Talk:Southern American English

Other Vocabulary
Would just like to add some other slang that is used in the Southern United States.

Britches - Pants Lick (noun) - A general amount of the content being described. Uppity - Snobby How do? - How do you do? Hankerin' for - A craving for

- Having my whole family from the south the list could go on forever, just figured adding a few more for some that might need clarification

MLKing (talk) 06:23, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * They sound good so long as you can find a better source. Not sure if "Red Neck Slang" is the most credible one out there, ha. Wolfdog (talk) 20:57, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

It is well known that "Bless your heart" is actually Southern for "Go to hell" (or a similar sentiment) and not a statement of sympathy as defined in this article. I don't yet have a source that can be cited for this, though. --Peter (Cactus Pete) (talk) 20:40, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is true, and also true that a source would be great. It's certainly both: an expression of concern that became used (maybe used even more) in an ironic sense. Wolfdog (talk) 23:30, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

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"Confederate English" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Confederate English. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Hog Farm (talk) 15:56, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Celtic or Germanic or what?
Does the southern drawl come from ethnic southern celtic people's way of speaking or from germanic people's way of speaking? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.79.178.4 (talk) 15:51, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * It's rather late to answer, but I think the best answer to your question is neither; the 'southern drawl' or the modern dialect is a relatively new phenomenon, with most of its notable features only appearing in the past 100 years with little to no record prior. Some of its modern features are from Southwest Irish English such as the pin-pen merger, use of 'do be' as a marker of habitual aspect, and (for some speakers) th-stopping. But by and large, most of its features are speech innovations instead of inheritances from an older phonology (though many pre-world war dialects had other Irish-born features such as monophthongal FACE /eː/ and GOAT /oː/ vowels, pronouncing some words spelled  with the /eː/ vowel instead of modern standard /iː/, and others with less or no documentation). As for the idea of it coming at all from any one group's way of speaking- just remember that dialects follow immigration patterns, so stating it as an "or"-type question doesn't really work for these things.
 * Anyway, hope that answer is satisfactory! LinguaNerd (talk) 14:44, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

"Country accent" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Country accent and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 December 29 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. signed,Rosguill talk 20:41, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Sure in /ʊər/ set
It makes more sense to group post-alveolars with palatals with how they're treated in sound changes. Is there a more elegant way of clearly communicating this relation in the table? And if we do not create a separate category for the palatal/post-alveolar class as a whole with this vowel, why make one for /jʊər/ specifically? LinguaNerd (talk) 02:38, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

"Tell-say" reduplication
As a native of the Charleston metro (I state this in case this is instead specific to Charlestonian English, the Carolinas-Georgia lowlands region, etc.), I often hear people, usually older speakers, follow a transitive "tell" clause (with the patient being the person who'll be spoken to) with another "say" clause (with the patient being what's going to be said). Something like:


 * "I told him, I said 'What the hell are you talking about?'"
 * "Tell her, say 'I ain't gonna hurt ya!'"

This isn't just what any English speaker would do, with two seemingly seperable clauses (as one could optionally replace the comma with a period, thus making "I told him." its own independent sentence; the construction I'm talking about appears to make the "tell" clause dependent on the "say" clause, as they always come in tandem). The way it's said, it's more like an odd semantically-reduplicative construction: One would use this the same as they would use just a single "tell" or "say" clause.

I'll admit, this is all by personal experience; I don't have any literature or online sources to back up what I'm describing. 2600:1700:2DA1:C20F:EA90:27F1:90FB:F029 (talk) 08:44, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
 * In my experience this also occurs outside of the South. Sometimes other words are used. An example I heard in New York: "I says to him, I says, 'That's stupid'". We'd need a reliable source that this only occurs in the South. Sundayclose (talk) 16:37, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Examples of famous non-rhotic speakers
We could include George Wallace and Bull Connor as examples of famous Alabamians who spoke in a non-rhotic accent that I believe is extinct in the state now, apart from among its black inhabitants of course. We could even do the same for the Texan country singer Tex Ritter. I suspect such Texan accents died out not long after the 40s when he was singing and such Alabamian accents died out not long after the 60s when Wallace and Cooper were about. Of course this would be original research without referring to an academic source describing these people as non-rhotic but the fact that they were can easily be discerned by watching YouTube videos. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 06:04, 24 February 2023 (UTC)