Linguistics 110 Linguistic Analysis: Sentences & Dialects
Lecture Number Twenty
Regional English Dialects
Southern USA


  1. Regional Variation (Continued)

    1. The South (Rural)
      1. Phonological variation
        1. [aj] : [A]
        2. [Ø] : [aw] Your hawg ate ma dawg! We gotta tawk.
        3. [z] : [d] before [n] Nice bidnis, idn't it? vs. niceness
        4. [ê] : [ø] before [n] Do you keep your pet in a pen?
        5. [l] : [u], [r] : ¤ unless followed by a vowel
            build, milk, killed : allow, low, Lee carved, car, here : ready, already, arrow
        6. [ow] : [r] –– swaller, holler, yeller, waller, foller
        7. drop initial unaccented schwas 'round, 'low, 'gree
        8. Overcompensation: [ivr] [kjubr] [sofr]
          sody, okry, sofy (Appalachia)
      2. Morphological variation
        1. (over) here, (over) there, (over) yonder
        2. participle prefixes: a-goin, a-comin, a-gon' (a-gonna), a-fixin to do it, a-eatin
        3. 2nd Person Plual: yall
        4. Predicate possessive pronouns:

          Predicate Pronouns
          SingularPlural
          mineourn
          yournyalls(es)
          hern, hisntheirn

        5. Past tense (de)regularization
          1. heerd, seen (seed),
          2. holp, et, killt,
        6. them people
      3. Syntactic variation.
        1. Complementizer what [ÅÏt]
          The feller over yonder what made me mad is kin a yourn
        2. Conditional if'n
      4. Lexical Variation
        1. fixin'
        2. I declare
        3. reckon
        4. tubber shore
        5. directly
        6. mighty, awfully (no 'very')
        7. gotta, hafta (no 'must')

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