U.S. Dialects

The distribution of dialects is documented through the study of particular words. Every word that is not used nationally has some geographic extent within the country and therefore has boundaries. Such a word-usage boundary, known as an isogloss, can be constructed for each word.

Isoglosses are determined by collecting data directly from people, particularly natives of rural areas. People are shown pictures to identify or are given sentences to complete with a particular word. Although every word has a unique isogloss, boundary lines of different words coalesce in some locations to form regions.

Origin of U.S. Dialects

The United States has four major dialect regions: North, Midland, South, and West (Figure 5-31). The three eastern dialect regions can also be divided into several subdialects. As with other elements of language, the distribution of U.S. dialects is a function of migration.

U.S. Dialect and Subdialects

The United States has four major U.S. dialect regions. The most comprehensive classification of dialects in the United States was made by Hans Kurath in 1949. He found the greatest diversity of dialects in the eastern part of the country, especially in vocabulary used on farms. Kurath divided the three eastern U.S. dialect regions into several subdialects.

The regional dialects display some familiar differences in pronunciation. For example:

• The South dialect includes making such words as half and mine into two syllables (“ha-af” and “mi-yen”).

• The North dialect is well known for dropping the /r/ sound, so that heart and lark are pronounced “hot” and “lock.”

The current distribution of U.S. dialects can be traced to differences in the origin of the English colonists along the East Coast. Three distinct dialect regions developed in the early colonies —North, South, and Midlands.

• North. Two-thirds of the New England colonists were Puritans from East Anglia in southeastern England, and only a few came from the north of England. The characteristic dropping of the /r/ sound is shared with speakers from the south of England.

• South. About half came from southeastern England, although they represented a diversity of social-class backgrounds, including deported prisoners, indentured servants, and political and religious refugees.

• Midland. These immigrants were more diverse. The early settlers of Pennsylvania were predominantly Quakers from the north of England. Scots and Irish also went to Pennsylvania, as well as to New Jersey and Delaware. The Middle Atlantic colonies also attracted many German, Dutch, and Swedish immigrants who learned their English from the English-speaking settlers in the area.

The diffusion of particular English dialects across the United States is a result of the westward movement of colonists from the three East Coast dialect regions. The North and South accents sound unusual to the majority of Americans because the standard pronunciation throughout the American West comes from the Midland rather than the North and South regions. This pattern occurred because most western settlers came from the Midland.

American Sign Language

American Sign Language (ASL) is thought to have originated at the American School for the Deaf, founded in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817 by Thomas Gallaudet. The sign language that Gallaudet adopted was based on methods that he had observed in France. As a result, ASL shares around 80 percent of its movements with those used in France. Around one-half million Americans are estimated to use ASL.

Appalachian English

Natives of Appalachian communities, such as in rural West Virginia, also have a distinctive dialect, pronouncing hollow as “holler” and creek as “crick,” for example. Distinctive grammatical practices include the use of the double negative, such as “ain’t nothing,” and adding “a” in front of verbs ending in “ing,” such as a-sitting.

Speaking an Appalachian dialect produces both pride and challenges. An Appalachian dialect is a source of regional identity but has long been regarded by other Americans as a sign of poor education and an obstacle to obtaining employment in other regions of the United States. Some Appalachian residents are “bidialectic”: They speak “standard” English outside Appalachia and slip back into their regional dialect at home.

African American English

Some African Americans speak a dialect of English heavily influenced by the group’s distinctive heritage of forced migration from Africa during the eighteenth century to be slaves in the southern colonies. African American slaves preserved a distinctive dialect in part to communicate in a code not understood by their white masters. Black dialect words such as gumbo and jazz have long since diffused into the standard English language.

In the twentieth century, many African Americans migrated from the South to the large cities in the Northeast and Midwest (see Chapter 7). Living in racially segregated neighborhoods within northern cities and attending segregated schools, many African Americans preserved their distinctive dialect. That dialect has been termed African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

The American Speech, Language and Hearing Association classifies AAVE as a distinct dialect, with recognized vocabulary, grammar, and word meaning. Among the distinctive elements of the dialect are the use of double negatives, as in Appalachian dialect.

Use of AAVE is controversial within the African American community. On one hand, some regard it as substandard, a measure of poor education, and an obstacle to success in the United States. Others see AAVE as a means for preserving a distinctive element of African American culture and an effective way to communicate with any African American children who may need a bridge between the dialects in order to succeed in school.

Changing Distribution of U.S. Dialects

Many words that were once regionally distinctive are now national in distribution. Mass media, especially TV, influence the adoption of the same words throughout the country. Nonetheless, regional dialect differences persist in the United States. For example, the word for soft drink varies. Most people in the Northeast and Southwest, as well as the St. Louis area, use soda to describe a soft drink. Most people in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Northwest prefer pop. Southerners refer to all soft drinks as Coke.

Soft drinks are called soda in the Northeast and Southwest, pop in the Midwest and Northwest, and Coke in the South

Pause & Reflect 5.3.3

Does your English fall into one of these dialects? Why or why not?

Creole Languages

A creole, or creolized language, is a language that results from the mixing of a colonizer’s language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated. A creolized language forms when the colonized group adopts the language of the dominant group but makes some changes, such as simplifying the grammar and adding words from the former language (Figure 5-33). Examples include French Creole in Haiti, Papiamento (creolized Spanish) in Netherlands Antilles (West Indies), and Portuguese Creole in the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast. These creole languages spoken in former colonies are classified as separate languages because they differ substantially from the original introduced by European colonizers.

Sign on the right, displayed at a march in Miami, Florida, is in Haitian French Creole.