North American English Regional Phonology - Southern American English

Southern American English

Few generalizations can be made about Southern pronunciation as a whole, as there is great variation between regions in the South (see different southern American English dialects for more information) and between older and younger people. Upheavals such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II have caused mass migrations throughout the United States. Southern American English as we know it today began to take its current shape only after World War II. Some generalizations include:

• The conditional merger of and before nasal consonants, the pin–pen merger.
• The diphthong /aɪ/ becomes monophthongized to /aː/.
• Lax and tense vowels often merge before /l/

The South Midland dialect follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moves across Arkansas and Oklahoma west of the Mississippi, and peters out in West Texas. It is a version of the Midland speech that has assimilated some coastal Southern forms, most noticeably the loss of the diphthong, which becomes, and the second person plural pronoun "you-all" or "y'all."

South Midlands speech is characterized by:

• monophthongization of as, for example, most dialects' "I" → "Ah" in the South.
• raising of initial vowel of to ; the initial vowel is often lengthened and prolonged, yielding .
• nasalization of vowels, esp. diphthongs, before .
• raising of to ; can't → cain't, etc.
• Unlike most American English, but like British English, glides (, the y sound) are inserted before after the consonants, and ; that is to say, yod-dropping does not occur.
• South Midlands speech is rhotic. This is the principal feature that distinguishes South Midland speech from the non-rhotic coastal Southern varieties.