spotlights placed on the aforementioned storytellers, American folklorists have generally given more attention to the narrator’s texts than to the narrator. Recently, though, some folklorists have explored the biography, repertoire, and creativity of several outstanding southern narrators, James Douglas Suggs, for example. Born in Kosciusko, Miss., in 1887, the black Suggs worked the famed Rabbit Foot Minstrel Show throughout the South in 1907. He sang and played guitar, danced, and told jokes. Later years found him working as a professional baseball player, railroad brakeman, and cook. With his wife and many children he eventually settled in Calvin, Mich., an area populated largely by southern blacks. He absorbed many narratives in his various occupations and travels, recounting them to the workers at the next job and to friends at the tavern. In 1952, while searching for storytellers in the field, folklorist Richard Dorson was directed by a local barkeep to Suggs, whom she knew as a “good talker.” In Suggs’s repertoire animal stories predominated, followed by equivalent numbers of ghost and hoodoo stories, tall tales, preacher jests, and Ol’ Marster tales. Dorson’s visit was opportune, for Suggs died two years later. Suggs’s life and narratives compose a major portion of Dorson’s classic study American Negro Folktales (1967). Another notable 20th-century narrator was Ray Lum, loquacious mule trader of Vicksburg, Miss. Lum’s rapid-fire delivery unveiled a quick wit and an impressive verbal ability, which served to relax people in trades. Indeed, the trader as clever trickster and affable talker ran throughout Lum’s many tales.

The image of southern storytelling has been instrumental to the growing popularity of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., held annually since 1973. The featured storytellers inevitably are southern verbal artists, many of whom give homage to traditional tellers in hometown settings who never came on a stage. Among the new generation of professional storytellers with southern repertories featured at the festival are Donald Davis, Kathryn T. Windham, and Charlotte Blake Alston. Colquitt, Ga., claims its own storytelling legacy with a festival and a unique “storytelling museum.” It not only instructs in the folk roots of southern storytelling but also encourages tradition-bearers to share their stories in a storytelling room.

Folk storytellers usually do not hang out shingles or announce their wares. Storytelling is rather an informal part of their jobs or social life. In a traditional anecdote attributed to many raconteurs, the renowned Texas Munchausen, Gib Morgan, when asked for a good “lie” by fellow oilworkers, told them that he was too busy to lie right then, for his brother lay sick and Gib had to leave. Later the workers discovered that indeed they were told a good lie. Such informal, impromptu exchanges recur often today at work and at play. Less easily spotted than the European wonder-tale-telling counterpart, the American storyteller nonetheless thrives on informal opportunities for a joke or anecdote. The South’s sociable, leisurely image and its strong oral tradition help foster the association of the region with storytelling.

SIMON J. BRONNER

Pennsylvania State University

Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams, eds., And Other Neighborly Names: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore (1981); Simon J. Bronner, Mid-South Folklore (vol. 5, 1977), Folklore Forum (vol. 13, 1981); John H. Burrison, Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South (1989); Kay L. Cothran, in Readings in American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (1979); Daryl Cumber Dance, Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans (1978); Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales (1967); William Ferris, Journal of American Folklore (vol. 85, 1972), Ray Lum: Mule Trader (1977); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935); Carl Lindahl, ed., Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana (1997); William Bernard McCarthy, ed., Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers (1994); William Lynwood Montell, Don’t Go Up Kettle Creek: Verbal Legacy of the Upper Cumberland (1983); North Carolina Folklore Journal (vol. 26, 1978).

 

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Nothing indicates the growing diversity of the South more than the rapid increase of the region’s immigrant population and their many languages. At the beginning of the 21st century the number of teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) was increasing dramatically. Previously, some school districts employed one English language teacher who traveled around to different schools on different days of the week, but many others, particularly in rural areas, had no ESOL teachers at all, leaving some immigrant children sitting silently in classrooms and understanding little of what was said. Only the larger urban school systems in cities where significant numbers of immigrants lived had daily classes for children learning English.

Things are different today. Of the 10 metropolitan areas with the greatest relative increase in foreign-born population during the 1990s, seven are in the South, with Nashville, Atlanta, and Louisville at the top of the list. Georgia and North Carolina, especially, have seen their Hispanic populations increase, by almost 400 percent in North Carolina. As more non–English speakers moved into the Southeast, the need for ESOL teachers became increasingly apparent. Schools in rural as well as urban areas initiated programs to introduce immigrant children to U.S. classrooms and to American English. Most schools use a system called “pull-out” ESOL classes, where students leave regular classrooms for several hours of English classes per week. Other school systems have “sheltered” programs, where English learners remain with other learners for up to a year before being moved into a regular classroom. Sometimes these programs are in a separate school building called a newcomer center. Most of the instruction in the sheltered class is in English, but teachers simplify their speech and use as many visual aids as possible in order to provide comprehensible input for learners.

One innovative program is called the Georgia Project. Started by a former senator whose daughter taught in an elementary school, with support from local businesses, this program in Dalton, Ga., has become a model for school districts around the country. After establishing a relationship with the University of Monterrey in Mexico, the district welcomed Mexican teachers into the classrooms as paraprofessionals. During the summers, teachers from Georgia go to Monterrey for an intensive language and culture course. The project has even incorporated some dual-language classrooms that include both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking children, who are taught half the day in each language. Though they have met with some controversy, such programs are becoming more popular in the region, with schools in Chapel Hill, N.C., offering dual-language classes in English and Chinese, for example.

In the region’s universities the most sought-after subfields for teaching faculty in linguistics are applied linguistics and second-language acquisition, as classroom teachers take the necessary courses for qualifying to teach ESOL. Such programs are increasing, and large universities in Atlanta, Memphis, and other cities offer doctorates in the field. Meanwhile, all over the South, English classes for adults are often being staffed by volunteers with little or no training in linguistics or language teaching methods. Classes are offered at churches, public libraries, and technical schools, and some public schools offer classes to parents of their students. Of course, much learning takes place outside the classroom, especially for immigrants who are not part of a local ethnic community and for those who work at jobs where English is commonly used. As new ethnic groups in the South learn English, new varieties of Southern English are developing.

ELLEN JOHNSON

Berry College

Center for Applied Linguistics, <www.cal.org>; James Crawford, Educating English Learners (2004); Edmund T. Hamann, The Educational Welcome of Latinos in the New South (2003); Stanton Wortham et al., Education in the New Latino Diaspora (2001).

 

Toasts and Dozens

In Greenville, Miss., Atlanta, Memphis, and other towns and cities in the South, you might hear preadolescent, lower-socioeconomic-class black boys playfully hurling rhymed insults at each other. The language is rough and the themes are risqué, but the composition is creative. They are playing the “dozens,” as they often call it. “I fucked your momma on the levee,” a Greenville youth told his playmate while others looked on. “She said, ‘Get up, baby, your dick’s getting too heavy.”’ The onlookers roared with delight. After shouts of encouragement, the butt of the insult replied, “I fucked your momma in New Orleans; her pussy started poppin’ like a sewing machine.” The challenge was put to the first boy to top the retort. He came back strongly with “I fucked your momma on a fence, selling her pussy for 15 cents; a bee come along and stung her on the ass, started selling her pussy for a dollar and a half.”

The dozens are social entertainment, a game to be played, but they have also sparked considerable sociopsychological comment. Folklorist Roger Abrahams observed, for example, that the dozens represent a striving for masculine identity by black boys, as they try symbolically to cast off the woman’s world—indeed the black world they see as run by the mother of the family—in favor of the gang existence of the black man’s world. In dozens playing, the black boy is honing verbal and social skills he will need as an adult male. A form of dozens playing, usually called “ranking,” has also been collected among white boys, but most collections have stressed the black dozens, also called “woofing,” “sounding,” and “joning.”

Although Roger Abrahams did his classic study of black verbal contests and creativity in Philadelphia, Pa., his informants had deep roots in the South. Other southern connections to the dozens are found in a spate of southern blues songs popular from the 1920s on. “The Dirty Dozen” was first recorded by Georgia’s Rufus Perryman, known as Speckled Red, in 1929. Other versions quickly followed by southern artists, including Tampa Red, Little Hat Jones, Ben Curry, Lonnie Johnson, and Kokomo Arnold. The content of the dozens was apparently in circulation prior to these recordings; folksong collectors Howard W. Odum and Newman I. White found references in the field to the dozens before World War I. Alan Dundes and Donald C. Simmons have suggested an older existence of the dozens in Africa.

Also collected from working-class blacks has been a form of narrative poetry called by its reciters “toasts.” Toasts use many of the rhyming and rhythmic schemes and the rough imagery of the dozens but are performed by young men as extended poetic recitations rather than ritualized insult. Indeed, Abrahams called toasts the “greatest flowering of Negro verbal talent.” Today, toasts are less common, but the related musical genres of rap and hip-hop are an important part of popular culture, not only in the U.S. South, but around the world.

The performance of toasts is intended to be dramatic. The settings are barrooms and jungles; the characters are bad men, pimps, and street people; and the props are often drugs, strong drink, and guns. Here is an excerpt, for example, from a common toast, “The Signifying Monkey.”

• Down in the jungle near a dried-up
  • creek,
• The signifying monkey hadn’t slept
  • for a week
• Remembering the ass-kicking he
  • had got in the past
• He had to find somebody to kick the
  • lion’s ass.
• Said the signifying monkey to the
  • lion that very same day,
• “There’s a bad motherfucker
  • heading your way.
• The way he talks about you it can’t
  • be right,
• And I know when you two meet
  • there going to be a fight.
• He said he fucked your cousin, your
  • brother, and your niece,
• And he had the nerve enough to ask
  • your grandmom for a piece.”
• The lion said, “Mr. Monkey, if what
  • you say isn’t true about me,
• Bitch, I’ll run your ass up the
  • highest tree.”
• The monkey said, “Now look, if you
  • don’t believe what I say,
• Go ask the elephant. He’s resting
  • down the way.”

Other popular toasts in oral tradition include “Stackolee” (also spelled Stagolee and Stagger Lee), “The Titanic,” “Joe the Grinder,” and “The Freaks (or Junkers) Ball.”

Several collections of toasts come from the South. In the North most texts come from the cities. Although some southern examples are reported in cities like New Orleans and Austin, southern texts often come from the rural and small-town South. In Mississippi, David Evans, William Ferris, and Simon J. Bronner collected them in small towns. Bruce Jackson’s book on toasts, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (1974), had texts primarily collected from prisons in Texas and Missouri. The connection to southern life is usually passed over by interpreters of toasts in favor of links to the life of the underworld and the urban ghetto. Relations exist, however, between the themes and heroes of the toasts and those of southern black folksongs, including “Stackolee” and “The Titanic.” The blues also are influenced by the erotic and violent verses of the toasts, and toasts are believed to be the most important source for the beginnings of rap music. Other connections are found between southern black animal folktales featuring the monkey and the toast “Signifying Monkey.” Indeed, Richard Dorson reported prose versions of “Signifying Monkey” in his classic collection American Negro Folktales (1967) taken from southern-born blacks.

Dozens and toasts stand out because they are framed as play or performance, and they contain strong themes and sounds. Dozens and toasts creatively manipulate imagery and metaphor to bring drama to words. The boy telling dozens may eventually tackle the more sophisticated toasts. Mastering the techniques in these traditional performances gives the teller an important sense of prestige and power that is reserved for the man of words in black society. Their dozens and toasts entertain friends and pass the time; they communicate values and feelings. The tellers of dozens and toasts are narrators of imagined scenes and cultural critics for the audiences for which they perform. The tellers also draw attention because they themselves are characters in the social drama of communication through folklore.

SIMON J. BRONNER

Pennsylvania State University

Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1970), Positively Black (1970); Simon J. Bronner, Western Folklore (vol. 37, 1978); Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales (1967); William Ferris, Jazzforschung (1974/75); Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (1974); Thomas Kochman, ed., Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out (1972); William Labov, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis, in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (1973); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (2000); Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman, Journal of American Folklore (vol. 87, 1974).

 

Turner, Lorenzo Dow

(1890–1972) LINGUIST.

Lorenzo Dow Turner was born in Elizabeth City, N.C., to a free black family that dates its origins to 1799. His research is important to southern speech because he was the first linguist to conduct systematic interviews of Gullah speakers, the first to maintain that Gullah was a legitimate speech variety, and the first to publish a book that illustrated how and why Gullah differed from other English varieties within and outside the southern United States.

Turner’s father, Rooks, and his brothers, Rooks Jr. and Arthur, all held college degrees at a time when most African Americans could expect to gain only a sixth-grade education, though the education of his mother, Elizabeth, was rudimentary. The importance that Turner’s family placed on education put him on the track to achieve the extraordinary. He completed a B.A. at Howard (1914) and an M.A. at Harvard (1917), becoming, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson before him, among the first black men to attend the latter institution. Returning to Howard, he served as instructor (1917–20) and then professor of English and head of the department (1920–28), during which time he completed a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1926). Leaving Howard for a year to found and edit the Washington Sun with his brother Arthur, he reentered academia after the newspaper failed and became professor and head of the Department of English at Fisk University (1929–46).

Lorenzo Dow Turner at his desk, 1949 (Lois Turner Williams, Chicago)

While teaching summer school at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg in 1929, Turner became acquainted with Gullah, the English-based creole spoken on the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands and nearby mainland. He soon decided to make recovery of the history and linguistic background of this language variety one of his life’s quests, encouraged by the historian Carter Woodson, who had identified the Sea Islands as an important reservoir of African American culture. After attending two summer Linguistic Institutes to learn the methodology of the nascent Linguistic Atlas Project, Turner arrived in the Sea Islands in 1932 to begin the first scientific investigation of Gullah, which Americans widely viewed as merely an “incorrect” version of 17th- and 18th-century English dialects. To counter this view and to document the African influence on Gullah and on other creoles, Turner studied West African languages at the University of London (1936–37) and then conducted fieldwork among African descendants in northern Brazil (1940–41), where he found that Yoruba speakers recognized some of the same African words, tones, and rhythms he had identified in Gullah.

Turner’s two decades of research on Gullah, his tireless lecturing, his frequent writing, and finally his groundbreaking book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) began to reverse societal attitudes toward Gullah, a creole like the one believed by some to be the ancestor of modern African American speech. He documented 4,000 terms in Gullah that derived from approximately 30 African languages. Most of these were personal names, but others were common vocabulary, such as bitty/biddy ‘a bird’ (Kimbundu, used in the South to refer to baby chicks); ninny ‘the female breast’ (Mandingo), ‘breast milk’ (in the South); goober ‘peanut’ (Kimbundu and Umbundu); jumbo ‘elephant’ (Umbundu, Kimbundu, and KiKongo); gumbo ‘okra, stew with okra’ (Tshiluba and Umbundu); and yam ‘yam’ (Vai).

Turner’s research earned him the title “Father of Gullah Studies.” He was first in bringing linguistic training to the analysis of Gullah, in conducting extensive interviews among its native speakers, in committing aspects of its grammar to paper, and especially in establishing conclusively that elements of Niger-Congo languages had survived in North America. He was the first African American to document the African influence in the oral arts of Brazil, to collect and translate folktales and proverbs from the Yoruba in Nigeria, and to transcribe Sierra Leone Krio and prepare books in that language for the Peace Corps. He and Melville Herskovits were the premier theorists of African retentions in American culture during their lifetimes.

After World War II, Turner moved from Fisk to Roosevelt College in Chicago to become professor of English (1946–70) and lecturer in the Inter-Departmental Program in African Studies (1952–70). A Fulbright Fellowship allowed him to fulfill a lifelong goal, to conduct fieldwork in Nigeria and Sierra Leone among native speakers of African languages. From this research he prepared several dictionaries. In his career’s final years, he directed the language component of Roosevelt’s Peace Corps project, training teachers for Sierra Leone (1962–66). In all he published five books and numerous articles and book reviews and prepared an impressive array of additional manuscripts, many translated from Brazilian Yoruba and the Niger-Congo languages of Africa into English. His research on Gullah, Krio, and Brazilian Yoruba brought the study of creole languages into the center of linguistic interest in the United States. Gullah is now celebrated in several annual festivals and has been the focus of at least 30 Ph.D. dissertations, numerous books and articles, and audio and video recordings.

MARGARET WADE-LEWIS

State University of New York at New Paltz

Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (video) (1991); Joseph Opala and Cynthia Schmidt, The Language You Cry In (video) (1998); South Carolina ETV, Family across the Sea (video) (1990); Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949; 2002); Lorenzo Dow Turner Jr., ed., The Folk Tales of Africa (2006), Photographic Images of Brazil and Nigeria by Africanist/Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner (2006); Margaret Wade-Lewis, The Black Scholar (Fall 1991), Dialectical Anthropology (vol. 17, 1992; vol. 26, 2001), Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies (2006).

 

Vocabulary, Changes in

The English vocabulary is constantly changing. Unlike pronunciation and grammar, vocabulary is acquired over a speaker’s entire lifetime. New words are created, people learn different words from listening to others, and words become old-fashioned and disappear. New words can result from leaving off parts of earlier terms, as when familiar compounds such as mantel-piece, school-teacher and clothes-closet are shortened to mantel, teacher, and closet. Sometimes new terms seem more descriptive, such as chestofdrawers, as opposed to bureau, and driveway, rather than avenue or lane (all of which once referred to a private drive); sometimes the older words were more vivid, as spew for vomit, and falling weather for rain or snow. Probably the most obvious characteristic of vocabulary change is the way it is inextricably tied to cultural change.

The lexicon of a language tells the story of the people who speak the language. During the 20th century the South changed from a predominantly rural, agricultural region to one having a majority-urban population, giving rise to institutions from supermarkets and shopping malls to modern high schools. Revolutions in transportation and communications increasingly affected daily lives, bringing unprecedented change to the region and its English.

Urbanization, industrialization, and technological advances led to changes in occupations and in implements and items at the workplace and at home. Words like back house and privy ‘outdoor toilet,’ doubletree and singletree ‘crossbar used to hitch mules or horses to a wagon or plow,’ tow sack and crocus bag ‘burlap bag,’ co-wench and soo-cow ‘calls to cows,’ and words for calling other farm animals are unknown to most southerners today, though a century ago they were everyday expressions that distinguished the South’s vocabulary from that of other regions. People know fewer terms for wildlife (terrapin and cooter for a land tortoise have declined in favor of turtle) and for foods formerly raised in gardens and orchards, like press peach and freestone peach. Semantic merger, the subsuming of formerly different meanings under one form, occurs when detailed knowledge is lost and distinctions are blurred, as in these two cases. Semantic extension occurs when a word takes on a broader meaning. Thus frying pan now encompasses the electric version, and siding is now more often made of aluminum or vinyl than wood.

Eating habits and economic patterns of production and consumption changed greatly as the South moved from an agricultural to an urban society. A century ago most southerners ate bread made at home, usually corn-bread. Bread made from wheat flour was bought at a store. Back then the latter was called light bread or loaf bread, but today it is known merely as bread, with the addition of a modifier (homemade bread) if it is not factory made. Similarly, in the past sweet potatoes were called just potatoes, while the other kind were Irish potatoes.

The commercialization of products, along with increasing familiarity with labels and the advertising of items sold nationwide, has replaced regionally marked vocabulary with standardized terms. Prior to modern grocery stores (led by Piggly Wiggly in the South), customers made a list of items they wanted, which were then brought to them by clerks; the new kind of store ushered in a change from bulk sales to individual packaging with labels. Words that had been known mostly within family or neighborhood circles (e.g., terms for vegetables canned at home or parts from animals butchered on the farm) entered the larger public domain in supermarkets and became open to change. Today the Upper South term green beans has almost replaced Deep South variants like snap bean and pole bean, and cottage cheese is no longer called curds or clabber cheese. Southerners buy green onions instead of shallots; peanuts instead of ground peas, goobers, or pinders; and a mix for making pancakes rather than battercakes, flitters, or slapjacks.

Stores like Piggly Wiggly contributed to the standardization of southern vocabulary. (Darren Fleeger)

However, many terms still survive that are identifiably southern. Butter bean is used alongside lima bean, though for some people it has narrowed to refer to a specific type of lima. Cold drink and coke still often mean a carbonated soft drink in general, and even though the older family pie has been replaced by cobbler, the latter is also a southern term. Many other southernisms can be heard every day: like(d) to ‘almost,’ carry ‘to take or escort (a person) somewhere,’ wore out or give out ‘exhausted,’ puny ‘sickly,’ slouch ‘lazy person,’ and pallet ‘makeshift bed on the floor.’ This list shows that regionalisms are often forms that are in general use but that have a special sense in one region.

Sometimes words are borrowed from other regions. Toilet and outhouse are from New England. From Pennsylvania come kindling (for lightwood) and chipmunk (for ground squirrel). School gets out (rather than lets out or turns out) was once a local expression confined to New York City. Bacon (previously called breakfast bacon in the South) and burlap bag are from the North, as are wishbone, skunk, moo, and Merry Christmas! (replacing southern pulley bone, polecat, hum or low, and Christmas Gift!). Some terms that are becoming less common were brought by settlers; for example, the mountain terms fireboard ‘mantel,’ hull ‘to shell (peas or beans),’ and poke ‘paper bag’ all came from Ulster. Attics are rarer in modern houses, and this book word has supplanted the traditional terms used by the lower classes (loft) and the upper classes (garret).

Lexical change is often led by speakers having more education or higher social status. Introduced in this way are names for members of a wedding party like best man and maid of honor. At one time, a wedding attendant, whether a male or a female, was called a waiter in the South. Until relatively recent times, only the wealthy hosted formal weddings. The practice known as shivaree in the Mississippi Valley and as serenading in the Southeast has dwindled to shaving cream and tin cans on the car in which the just married ride. Education played a role in replacing rheumatism by bursitis, neuritis, and arthritis, though the last of these is still sometimes anthropomorphized as Arthur-itis.

Other newer, nationally known words do not replace regional words but are used alongside them. Some research indicates that the size of the Southern English vocabulary has increased by as much as 40 percent from adding new words to preexisting ones. Television, movies, radio, and the Internet have a larger effect on the choice of words southerners use than on the accents to pronounce them, but even new words spread through the media may have a regional association. For example, hip-hop slang can vary by region, and the popular word crunk (as a noun, “a rowdy style of rap music”; as an adjective, “wild, drunk, loud, excited, etc.”) originated in the South. Regional differences persist especially in vocabulary used mostly around home or within the family, like the words children use to address their grandparents (pawpaw, peepaw, mamaw, nanny, etc.).

Adequate funding for public school systems in many parts of the South was not established until the mid-20th century. With more southerners attending school, words entered the southern vocabulary because of increasing literacy. The educational level of the population in the South improved tremendously during the 20th century, and as it did, the number of synonyms for concepts increased, with older words continuing to exist alongside newer ones, the choice of words in any given situation depending on what style of speech is appropriate. Words used in one situation with a particular listener might be inappropriate in a different situation with another listener. Language is a dynamic entity, especially in its words and meanings. As our world changes, so does our vocabulary.

ELLEN JOHNSON

Berry College

Craig Carver, American Regional Dialects (1987); Wayne Glowka et al., American Speech (vol. 80, 2005); Ellen Johnson, Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States, 1930–1990 (1996); Hans Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949); Gordon Wood, Vocabulary Change (1971).

 

Y’all

There is no more signature southernism than y’all. It and its close relative you all, with the stress on you, are symbolic, immediately signaling an affinity for the American South, and northerners of all levels of education who move to the region often acquire one or both of them, even if they never adopt any other southern usages. Their down-home character conveys hospitality and makes those to whom they are addressed feel welcome. Y’all, and to a lesser extent you all, set a tone of familiarity and informality, including when directed at strangers.

Misspelled Stuckey’s sign, Vaiden, Miss. (Charles Reagan Wilson Collection, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi)

The early history of y’all is unclear. It is unknown in the British Isles, though the Ulster form ye aw (i.e., you plus all), attested as early as the 1730s, is one possible source. That early form and the frequently observed modern spelling ya’ll suggest that y’all may not be(or may not be perceived to be) simply a contraction of you plus all. By 1600 singular thou and thee had largely disappeared from British speech, and plural you had shifted to become a singular as well as a plural pronoun. This loss of distinction opened the door to the eventual development of y’all and similar second-person-plural pronouns and compounds in varieties of English (yous, you’uns, and most recently, you guys).

Y’all and you all have sparked as much argument and controversy, in both scholarly and popular circles, as any other forms in Southern English, with respect to whether they are ever singular, an issue arising from the fact that they are sometimes addressed to a single individual. At the simplest level, y’all and you all differ from plural you in emphasizing inclusiveness; they mean all of you. This is the case when addressing not only a group but also a single person with whom other individuals (family members, friends, colleagues, etc.) are associated in the speaker’s mind. Thus, a southerner normally understands “What did y’all do last night?” to be a question about one or more people in addition to a single person addressed. But a third party who does not use y’all may mistakenly interpret this use of it as a singular pronoun. In similar fashion, y’all is sometimes addressed to one person who represents an institution, business, or other indeterminable number of individuals collectively. The customer who asks a salesperson, “Do y’all have any fresh orange juice?” may not see or know who or how many others work for the establishment, but the speaker may nonetheless associate those others (if any) with the salesperson. Thus, cognitively the pronoun is plural. Y’all may also be a “distributive plural” addressed to a group of people directly, each of whom is a potential referent, as in asking the question, “Did y’all take out the garbage?” As a practical matter, only one person takes (or needs to take) action. Y’all is also used in direct address (as in partings, “Bye, y’all”), greetings (“Good morning, y’all”), invitations (“Y’all come”), and so on. In these expressions the form is equivalent to everyone (that is, an indefinite pronoun), and more than one person is clearly present.

Taken together, these many and diverse usages indicate that y’all and you all likely have a secure future in southern speech. Accounting for their vitality is not only their strong identification with the South but the fact that they are highly functional and have diverse usages beyond being a plural personal pronoun equivalent to you.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY

University of South Carolina

Michael Montgomery, SECOL REVIEW (vol. 20, 1996), Southern Journal of Linguistics (vol. 26, 2002); Gina Richardson, American Speech (vol. 59, 1984).