“Southern American English in Alabama”
Alabama Humanities Foundation Speakers Bureau
Catherine Evans Davies
use my outsider status to my advantage because it allows me to notice things that someone who is inside might not see
monophthongized [ai]
“double modals” I might can go; I might could go
“vernacular” casual speech, defined as containing stigmatized features
/i/
/ai/ bright white light vs. nice white rice
“Do You Speak American?” American Varieties: Sounds of the South. PBS. 2005. http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/southern/sounds/
The most widely recognized phonological features of SAE are the merger of the vowels in words like pen and pin or ten and tin (the vowel in both words has the sound of the second member of the pair) and the loss of the offglide of the /ai/ diphthong in words like hide (so that it sounds like hahd). SAE is also characterized by a series of vowel rotations that William Labov (1993) has called the “Southern Shift.” Describing the shift would require an extensive technical phonetic descriptions of SAE vowels, but people can hear its most important feature simply by listening to Bill Clinton’s pronunciation of the vowel in way or stayed. The beginning of the vowel (which is a diphthong in SAE) will sound something like the vowel in father. Vowel differences such as these are hard to describe in non-technical terms, but they are what makes people immediately recognizable as speakers of SAE -- long before a might could, fixin to, or yall crops up in their speech.