Anyone who spends a lot of time cruising around the South eventually comes to realize that there are scores and scores of sub-dialects — maybe hundreds. Or at least, “were.” People in Tidewater Virginia had the general Southern drawl dialect — but not as slow a drawl as those from Charleston, SC, say. Then inside Tidewater there are (or at least were) different usages in Norfolk and in Portsmouth, on opposite sides of the Elizabeth River. Then there were Eastern Shore dialects, as someone pointed out above. In Appalachia, the cadence tends to be more clipped and faster as you move up country from Tennessee to Pennsylvania — but there are exceptions along the way.
And its not just Southern. I inherited a good “ear” from both parents, for which I am grateful. When mingling with New Yorkers, I can usually pick out a native of the Bronx, which imbues a different accent than Brooklyn. In New England, you hear different dialects in Vermont, and New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, of course (Bah-stonian, wheah they pahk tha cahs, for example). And Maine is great — Down East is my favorite, but then there’s upcountry Aroostook, where you run into the northern edge of redneck USA, mingling with speakers of Canadian French. And in the Western Maine mountains, a whole new vocabulary and inflection. Wonderful place for a language maven.
I think we are losing so much of our dialects and I am amazed how newscasters manage to sound southern to me.
I envy you. I love to hear proper speaking.
My southern country dialect sticks out like a sore thumb and I feel people may think I am dumb when they hear me speak
melissa