Southern American english

In the speech of the South there are subareas and gradations of social status, as reflected in speech ,to be found nowhere else in the country .Generally speaking ,SA has unique differences in the manner of articulation .Southerners lengthen certain vowels,they make the single vowels (monophthongs) into diphthongs and triphthongs .The articulation is more lax and unprecise and it is this rather than the rate ,or speed , of speech which characterizes “the southern drawl”. Few generalizations can be made about Southern pronunciation as there is great variation between the regions of the South , between older and younger people, and between people of different ethnic backgrounds.

The following features are characteristic of older SAE:

· Lack of yod-dropping, thus pairs like do/due and toon/tune are distinct. Historically, words like due, lute, and new contained /juː/ (as RP does), but report says that the only Southern speakers who make a distinction today use a diphthong /ɪu/ in such words. They further report that speakers with the distinction are found primarily in North Carolina and northwest South Carolina, and in a corridor extending from Jackson to Tallahassee.

o The distinction between /ær/, /ɛr/, and /er/ in marry, merry, and Mary is preserved by some older speakers, but few young people make a distinction. The r-sound almost becomes a vowel, and may be elided after a long vowel, as it often is in AAVE. The following phenomena are relatively wide spread in SAE, though the extent of these features varies across regions and between rural and urban areas. The older the speaker, the less likely he or she is to display these features:

· The merger of [ɛ] and [ɪ] before nasal consonants, so that pen and pin are pronounced the same, but the pin-pen merger is not found in New Orleans, Savannah, or Miami (which does not fall within the Southern dialect region). This sound change has spread beyond the South in recent decades and is now found in parts of the Midwest and West as well.

· Lax and tense vowels often neutralize before /l/, making pairs like feel/fill and fail/fell homophones for speakers in some areas of the South. Some speakers may distinguish between the two sets of words by reversing the normal vowel sound, e.g., feel in SAE may sound like fill, and vice versa.

Mean formant values for the ANAE subjects from the Southern U.S. (excluding Florida and Charleston, SC). The red symbol marks the position of monophthongized /aɪ/ before voiced consonants. The distinction between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ is preserved mainly because /ɔ/ has an upglide. /eɪ/ is backer and lower than /ɛ/.

The following features are also associated with SAE:

· The diphthong /aɪ/ becomes monophthongized to [aː]:

o Most speakers exhibit this feature at the ends of words and before voiced consonants but not before voiceless consonants; some in fact exhibit Canadian-style raising before voiceless consonants, so that ride is [raːd] and wide is [waːd], but right is [rəɪt] and white is [ʍəɪt]. Many speakers throughout the South exhibit backing to [ɑːe] in environments where monophthongization does not take place.

o Others monophthongize /aɪ/ in all contexts, as in the stereotyped pronunciation "nahs whaht rahs" for nice white rice; these speakers are mostly found in an Appalachian area that includes eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and Northern Alabama (the "Inland South"), as well as in Central Texas. Elsewhere in the South, this pronunciation is stigmatized as a working class feature.

· The "Southern Drawl", breaking of the short front vowels in the words "pat", "pet", and "pit": these develop a glide up from their original starting position to IPA| [j] , and then in some cases back down to schwa: /æ/ → [æjə]; /ɛ/ → [ɛjə]; /ɪ/ → [ɪjə].

· The "Southern Shift", a chain shift following on as a result of the Southern Drawl: the nuclei of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ move to become higher and fronter, so that, for example, instead of [ɛjə], /ɛ/ becomes a tenser /ejə. This process is most common in heavily stressed syllables. At the same time, the nuclei of the traditional front upgliding diphthongs are relaxed: /i/ moves towards [ɪi] and /eɪ/ moves towards [ɛi] or even lower and/or more retracted. The back vowels /u/ in boon and /oʊ/ in code shift considerably forward.

· The distinction between the vowels sounds of words like caught and cot or stalk and stock is mainly preserved. In much of the South, the vowel found in words like stalk and caught has developed into a diphthong [ɑɒ].

· The nucleus of /ɑr/ card is often rounded to [ɒr].

· /z/ becomes [d] before /n/, for example [wʌdn̩t] wasn't, [bɪdnɪs] business, but hasn't is sometimes still pronounced [hæzənt] because there already exists a word hadn't pronounced [hædənt].

· Many nouns are stressed on the first syllable that would be stressed on the second syllable in other accents. These include police, cement, Detroit, Thanksgiving, insurance, behind, display, recycle, TV, guitar, and umbrella.

· The distinction between /ɜr/ and /ʌr/ in furry and hurry is preserved.

· In some regions of the south, there is a merger of [ɔr] and [ɑr], making cord and card, for and far, form and farm etc. homonyms.

· The distinction between /ɪr/ and /ɪər/ in mirror and nearer, Sirius and serious etc. is not preserved.

· The distinction between /ʊər/ and /ɔr/ in poor and pour, moor and more is not preserved.

· The l's in the words walk and talk are occasionally pronounced, causing the words talk and walk to be pronounced /wɑlk/ and /tɑlk/ by some Southerners. Some older speakers have a phenomenon that resembles the trap-bath split. Where General American accents prescribe /æ/ and considerably liberal accents have /ɑ:/, Southern American English may have a new vowel diphthong /æɪ/, as in aunt /æɪnt/ and gas /gæɪs/. In the speech of the South there are subareas and gradations of social status, as reflected in speech ,to be found nowhere else in the country .Generally speaking ,SA has unique differences in the manner of articulation .Southerners lengthen certain vowels,they make the single vowels (monophthongs) into diphthongs and triphthongs .The articulation is more lax and unprecise and it is this rather than the rate ,or speed , of speech which characterizes “the southern drawl”. Southern American English is also typified as an “r-less” (non-rhotic)regional standart of AE pronunciation .standart SA generally adheres to the following patterns . In SA final and preconsonantal [ɾ] is usually omitted, as in far [fa:] and farm [fa:m] .Intervocalic [ɾ] frequently drops out , as in very [‘vɛ:ɪ] and Carolina [kə’lɑ:nə]. The linking [ɾ] , as in far away [fɑ:ə’weɪ], is rare.

Normally [з] and [ə] replace the GA [ɝ] and [ɚ] , as in bird [bзd] and sister [‘sɪstə].

Consequently , southerners use the diphthongs [ɪə] , [ɛə], [ʊə], though [ə] may occasionally drop out . Therefore , fierce may be [fɪəs] or [fɪ:s] , poor may be [pʊə] or [poə] or [po].

[ɑ:] , [ɑ] and [ɔ], as in cart ,coat and caught , are usually clearly differentiated. On the other hand , caught some times diphthongizes as [kɔʊt] , approaching ambiguity with coat [koʊt]. The shift to [ɔʊ] characterizes the whole class of words illustrated by caught , walk, cost, log and law .The diphthongal extreme is illustrated by laundry which may have [ɔ], [ɒ], [ɑ], [ɔʊ],[ɒʊ] or [ɑʊ]. “Short-o” words may have [ɔ] and [ɒ] :log and mock usually have [ɔ]; log may also have variants with [ɒ], [ɒʊ] and [oʊ]; donkey may have [ɑ],or [ɔ], or [ɒʊ], or [ɔʊ].

[æ] is normally used in dance and ask,though a diphthongal variant [æɪ] is frequent ,as in [æɪsk] for ask.