Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (24 page)
Diphthongization, triphthongization and even what might be called double diphthongization are regular characteristics of what has been referred to as “typical” Southern speech. Collectively and popularly, these phenomena are called the Southern drawl. Tyros in the talking pictures and elsewhere who think this Southern drawl is nothing more than slow, attenuated speech produce most inaccurate and laughable results. Duration is probably the basis of the drawl, but it is by no means its end-result.
2
Another Southern observer, this time of Texas,
3
agrees with Wise that the intrusion into cultivated speech of elements borrowed from the folk-speech is more frequent in the South than elsewhere: she might have added that these borrowings are not all phonological, but also include many examples of “bad” grammar,
e.g.
, the use of
don’t
in the third person singular. She says:
Family usage is an important factor in Southern speech. Children whose parents speak a rustic dialect are likely to preserve certain features of their rustic pronunciation even when they are well educated. It is only natural that an observer from another part of the country should feel justified in designating as cultivated Southern pronunciation certain features of the speech of educated Southerners whose speech habits have been acquired in rural communities or from more or less illiterate parents.… Nevertheless, the cultivated Southerner is quick to recognize and condemn the rustic features that appear even in the speech of the educated.
4
But this, obviously, is a begging of the question. The Southerner from the great speech-belt which sweeps southward and westward from the Virginia Piedmont through all the late Confederate States, with branches projecting into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma, and even into Southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, uses habitually a dialect that marks him off instantly, and is not concealed by education. Indeed, Miss Wheatley herself admits that a Southern university professor “may and often does” show speechways that he himself, as a cultivated man, “considers rural and vulgar.” In the Tidewater region of Virginia and South Carolina, where the most elegant of all Southerners live and have their being, little effort
seems to be made to conceal a way of speaking that sounds to many Northerners (as they say in their benighted fashion) somewhat niggerish. A Tidewater Virginian, when he escapes to the wilds of the damyankee, may throw off his native speechways more or less, but at home he clings to them, and Greet tells of a member of the distinguished Carter family who was forced to make its name
Cyahtuh
whenever he returned to visit an intransigent old aunt.
1
Southern American has been neglected by Northern philologians, but some of the Southern brethren have made and published excellent studies of it, notably Cleanth Brooks, Jr.,
2
Raven I. McDavid, Jr.,
3
George P. Wilson,
4
H. P. Johnson,
5
James B. McMillan,
6
Atcheson L. Hench,
7
N. M. Caffee,
8
James T. Barrs,
9
the aforesaid Greet, Combs and Wise, and, above all, William A. Read.
10
Southern speech has suffered cruelly on the stage and in talkies, where kittenish
actresses from the domain of General American think that they have imitated it sufficiently when they have thrown in a few
you-alls
and
honey-chiles
and converted every
I
into a long
ah
. Such outrages have brought forth some sharp protests from Southern philologians, and are frequently belabored in the Southern newspapers. In 1944 Walling Keith, editor of the Gadsden (Ala.)
Times
, was moved to organize a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Southern Accents, with the Hon. Cordell Hull as its president, and Governors Chauncey Sparks of Alabama and Ellis Arnall of Georgia among its trustees. Keith was especially incensed by the use of
you-all
in the singular by “goofy-eyed fake Southern belles,” but he also laid about him on other counts, and got promises of help from many other Southern editors.
1
The exact phonetic nature of the Southern long
i
has been discussed by various sub-Potomac philologians, for example, Medford Evans, of the University of Chattanooga.
2
Evans points out that, in standard English, this phoneme is not a simple vowel, but a diphthong made up of the vowels
a
and
i
(
ah
and
ee
). In Southern speech, however, the latter half of the sound is dropped off, leaving a remnant that sounds to Northerners like
ah
. But it is not precisely
ah
to Southern ears: it is produced nearer the front of the mouth than the true Southern
ah
. Evans says that it appears only at the ends of syllables or before voiced consonants, and in this he is supported by other observers.
3
Thus the Southerner’s first person
I
sounds
ah
to a Northerner, and the same vowel occurs in
my, ride, time, fine, alive, try
and
high
. But in
night, hike, ice, life
and
type
he uses the diphthong that is used by all the other speakers of English.
General American, though it is, technically speaking, as much a dialect as any other form of American speech, is less studied than the rest, no doubt because its immense and growing extension makes it seem obvious and commonplace. As I have noted, some materials
have been gathered looking to a Linguistic Atlas of it, but that atlas will probably not be completed for a good many years. In the early days its larval form, then called Western speech, attracted the attention of the contemporary philologians, for that form was the source of nearly all the current neologisms, many of them of an extraordinary pungency.
1
Webster and Pickering were too early to record more than a few of them, for the great movement into the West, with its vast proliferation of new words and phrases, did not begin in earnest until after the War of 1812, but by the time John Russell Bartlett put together his Glossary in 1848 many of them had come into notice in the East, and he listed a large number. The West was wild and woolly until the Civil War and for twenty years afterward, but in the middle 80s it began to succumb to the schoolma’am and the evangelist, and today it shares with the South the custody of what remains of Puritanism and is quite decorous in its speech. Nearly all the verbal novelties since 1900, in fact, have been generated in the East,
2
and the once-familiar term,
Westernism
, has ceased to have any significance.
3
Even in its palmy days the West introduced few novelties in pronunciation: its contributions were nearly all to the vocabulary. The two waves of pioneers, from the North and the South, met on its wide reaches and the reaction between their speechways produced what is now General American. The misfits lingered in Appalachia or took refuge in the Ozarks, and there hung on to the archaic patois that we have been lately examining. The Pike county dialect of the Mississippi Valley was only a transient phenomenon: it long ago disappeared from all save a few remote backwaters.
The speech of the Western cattlemen, once romantic nomads but now mere drovers,
4
is said by Greet to show a predominantly Southern sub-stratum.
5
“Its eastern boundary in the South,” he says, “runs from Laredo to San Antonio, to Forth Worth, to Little Rock or close by. It extends west to the Pecos river and the Sacramento
Mountains, jumping the Rio Grande Valley, where the influence is strong of New Mexican Spanish (fanning up into southern Colorado). It picks up again in Arizona, and extends north with the cattle industry, skipping the agricultural lands, into the Canadian provinces. The mining communities of the region share the cattlemen’s speech.” But this speech remains a good deal less regional than occupational, and in any case most of its terms have been made so familiar by the movies and by pulp fiction that it hardly strikes the average American as peculiar. In 1913, when Bartle T. Harvey, of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, undertook the first vocabulary of it,
1
he listed many words and phrases that are known to every schoolboy,
e.g., fall guy, bear
(a general term of approval:
It’s a bear
),
to get in bad, to hit the hay, locoed, makings
(of a cigarette) and to
mooch
. A year later, adding to his list, he had little to offer save more of the same sort,
e.g., to buffalo, bull
(idle talk),
coffin-nail
(cigarette),
to goose, to be nuts over, to punch
(cattle) and
twister
(cyclone).
2
All the later contributors to the subject offered only more and more evidence that the speech of the old Wild West was being rapidly assimilated to General American.
3
The same may be said of the speech of the Southwest. It is, even today, much more heavily laden with Spanish loans than General American, but a great many such loans have been taken into the latter,
4
and meanwhile the Southwest seems to be gradually abandoning those that remain, so that New Mexican American promises, on some near tomorrow, to become indistinguishable from the American of the Middle West, as the American of New Orleans, once full of French loans, has become almost indistinguishable from
that of the rest of the lowland South.
1
“Perhaps the Middle West language, whatever it is,” said an intelligent newspaper commentator in 1937,
2
“will prevail because it is a composite. While it has its own sectionalisms, it has rejected to a large degree the radical departures of the older areas of the South and East. Its Tarkingtons, Lardners, Sandburgs and others have created a literature as purely American as any yet produced.”
The sectionalisms here mentioned, of course, are to be found all over the United States, for despite the general uniformity of speech in large areas there are still many local peculiarities, some of them purely regional and the rest determined by occupational and racial factors. In the small State of Maryland, for example,
3
there are five quite distinct speech areas, and several sub-areas. In the two far western counties the prevailing speech is that of Appalachia. To the eastward, under the Mason and Dixon line, the influence of the Pennsylvania German area of Pennsylvania is plainly apparent. On the Eastern Shore, south of the Choptank river, the dialect shows the influence of Tidewater Virginia, with occasional suggestions of Appalachia. On the Western Shore, below Annapolis, it is predominantly General Southern. In Baltimore and vicinity and around the periphery of Washington it is General American, with a few touches of Southern. Moreover, there are innumerable gradations where these areas meet, so that it is often difficult to say of a strange Eastern Shoreman, for example, whether he comes from below the Choptank or above. The same differentiations are to be found in many other States, even, as has been noted, in such apparently homogeneous areas as New England and the Deep South. It is thus
very misleading to sort out American speechways by States. But that, unhappily, is just what has been done by most local writers on the subject, and as a result their reports are often very far from illuminating, for they put down as local variants locutions that are actually common to large areas. Wentworth’s “American Dialect Dictionary” offers massive evidence of this: he shows that words and phrases credited to this or that State are often to be found in other States a thousand miles away,
e.g.
, the pronunciation
yarb
for
herb
occurs both along the Maine coast and in the Ozarks,
ground-hog
for
Arctomys monax
is common to central Pennsylvania and northwestern Arkansas,
bucket
(for the New England
pail
) ranges from the Philadelphia area to Alabama and Kansas, and
heap
from Connecticut through the South to the Far West.
1
But we must take the available material as it comes, and in the following notes I have tried to list and summarize, for the use of local inquirers, such papers on it as I have encountered.
2
The most comprehensive studies of Alabama lowland speech are those of Cleanth Brooks, Jr., already noted in the discussion of Southern speech in general,
3
and James B. McMillan
4
but there are
others worth consulting by L. W. Payne, Jr.,
1
and Leah A. Dennis.
2
Payne’s field of investigation was an area in eastern Alabama and western Georgia “centering around the town of Auburn, Ala., and extending south to include Macon and Russell counties, west to include Tallapoosa county, north to include the counties of Chambers and a small part of Randolph, and east to include the counties of Troupe, Harris and Muscogee in Georgia.” His material was used in the study by Brooks just mentioned. He said of it: “I am convinced that the speech of the white people, the dialect I have spoken all my life and the one I have tried to record here, is more largely colored by the language of the Negroes than by any other single influence. In fact, the coalescing of the Negro dialect with that of the illiterate white people has so far progressed that for all practical purposes we may consider the two dialects as one.”
3
“The dialect of white and Negro,” said Brooks, writing twenty-six years later, “is substantially the same.”
In 1941 McMillan and I. Willis Russell undertook a linguistic survey of the State with funds supplied by the University of Alabama. By 1946 they had accumulated phonographic records from 64 of the 67 counties. Their informants were mainly freshman students at the university, each a native of the county he or she represented, and usually also the child of natives. These informants read “Arthur the Rat” for one face of a record and a script prepared by McMillan and Russell for the other. Other material was gathered in the field. That used for McMillan’s doctoral dissertation, lately mentioned, came mainly from Talladega county, to the eastward of Birmingham, but records were also made in Calhoun, Chambers, Clay, Cleburn, Coosa, Lee, Randolph and Tallapoosa counties. This region overlaps that studied by Payne and Brooks, but lies rather more to the northward. It covers, says McMillan,
