Most Americans know that the Southern United States region has a distinct dialect of its own, but what is less widely known is that even within the South a wide variety of sub-dialects of English are used. A dialect is formally defined as a language variety used by and characteristic of a particular social group, including regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups (Finegan 1994: 507). Southern regional dialect is difficult to fit into one rigidly defined category. The variations can be found in two main areas: word choice and usage, and accent and pronunciation.

    A certain amount of historical knowledge is needed to understand the language development in the South. The South was settled gradually over a number of years; different groups of people immigrated to specific areas at different times, bringing their linguistic variations with them. Geographical barriers, the lack of technology, and an emphasis on agriculture made a uniform dialect nearly impossible (Wood 1971: 1-3). Just as people today develop original slang to describe a particular situation, a strong sense of local dialect developed within geographical and ethnic boundaries. Standardization was slow; as English across the country grew more similar, the South kept some of its uniqueness and local dialects became sub-dialects of the overall Southern dialect.

    Wide disparity of word choice is a feature of the Southern states. Gordon R. Wood and others have done extensive field research to catalog the occurrence of local words. Wood's study centers around residents of eight Southern states: Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Almost one-hundred fifty words are included, and from this data Wood is able to create maps showing the diversity of diction. For example, the words used to refer to a forked chicken bone are pully bone and wishbone. Both are fairly equally distributed over the eight states, although pully bone is slightly preferred. In some counties pully bone is exclusively used; in others usage is split between the two choices (Wood 1971: 331). An opposite example is that of the sound made by cows: lowing. This is by far the most popular choice and is used throughout the Southern region (Wood 1961: 338). Wood's study and others like it reveal the assortment of words used by Southern speakers to allude to the same item or action.

    Southern dialect, especially in the Smoky Mountain and Appalachian areas, is so far removed from standard American English that there are several books that act as dictionaries. These compilations contain many words or phrases that are unfamiliar to speakers outside the South. Some examples are galluses, a word for 'suspenders', and upscuddle, meaning 'a quarrel' (Farwell, Nicholas 1993: 74, 175). These words are certainly regional and would not likely be found outside of the small local areas in which they originated. Another common feature of word usage in the South involves using standard words in an unconventional way. This occurs especially with verbs. Pleasure is usually considered a noun; however, the Appalachian dialect uses it as a verb meaning 'to please' (Garber 1976: 69). Verb forms are also mutated to take on different tenses. Usually these changes are linguistically simpler than what is used in standard English. Et is used for 'ate', learnt for 'learned', het for 'heated', and seed for saw or seen (Garber 1976: 27, 52, 40, 79). Each of these forms either follows an easier phonological rule or simply has a reduced number of syllables in pronunciation.

    Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid are two other leaders in the field of regional dialect. Their research, which is compiled in The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States, centers on pronunciation and accent. One comparison made concerns the vowel in the name Mary. In the South Midland, which is bounded by the Appalachians to the west, Pennsylvania to the north, and northern Georgia to the south; Mary either has / / or /e/ (Kurath, McDavid 1961: 19). In the Upper South, which is mostly comprised of Virginia, Mary only has /e/ (Kurath, McDavid 1961: 20). In the Lower South, which is mainly South Carolina and Georgia, /e/ is predominant as well (Kurath, McDavid 1961: 21). Another instance of variation pertains to the pronunciation of the final vowel in Missouri. In Virginia, the sound is / /, but further south the pronunciation gradually shifts to /i/, and in Georgia it is almost exclusively /i/ (Kurath, McDavid 1961: map 150). Almost no pronunciation is uniform in the South; even within a single state diversity can exist, especially in states like Virginia or North Carolina that have marked regions correlating to geography.

    The variations in Southern dialect can be summed up with the use of isoglosses. An isogloss is defined as the geographical boundary marking the limit of the regional distribution of a particular word, pronunciation, or usage (Finegan 1994: 509). Isogloss is one attempt to categorize certain words. Although this practice does create specific lines, it is possible for isoglosses to overlap, so that in some areas as many as five or more isoglosses can exist. Isoglosses also cannot be established for dialects in general; instead they must be drawn for one specific word or phonetic aspect. However, they are a convenient way of narrowing the research and making it manageable for study.

    The many different Southern sub-dialects that have developed and lasted over time are extremely difficult to group into one main dialect. The variances occur not only in word choice, but in pronunciation as well, and are found even within a very small area. When studying this complex situation, it is wise to look for diversity rather than similarity.

Farwell, Harold F. and J. Karl Nicholas. Smoky Mountain Voices.       Edited by Harold F. Farwell and J. Karl Nicholas. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Finegan, Edward. Language: Its Structure and Use, 2nd ed. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994.

Garber, Aubrey. Mountain-Ese: Basic Grammar for Appalachia. Radford: Commonwealth Press, 1976.

Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1961.

Wood, Gordon R. Vocabulary Change. Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.