Regional Patterns of American Speech

The American Frontier Through the passage of time, the frontier contributions of Northern European folk speech—especially British, Irish, Scots, and Swedish—have lost much of their identity because their speakers were soon united in a common culture. But from these sources of early frontier speech probably came the pronouns hit (for it), hisn, ourn, theirn, and yourn, the inflected verb forms clumb, drug, holp, and riz, the auxiliary construction mought could (or might could), and a large number of folk pronunciations and lexical items, forms transmitted through the oral tradition of the common people. Scots forms also appearing in the poetry of Robert Burns include duds (clothes), gumption, hunkers, mountain billy (hillbilly), tow (hemp fiber), and the distinctive pronunciations reflected in chimla (chimney), het (heated), and southron (southern), as well as the simplification of consonant clusters, as in kin‘ (kind) and sin‘ (since), and the total assimilation of l after back vowels, as in ca’ (call), fu’ (full), and howe (hollow). From Irish sources probably came mammy, moonshine, and mountain dew. General English folk forms also included clean, flat, and plumb (all meaning "completely"), passel (from parcel), and sass (from sauce). Many of these forms go back to Middle English, and all survive in current American Midland and Southern dialects. 18 The Evolution of Dialects in American English The principal regions of American English developed during the 18th century, as the historic American cultural areas took shape. Every major regional dialect area, past and present, corresponds almost perfectly with a cultural area delimited by other social factors. For instance, the presbyteries of Appalachia mark the pattern of Scottish settlement; Dutch and German barns show a Germanic presence in the eastern and east-central states; different methods of cooking cornmeal in pones, dodgers, and hushpuppies reflect the settlement patterns of various groups. Even the superstitions connected with chicken clavicles (wishbone, pulley bone, or lucky bone) identify social groups, as do the traditional Southern greetings hey and Christmas gift! Wherever clear-cut boundaries of culture can be reconstructed on the basis of historical information from archaeology, music, graphic arts, or the social sciences, dialect differences can be predicted based on the most persuasive kind of circumstantial evidence: the recorded experience of the forebears of a speech community. 19 The different cultural areas of historical America thus had characteristic words that distinguished them from one another or from the broader culture. For instance, the general terms harmonica, headcheese, mantelpiece, and wishbone all contrast with folk forms such as French harp, souse, fireboard, and pulley bone, and so provide evidence of distinct regional varieties of American English. To establish these historical patterns of regional variation, linguistic research since the 1940s has concentrated on the speech of elderly speakers who traveled little outside their native communities. But because language changes, some words may no longer conform to earlier regional designations determined by linguistic research. Terms such as blinds (window shades), skillet (frying pan), and green beans no longer exclusively identify the historical dialects of Pennsylvania today just as other terms such as snack, slaw (coleslaw), and seesaw no longer authoritatively mark the Southern dialects. Consequently, the labeling of dialect terms in any American dictionary may in some instances seem at odds with one’s personal experience of contemporary American English. 20 The Northern Pattern The historical dialects of the Northern states include a Coastal and an Inland Northern pattern, extensions of eastern and western New England, respectively, as well as southwestern New England (western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and north central Pennsylvania), metropolitan New York (the New York City focal area), and the Hudson Valley (south central New York and northeastern Pennsylvania). The Inland Northern dialect extends from the lower Connecticut Valley, first into the old New England frontier and then across the vast expanse of the Middle West. Whether as a result of isolation from British sources or the internal social chemistry of the frontier setting, Inland Northern is often viewed as more typical of American usage than any other regional configuration. Two typical pronunciations are most striking: postvocalic r is preserved in all contexts; and ä is the expected vowel in crop, on, and almost all other members of this historical set, with the exception of dog and with divided usage in hog and log. Northern lexical forms extend over the entire territory: burlap bag, chipmunk, clapboards, faucet, fried cake (doughnut), haycock, lobbered milk (clabbered milk), spider (frying pan, originally with three legs), and teeter-totter. 21

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