Talk:Older Southern American English

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It's not an orphan anymore.... can I remove that template? - Rhetorent

Characteristics section is for ALL Southern Dialects? Hey everybody, it seems that whoever made this page posted a group of characteristics that apply to English in various parts of the South, not just in the Piedmont and Tidewater of Virginia. I'm from the Piedmont myself, and my dad is from the Tidewater. A lot of those characteristics are simply not right in regards to most people. I looked at the link and it took me to the page that the characteristics are copy and pasted from. The source clearly means that those characteristics are for various dialects in the South, not specifically for the "Old Virginia" dialect. This seems like a pretty serious error to me.
 * Agreed. I'm going for a merger. Wolfdog (talk) 19:43, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
 * (With Tidewater accent). Wolfdog (talk) 23:58, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

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Notable speakers
Thanks for the idea of adding a "Notable speakers" section, which, theoretically, I am all in favor of. I just caution that, first, we should discuss and probably create a draft before changing the page. My reasoning is that "Notable speakers" sections usually dissolve into edit wars (about personal users' feelings one way or another about the speakers' accents) when no citations are provided, especially in a case like Older Southern, which (unlike Modern Southern) is a very broad classification based on regional convenience only and not a uniform type of English. This is the list of speakers posted on the article so far: My initial thoughts are that "Older Southern American English" is not one dialect but an obvious group of separate dialects, so at the very least we should name which specific dialect each of these gentlemen speak. My next concern is the edit-warring potential I mention above. Fortunately, both of these concerns can be dealt with, which could allow us to keep the section. Others' thoughts? Wolfdog (talk) 01:10, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Fritz Hollings
 * Strom Thurmond
 * Shelby Foote
 * Jimmy Carter

Thank you for taking the time to write an entry in the talk page. I am certain that Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings have Charleston accents. However, I am not certain what the names are for Jimmy Carter and Shelby Footes accents though. It isn't really listed anywhere on the page. I would highly recommend expanding the article before we can proceed with this list. I would also like to add George Wallace to the list. Although I've made over 2000 edits, I am not quite sure how to write a draft. Scorpions13256 (talk) 22:27, 2 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Thurmond doesn't have a Charleston accent exactly (though I agree that Hollings clearly does). In particular, Thurmond's accent is not Charlestonian in that he mostly has non-gliding, pen-pin merger, fronted , and no Charleston raising of , though he does have a very high, sometimes gliding non-rhotic (sometimes with a coil-curl merger), non-gliding , and some other clearly Older Southern vowels (Charlestonian or otherwise). In particular, it seems that Thurmond was both born and educated, if not raised, in northwestern South Carolina, which is out of the Charleston dialect region. His accent does seem to align quite perfectly to what I have here labelled "Plantation South". Perhaps we can add such a section to this page here. Carter seems to have a modern Southern accent, except for the older features of it being non-rhotic and no  fronting, meaning it might be a kind of transitional Plantation Southern. Wallace has the older features of  not tensed, high , and wine-whine distinction; the newer features of pen-pin merger,  deleting,  fronting, and Southern  breaking; and the transitional feature of variable rhoticity. Overall, he seems to have a perfectly transitional older-to-modern Southern accent. Not sure what to do with all this original research by myself. Wolfdog (talk) 00:48, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Influences on Appalachian Speech
I noticed that you changed the influence of Applachian speech from northern England to Southern England. Care to discuss. Appalachia was populated for the most part by so called Scots Irish immigrants from the Ulster Plantation, and they were recruited by William of Orange, mostly from the Scottish English border lands with of course some Highland Scots. The speechways of the tidewater (Henrico county, Goochland and Lunenburg county (whichincludes subsequent Mecklenburg and Halifax Counties) migrated through the Cumberland gap into Kentucky, then westward. Some most certainly stayed in the Appalachian mountains, but most continued on as they perceived themselves to be planters, and a planter need large tracts (usually 200 acres)of arable land, something not offered by the Appalachians. Condsidering that there was little tidewater migration to Appalachia and most Appalachians were in fact Scots Irish, and there speechways as well as their music and culture reflect those orgins. I accept that I could be mistaken. So please discuss.Oldperson (talk)

So we have evidence showing that while Southern Appalachian Dialects did have notable influences from Scots-Irish and Northern English settlers, they still maintain major similarities with other Southern Dialects including those in the lowland South. The lowland South was settled by a combination of Planters, Indentured Servants, (most of whom came from Southern and Southwestern England), as well as African Slaves. Indentured Servants from the lowland South moved into Appalachia throughout it's settlement period. The Scots-Irish and German settlers who came later had extensive interactions with these settlers. This accounts for differences seen between Northern Appalachian dialects and Southern Appalachian dialects despite the fact that both parts of Appalachia had significant Scots-Irish ancestry. Also, notice that the early settlement of West Virginia as stated in its Wikipedia article came almost entirely from Eastern Virginia. This also takes into account the regions of the Lowland South that had limited amounts of Slavery. These regions share strong similarities to Southern Appalachia in terms of culture, dialect, music, etc. Take for example Rural Florida, Southeastern Alabama, parts of Inland Southeastern Georgia, and also the inland portion of Western Tennessee which sits between the Mississippi River and The Nashville Region, both of which have strong Lowland Southern Characteristics that Inland Western Tennessee lacks. All of the regions mentioned have no significant evidence of settlement from Appalachia yet show very strong similarities. Many sources support this claim including many Wikipedia articles. However, the primary source that I have for this claim is the Aschmann Dialect map which has a section where it discusses the origins of Southern Dialects in detail and gives sources of it's own to support the research.MaryElizastar12! (talk) 18:13, 3 January 2024 (UTC)