The main information about Southern and Northern American English

Introduction

American English (AmE, AE, AmEng, USEng, en-US), also known as United States English or U.S. English, is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two thirds of native speakers of English live in the United States.

The variety of English spoken in the USA has received the name of American English. The term variant or variety appears most appropriate for several reasons. American English cannot be called a dialect although it is a regional variety, because it has a literary normalized form called Standard American, whereas by definition given above a dialect has no literary form. Neither is it a separate language, as some American authors, like H. L. Mencken, claimed, because it has neither grammar nor vocabulary of its own. From the lexical point of view one shall have to deal only with a heterogeneous set of Americanisms.

An Americanism may be defined as a word or a set expression peculiar to the English language as spoken in the USA. E.g. cookie 'a biscuit'; with boards or shingles laid on; ' frame-up ' a staged or preconcerted law case ; guess 'think'; store 'shop'.

This work tell you some new information about Southern American English and Northern American English. What is commonly referred to as a "southern accent" in the United States may be one of the most distinguishable regional accents within the country. However, contrary to popular belief, there is no single "Southern accent". Instead, there are a number of sub-regional dialects found across the Southern United States, collectively known as Southern American English. Yet these dialects often share features of accent and idiom that easily distinguish them from the English spoken in other regions of the United States, features that identify those dialects as "Southern", particularly to other Americans. Although people in the South of the United States speak different "Southern" dialects, they can understand one another, as can, on a broader scale, residents of the United States and the United Kingdom

Southern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.

This linguistic region includes Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas, as well as most of Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia. It also includes parts of southern and central Missouri, and parts of Florida and Maryland.

Southern dialects originated in large part from immigrants from the British Isles who moved to the South in the 17th and 18th centuries. Settlement also included large numbers of Protestants from Ulster, Ireland, and from Scotland. Upheavals such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II caused mass migrations of those and other settlers throughout the United States.

Northern American English (Northern AmE, also rendered as northern American English) is the variety of the English language used in the northern United States. Among the oldest and most pervasive of American English patterns, it is particularly used in New England, New York, New Jersey, and northeastern Pennsylvania, and the dialects extend beyond the Mississippi across northern Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.

Canadian English is believed by some scholars to have originated from northern American English, or to simply be a variety of it. North American English is a collective term used for the varieties of the English language that are spoken in North America, namely in the United States and Canada. Because of the considerable similarities in pronunciation, vocabulary and accent between American English and Canadian English, the two spoken languages are often grouped together under a single category.

The object of research of the given work are Southern and Northern American English dialects. The subject of research of the given course work are features of the use of Southern and Northern American English dialects in various sources and a life. The aim of this research consists in studying groups of Southern and Northern American English dialects on a fiction example. The problems of the given research are:

• To consider the basic classification of southern and northern dialects in various aspects
• To analyse ways of use in various lingvo-cultural situations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter I

Dialect. The main information about Southern and Northern American English

1. The main information about dialects.

There is little question that English is the most widely taught, read, and spoken language that the world has ever known. It may seem strange, on some moments' reflection, that the native language of a relatively small island nation could have developed and spread to this status [1; 225].

It seems, then, that while the criterion of mutual intelligibility may have some relevance, it is not especially useful in helping us to decide what is and is not a language. In fact, we have to recognise that, paradoxically enough, a language is not a particularly linguistic notion at all. Linguistic features obviously come into it, but it is clear that we consider Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and German to be single languages for reasons that are as much political, geographical, historical, sociological and cultural as linguistic. It is of course relevant that all three Scandinavian languages have distinct, codified, standardised forms, with their own orthographies, grammar books, and literatures; that they correspond to three separate nation states; and that their speakers consider that they speak different languages [1; 226].

The term language, then, is from a linguistic point of view a relatively nontechnical term. If therefore we wish to be more rigorous in our use of descriptive labels we have to employ other terminology. One term is variety. We shall use variety as a neutral term to apply to any particular kind of language which we wish, for some purpose, to consider as a single entity. The term will be used in an ad hoc manner in order to be as specific as we wish for a particular purpose. We can, for example, refer to the variety Yorkshire English, but we can equally well refer to Leeds English as a variety, or middle class Leeds English - and so on [1; 227].

More particular terms will be accent and dialect. Accent refers to the way in which a speaker pronounces, and therefore refers to a variety which is phonetically and/or phono-logically different from other varieties. Dialect, on the other hand, refers to varieties which are grammatically (and perhaps lexically) as well as phonologically different from other varieties. If two speakers say, respectively, I done it last night and / did it last night, we can say that they are speaking different dialects[3;372].

The labels dialect and accent, too, are used by linguists in an essentially ad hoc manner. This may be rather surprising to many people, since we are used to talking of accents and dialects as if they were well-defined, separate entities: a southern accent, the Somerset dialect. Usually, however, this is actually not the case. Dialects and accents frequently merge into one another without any discrete break [2; 20].

How is it that English accents have survived the merging of dialects? One important factor is probably mutual intelligibility. Groups who use different dialects but have some degree of contact with each other will find ways of erasing the linguistic obstacles to mutual understanding, if they want to communicate with each other and if they have need to do so. In this respect, accents are much less of an obstacle to mutual understanding than basic differences in vocabulary and sentence structure. A further factor that underpins the continuing vitality of accents is mentioned in the previous discussion of split reactions to prestige forms. Basically, a large proportion of the working class, while recognizing the prestige value of certain forms, none the less identifies strongly with the speech patterns of its own locality. In terms of accent this leads to a cone-or pyramid-like distribution of various forms, a situation that for the British Isles can be summed up in the following way [1; 228].

The prestige accent, known as Received Pronunciation (RP), had its historical origins in a dialect of English associated particularly with the region stretching south-east from the Midlands down towards London, but including the historic university cities of Cambridge and Oxford. It survived because of its association with centres of power and influence. It was spoken by the merchant classes of London in the fourteenth century, for example, and would have been familiar to students attending the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the middle ages. Its status as an important dialect was enhanced by its use in government and official documents from about 1430 onwards. More recently, its association since the nineteenth century with the public schools helped to achieve special pre-eminence for its distinctive patterns of pronunciation. Consequently it is, for instance, the preferred form of pronunciation for reading BBC news bulletins and for teaching English as a second language; and this for the simple reason that, having lost its former regional affiliations, it is now the most widely understood and spoken of all the accents within the British Isles. Its wide dispersal and its typical use by members of the middle and upper classes guarantee it a prestige and status denied to the more regionally marked accents. These latter forms have survived amongst those groups historically less mobile, with less access to higher education and to jobs that entail permanent moves away from their place of origin. Hence the conical nature of accent distn-bution: the "higher" up the social scale, the more likely one is to find the single accent - RP; the "lower" down the social scale, the more likely one is to find regional variation [3;374].

The survival of regional accents does not of course preclude quite sharp judgements upon and reactions to the forms that endure, often rationalized by reference to the way they sound. Thus, the Birmingham accent is often disliked (even by a proportion of those who actually use it), and this negative reaction will be couched in terms of a dislike of its "nasal whine". On the other hand a much more positive reaction will commonly be registered for the Southern Irish accent which will be praised for sounding "soft" and "warm". Other accents with similar ethnic or rural associations such as the Welsh, Scots and West Country accents will likewise evoke positive judgements - the South Wales accent, for example, often being regarded as "lilting" and "musical". But despite the "colourful" properties considered to reside in some of the regional accents, the only accent that speakers generally think of as having absolute claims to "correctness", whether or not they like it, is RP [5; 165].

RP speakers are rated more highly than regionally accented speakers in terms of general competence (e.g. "ambition", "intelligence", "self-confidence", "determination", and "industriousness"). But they emerge less favourably than regionally accented speakers in terms of personal integrity and social attractiveness (e.g. their "seriousness", "talkativeness", and "sense of humour"). Furthermore, some evidence seems to suggest that accents vary in their persuasive power. In one study four similar groups were played a tape recording of an argument against capital punishment. Each group heard the same argument but in a slightly different guise from the others: one group heard an RP version, one heard it in a South Wales accent, one in a Somerset accent and one in a Birmingham accent. A fifth group had the argument presented to them in written rather than spoken form. The RP spoken version was, perhaps not surprisingly, rated highest in terms of the quality of argument [5; 166].

In spite of this, however, it was in the groups which had heard the regionally accented versions that most shift in opinion on the issue was registered, so that regional accents rather than RP seemed to be most effective in changing peoples minds. It may be concluded, therefore, that the sense of integrity associated with the lower-prestige accents counted for more with listeners than the apparent competence and expertise of the RP speaker [3; 374].

Advertising agencies in their preparation of nationally broadcast television commercials display a developed aptitude for trading on these conflicting cross currents of prejudice. Advertisements for pharmaceutical products or for consumer durables (such as cars, televisions, washing machines, hi-fi equipment, vacuum cleaners, etc.), where the emphasis may well be on presenting a commodity that embodies expertise, will typically take an RP accent or perhaps an American one. But for products, especially food, where natural ingredients are to be emphasized (e.g. cottage cheese, frozen turkey, pork sausages, brown bread, dairy butter) regional - especially rural - accents are more likely to be used. Much more rare is an accent associated with Asian or Jamaican ethnic minorities or one associated with a large industrial conurbation such as London, Liverpool or Birmingham - unless used for comic effect or for merchandise where the marketing strategy is more likely to be aimed at the working class (e.g. do-it-yourself car maintenance products or beer) [5; 167].

The relative status of accents with respect to each other is, of course, not totally fixed and static. Just as the alignment of the various groups and formations in society in relation to each other is in a constant process of change, so with patterns of pronunciation and our attitudes towards them. The range and role of accents in the media probably provide quite sensitive indicators of more far-reaching changes taking place in the wider society. For example, until the 1960s it was relatively unusual in British broadcasting for any accent except RP to be used by "institutional" voices such as presenters, quiz-masters, introducers, newsreaders, link persons, interviewers, etc. (Hence, of course, the currency of the term "BBC English".) Since that time there have been structural changes within broadcasting itself that have allowed access to a wider range of accent-types (not to mention minority languages) through the development of regional networks (BBC Wales, for instance, was established in 1964). This in itself reflects a certain sensitivity on the pan of the state to separate regional identities within the larger society. But other kinds of socio-cultural and linguistic change have filtered through into the overall composition of broadcasting even at a national level. For instance, the transformation of popular music in the 1960s - its partial alignment with, and expression of, a distinctive "youth" or "counter" culture, the popularity of the pirate radio stations - all had fundamental consequences for what had been known previously as the "music and light entertainment" sections of broadcasting. The emergence of performers with some claim to working-class roots in large cities such as Liverpool and London (e.g. The Beatles and The Who), carrying with them in their speech clear marks of their origins, conferred a limited respectability on accents which had hitherto thrived only as the hallmark of individual comics or of comedy as a genre. Disc jockeys with working-class accents began to fill radio time and these same accents began to be heard more frequently in drama and soap opera (e.g. "Z Cars" and "Coronation Street"). The accents of the Celtic minorities had always been minimally represented, but it is interesting to note the gradual elevation of both Northern English (e.g. Yorkshire) and Southern Irish accents to the relatively prestigious position of chat show host and interviewer: Southern Irish in the persons of Henry Kelly, Frank Delaney, and Terry Wogan; Northern English in the persons of Michael Parkinson, Russell Harry and Melvyn Bragg. Only in the extreme conditions of wartime radio broadcasting did the BBC use a regional accent for presenting the news. In the early years of the war, when it looked as if the Germans might invade, Wilfrid Pickles -who spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent - was moved south to London to read the news. It was considered that the Germans might successfully mimic an RP accented speaker for propaganda purposes, but that Wilfrids Yorkshire accent would defy imitation. Audience reaction was mixed and the innovation only lasted as long as the fear of invasion. In peacetime the last bastions of BBC TV to fall to regional accents will no doubt be "Panorama" and "the Nine o'clock News"; but then to a Scots, Irish, Welsh or Yorkshire accent rather than one associated unambiguously with one of the major industrial conurbations [3; 375].

There are many parts of the world where, if we examine dialects spoken by people in rural areas, we find the following type of situation. If we travel from village to village, in a particular direction, we notice linguistic differences which distinguish one village from another. Sometimes these differences will be larger, sometimes smaller, but they will be cumulative. The further we get from our starting point, the larger the differences will become. The effect of this may therefore be, if the distance involved is large enough, that (if we arrange villages along our route in geographical order) while speakers from village A understand people from village B very well and those from village F quite well, they may understand village M speech only with considerable difficulty, and that of village Z not at all. Villagers from M, on the other hand, will probably understand village F speech quite well, and villagers from A and Z only with difficulty. In other words, dialects on the outer edges of the geographical area may not be mutually intelligible, but they will be linked by a chain of mutual intelligibility. At no point is there a complete break such that geographically adjacent dialects are not mutually intelligible, but the cumulative effect of the linguistic differences will be such that the greater the geographical separation, the greater the difficulty of comprehension [1; 230].

This type of situation is known as a geographical dialect continuum. There are many such continua. In Europe, for example, the standard varieties of French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese are not really mutually intelligible. The rural dialects of these languages, however, form part of the West Romance dialect continuum which stretches from the coast of Portugal to the centre of Belgium (with speakers immediately on either side of the Portuguese-Spanish border, for instance, having no problems in understanding each other) and from there to the south of Italy. Other European dialect continua include the West Germanic continuum, which includes all dialects of what are normally referred to as German, Dutch and Flemish (varieties spoken in Vienna and Ostend are not mutually intelligible, but they are linked by a chain of mutual intelligibility); the Scandinavian dialect continuum, comprising dialects of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish; the North Slavic dialect continuum, including Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Slovak; and the South Slavic continuum, which includes Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Macedonian and Bulgarian. [3; 375]

The notion of the dialect continuum is perhaps a little difficult to grasp because, as has already been noted, we are used to thinking of linguistic varieties as discrete entities, but the fact that such continua exist stresses the legitimacy of using labels for varieties in an ad hoc manner. Given that we have dialect continua, then the way we divide up and label particular bits of a continuum may often be, from a purely linguistic point of view, arbitrary [5; 168].

In some cases, where national frontiers are less well established, dialect continua can cause political difficulties - precisely because people are used to thinking in terms of discrete categories rather than m id hoc or continuum-type terms. The South Slavic dialect continuum, as we have seen, incorporates the standard languages Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Macedonian and Bulgarian. Those varieties spoken on the former Yugoslavian side of the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border were claimed by Yugoslavia to be Macedonian and by Bulgaria to be Bulgarian. The argument was basically, of course, about the location of the frontier, with Bulgaria claiming what was Yugoslavian territory. From a purely linguistic point of view, however, the argument is not resolvable, since dialect continua admit of more-or-less but not either-or judgements. The linguistic varieties involved may be more or less like standard Macedonian or Bulgarian, but no linguist would feel confident about saying that they actually are one or the other [3; 375].

Dialect continua can also be social rather than geographical, and continua of this type can also pose problems. A good example of this is provided by Jamaica. The linguistic history of Jamaica, as of many other areas of the Caribbean, is very complex. One (simplified) interpretation of what happened is that at one time the situation was such that those at the top of the social scale, the British, spoke English, while those at the bottom of the social scale, the African slaves, spoke Jamaican Creole. This was a language historically related to English but very different from it, and in its earlier stages probably was not too unlike modem Sranan (another English-based Creole spoken in Surinam). The following extract from a poem in Sranan demonstrates that it is a language clearly related to English (most words appear to be derived from English) but nevertheless distinct from it and not mutually intelligible with it:

 

mi go —  m'ekon,	I've gone - I come,
sootwatra bradi,	the sea is wide.
tak wan mofo,	Say the words,
ala mi mati,	you all my friends,
tak wan mofo,	say the words. I've gone,
m'go,	I come...
m'e kon...

 

Over the centuries, however, English, the international and prestigious language of the upper social strata, exerted a considerable influence on Jamaican Creole. (Jamaican Creole was recognised as being similar to English, and was therefore often (erroneously) regarded, because of the social situation, as an inferior or debased form of it.) [3; 376].

Two things have happened. First, the "deepest" Creole is now a good deal closer to English than it was (and than Sranan is). Secondly, the gap between English and Jamaican Creole has been filled in. The result is that, while people at the top of the social scale speak something which is clearly English, and those at the bottom speak something which clearly is not, those in between speak something in between. The range of varieties from "pure" English to "deepest" Creole forms the social dialect continuum. Most speakers command quite a wide range of the continuum and "slide" up and down it depending on stylistic context. The following examples from different points on West Indian dialect continua illustrate the nature of the phenomenon:

It's my book	/ didn 't get any	Do you want to cut it ?
its mai buk	ai didnt get eni	du ju wont tu kAt it
iz mai buk	ai didn get non	du ju wa:n tu kot it
iz mi buk	a din get non	ju warn kot it
a mi buk dat	a in get non	iz kot ju wccn kot it
a fi mi buk dat	mi na bin get non	a kot ju wccn fu kot i

The problem with the Jamaican social dialect continuum is that, while any division of it into two parts would be linguistically as arbitrary as the division of the northern part of the Scandinavian continuum into Norwegian and Swedish, there is no social equivalent of the political geographical dividing line between Norway and Sweden. There is no well-motivated reason for saying, of some point on the continuum, that "English stops here" or "Jamaican Creole starts here". The result is that, whether in Jamaica or in, say, Britain, Jamaicans are considered to speak English. In fact, some Jamaicans do speak English, some do not, and some speak a variety or varieties about which it is not really possible to adjudicate. Clearly, the varieties spoken by most Jamaicans are not foreign to, say, British English speakers in the same way that French is, but they do constitute in many cases a semi-foreign language. Again this is a difficult notion for many people to grasp, since we are used to thinking of languages as being well-defined and clearly separated entities: either it is English or it is not. The facts, however, are often Somewhat different. The most obvious difficulty to arise out of the Jamaican situation (and that in many other parts of the West Indies) is educational. West Indian children are considered to be speakers of English, and this is therefore the language which they are taught to read and write in and are examined in. Educationists have only recently come to begin to realise, however, that the relative educational failure of certain West Indian children may be due to a failure by educational authorities to recognise this semi-foreign language problem for what it is [1; 231].