Talk:Southern American English

Y'all go "y'all" wrong. It's singular

The citation offered for calling "y'all" a plural pronoun does not actually say any such thing. In truth "y'all" is a singular collective term. Compare a SCHOOL of fish, a HERD of antelope, a PRIDE of lions, a PACK of wolves, a CONGREGATION of worshipers, a CAST of characters, etc. As this page itself points out, "all y'all" is the plural form of "y'all." "All y'all" is used for groups of groups. For example, "Y'all over here say 'star,' and y'all over here say 'wars' and that way all y'all together will be saying 'Star Wars.'" I am editing accordingly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.121.192.199 (talk) 17:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 January 2019 and 9 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): BitterLilyz.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:52, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

"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 <ea> 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 Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 December 29#Country accent 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)