Posted on 09/18/2015 9:57:02 AM PDT by chasio649
The other day, my son asked why there are such a variety of accents in the country. Why does a fellow from Mississippi have a twang that’s different from a fellow in Texas?
Long ago, I asked my father a similar question. He pointed out that it isn’t just in America – a wide range of dialects and accents are common for French, Arabic, whatever.
In recent days, some interesting pieces have appeared online. One in Slate has a list of the top slang terms from every state. Here’s what was included for the Mid-South:
Arkansas: “tump” -- to tip over or dump out. Louisiana: “banquette” – sidewalk. Mississippi: “nabs” -- peanut butter crackers. Tennessee: “whirlygust” -- a strong wind. The words from Arkansas and Mississippi are familiar. Not so those from Louisiana and Tennessee.
Humans are so inventive, language doesn’t have to be spoken words. Slate has posted a video shot in a mountainous region of Turkey where residents whistle long range conversations when their shouts won’t carry. Some 10,000 people still use this method of communication.
And if you want to get into some truly odd language characteristics, head down to northwest Brazil. There, the Piraha people speak a language unrelated to any other. Christian missionaries have spent agonizing decades trying to learn the intricacies of the Piraha’s tongue and culture.
A 2007 profile in the New Yorker says Piraha is “based on just eight consonants and three vowels, (and is) one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.”
Further, the Piraha, “have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for ‘all,’ ‘each,’ ‘every,’ ‘most,’ or ‘few.’”
Why has this group been able to resist modernity? Largely because they “consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior, and they are unique among Amazonian peoples in remaining monolingual.”
Or 'youse guys' Northern NJ / Brooklyn NY / Northern Ohio
“The north didn’t experience this so much until much later.”
When they bought and ran their own plantations down south...don’t try to educate me...Take a trip to Natchez, MS and see where all the plantation owners were from....Don’t you yankee asses ever claim to not have your hands dirty in the whole plantation system...Where do you think the money went for cotton specualtion? I absolutely refuse your premise that my southern drawl comes from africans...my city that i live in is 53% black....I DO NOT talk like them....but thanks for replying and bless your heart.
Drawl?
What drawl?
Or a Po-Boy
http://ragin-cajun.com/restaurant/menu/menu-the-original
http://www.goodecompany.com/images/pdf/restaurantmenu/Q1-Menu-Tab-Full-Service-Menu.pdf
What’s cuawfee?
Forgot yins..(you plural) Pittsburgh
Good family friends were from Nanty Glo, PA....Loved to hear them talk...such wonderful slang...Yins was just everyday as ya’ll :)
Ya got me, What’s a wooder. (almost afraid to ask)
My wife is a ‘Burgher, I just hear her unique words.,ie.,
left = let.
yinz= you all = all y’all = you guys = youse guys
jagerbush=thorny shrub.
Kinda fun to hear the dialect.
You seem very angry.
.
Everyone here noted that the idiot didn’t answer his own question.
What has been said is that Southern English is more representative of the English spoken 300-400 years ago then what we hear now in England, which is Victorian.
The affected accents of the 19th century came from people copying the upper classes. This of course never made it to the South, so the way they speak is supposedly the way the English and Scots/Irish sounded 3 centuries ago.
“The white south is very homogenous and reflects a strong Scots Irish English dialect of the 1600s thru early 1800s”
LOL, I nailed it! And yes yes, southerners never interacted with blacks, or had to communicate with them. And the black culture had no effect at all of the white south. And most southerners don’t have a speck of African in their DNA.
Its funny to watch the defenders of the faith. There’s something almost fine about it.
And whats funny, is that thta historic southern white interaction with blacks is essentially meaningless today, but they are terrified at knowing it.
“A Brazilian acquaintance of mine told me that the differences between Brazilian and Lusitanian Portuguese are greater than those between British and American English, and that he could barely understand people from Portugal.”
Also true for Quebecois French and French in France.
And even a Montreal native French speaker may find it hard to understand a rural Quebec farmer.
What you state contradicts itself. Those who where in close proximity of the slaves would have been the more aristocratic Southerner, while the ones who were not would have been those speaking Appalachian as you say. At the time of the Revolution half if not slightly more of the population of South Carolina was African. Accents and speech patterns are acquired from ones peers, not parents. On the plantation is was quite common for white and black kids being playmates, thus the accents and speech patterns would be influenced. Works the other way to. Listen to Charlie Rangel speak. He does not have a typical African American accent, but a typical Irish NYC accent. I would suspect he had a lot of Irish and German friends as a kid growing up.
“Oh, and there was no “huge” influx of slaves, ever.”
There were about 3,200,000 slaves just prior to the civil war, and the confederacy had a population of around 10 million.
The slave trade had stopped several decades before, but there were a lot of blacks around.
A hot drink you get in a blue paper cup with Greek columns on it.
I read something very similar to what you described. And I think I remember them saying that the true Southern accent is closer to English aristocracy than the English used today in England by the commoners. I think I read it on a web-site reading about the origin of widely used languages and dialects.
I knew an older guy from the Netherlands and when he spoke english, his accent sounded like New York. It occurred to me that New York was once New Amsterdam and I think the original Dutch inhabitants gave New Yorkers their distinctive accent.
Well, ya see, it’s pretty simple.
Southerners keep their awls in a drawer and instead of
saying “Get the awl from the drawer”
they just say “drawl”.
Spanish in Spain is not exactly the same as Spanish in Mexico. Spain has an extra conjugation tense for verbs than does Mexico. And even within Spain, Spanish is different. I lived in southern Spain in Andalusia for three years as a kid. They were known for using slang and cutting off the ends of their words. Northern Spaniards speak "Castilian" Spanish which is more proper and formal. Similar to the twangs and drawls in the southern US versus the formal pronunciations in Boston.
It doesn't take long living in a new part of the country to pick up the idiosyncrasies of the words and language from that region. When my kids were young, we lived in South Carolina for a while. They quickly started talking like their peers at school and developed southern drawls. They lost the drawls over time when we moved back to New Mexico and Arizona. Even as adults, it is hard not to adapt the local tongue that is spoken around you. When I met my wife in the Air Force in New Mexico 40 years ago, she had a distinct southern accent to her speech because she was raised in the South. It softened over the years but I could still pick a little of it up in accent and words over the years, even though we didn't live in the south. She still uses words that are distinctly southern. She says "mash the gas pedal" instead of step on the gas. Or she calls a coke a soda pop. And my pants are not pants but "britches". "Nabs" are peanut butter crackers. And sometimes it is hard to distinguish what word she is using when she says "all". It is "all" the people in the world or does she mean the "all" as in "oil" for the car. They both sound the same to me.
But we are living in Florida now and even I (who was raised in the western US) have picked up a slight exaggerated southern drawl because is is hard not to. It is how people around you speak. And if you are going to assimilate, you will unconsciously begin to speak that way too.
Y'all come back now, 'ya hear?
I’m Georgia born and raised(Macon)with a Tennessee family history. I speak Georgissean.
I was born in Texas but spent 7 school years in northern New Mexico. They said i sounded like a yankee when i returned to Texas. Took quite a while to get my Texican back.
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