American Language Supplement 2 (25 page)

McMillan’s detailed description of this dialect shows that it is a mixture of Appalachian, Southern Lowland and General American. Post-vocalic and pre-consonantal
r
is sounded by many of the poor whites, as in General American, but is reduced to something resembling the neutral vowel by the gentry and the Negroes.
Sh
followed by
r
is commonly transformed into
s
, so that
shrink
and
shred
become
srink
and
sred
. Final
t
preceded by
p, k, f
and
s
is usually lost, so that
guest
becomes
goes
and
sects
and
sex
are homophones.
Mrs
. may be
miz, mis
or
miziz
, but is never
misiz
. The flat
a
is used normally in
aunt, dance, pass, half, bath
, etc., but transformed into what McMillan calls “a new diphthong, with an
i
off-glide, acoustically close to
ei
.” Before
r
and
m
, as in
far, calm
, etc., the broad
a
is heard.

There is a chapter headed “Folklore and Folkways” in “Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South,” in the American Guide Series,
¹
but it offers only a few specimens of the local speech. The same book says that the early settlers were “small farmers from the Atlantic seaboard.” It reports that there are French-speaking Cajans (Acadians) in the southwestern corner of the State, along the Louisiana border; a Russian colony at Brookside, near Birmingham, a colony of Swedes in Baldwin county, across Mobile Bay from Mobile, and one of Germans in the same county. These colonies have introduced some of their native folk customs, but they seem to have had no effect upon the local speech.

Notes on Arizona speechways will be found in the discussions of Southwestern speech in general, already noted. In 1914 A. P. Man,
Jr., printed in
Dialect Notes
¹
a brief vocabulary collected from the Western stories of Stewart Edward White.

In 1904 J. W. Carr, of the University of Arkansas, began the publication in
Dialect Notes
of a series of observations in the Ozark region of Northwestern Arkansas.
²
This part of the State, he said, “was settled largely by people from Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri,” and, like Randolph, he found their “peculiarities of speech” to be mainly Appalachian. His field-work was done in the vicinity of Fayetteville, in Washington county. During the same year an English Club was organized at the University of Arkansas, and one of its purposes was “to study the English spoken in Arkansas.” Carr had the aid of its members, and especially of one of them, Rupert Taylor. He listed a number of locutions apparently peculiar to Northwestern Arkansas,
e.g., to grabble
, to dig only the largest potatoes;
hickory-tea
, a whipping;
mush and molasses
, idle talk;
ciphering-match
, a contest in arithmetic;
cook-room
, a kitchen;
to jowl
, to quarrel, used only of dogs and children;
squat-drop
and
rousin’ oil
, a purgative;
training-school
, a prep-school leading to the State university;
wire-road
, one along which a telegraph wire was strung;
Yankee
, a cheat;
blue
, mouse-colored;
calico
, a woman;
brought on
, imported, and some interesting names for children’s games,
e.g., Bill Brown’s Big Black Hog, Black Man, Bring Home What You Borrowed, Chicago, Old Granny Hobble-Gobble, Crook Crab
, and
Frog in the Middle
. In this fourth paper he listed some Arkansas words and phrases also reported elsewhere, most of them from nearby States but some from as far away as Cape Cod. In 1937 James H. Warner undertook a complementary study of the speech of the Arkansas lowlands. This region is outside the Appalachian area, and shows both Southern and Western influences. Warner said of it:

I add a few of Warner’s examples, some of them common to the whole lowland South:

“California,” wrote B. H. Lehman in
Dialect Notes
in 1921,
²
“offers a fine opportunity to the collector of words. Its size, its peculiar history, its natural diversity, the varied industry and varied idleness of its inhabitants, and a remarkable disposition to create words, all enrich the field.” Lehman listed a number of terms, presumably of California origin, that have since come into general use,
e.g., jaywalker, hang-out, pearl-diver
(a dish-washer),
purp, patootie
(a sweetheart), and various words in -
eria
, -
ery
and -
atorium
.
³
Spanish terms, of course, are in more frequent use than in the East, and there is an appreciable infiltration of loans from the Chinook trade-language.
⁴
Percy Marks, who is a native of the State, tells me
⁵
that in its northern part English is spoken “closer to as it is spelled” than anywhere else in the country. The Californians there, he says, “are not nasal; they sound the
r
, and the
a
is usually flat; they slur less than any other people; they sound every syllable.” But another
correspondent says that some curious dialectal peculiarities survive among the older inhabitants of San Francisco, including a diphthongization of
i
that suggests vaguely the
boid
and
goil
of Brooklyn. Of this I have no other evidence.

So far as I know, the only published study of Colorado speech is in a paper by Louis Swinburne.
¹
It is devoted mainly to the argot of cattlemen, but also lists some Indian and Spanish loans. In 1879, three years after the State entered the Union and a year after the beginning of the Leadville mine boom, a brief note on the subject was printed in the Denver
Tribune
,
²
but this note showed nothing beyond a few specimens of the general cow country speech of the time,
e.g., round-up
for a social party,
³
to corral
in the general sense of to get,
⁴
to go over the range
for to die,
to pass in one’s chips
,
⁵
to buck
(of a horse),
⁶
and
cow-puncher
.

Noah Webster was a native and almost lifelong resident of Hartford, Conn., and hence took a somewhat bilious view of the speech-habits of the Boston area. The fact may have had as much to do as the flow of immigration with the failure of the Boston dialect to make any progress west of central New England. The seam between it and the Connecticut speech-area, according to Hans Kurath,
⁷
“runs straight north from the mouth of the Connecticut river through Connecticut and Massachusetts to the southern boundary of Franklin county, where it swerves west and follows the southern boundary of Franklin county to the Berkshires. Here it turns north again and runs along the crest of the Green Mountains to the northern boundary of Vermont.” The most distinctive feature in the pronunciation of the area west of this line, he adds, “is the rather general use of
r
in all positions, contrasting with the eastern habit of
pronouncing
r
only when followed by a vowel.”
¹
But there are also other differences in phonology, and in vocabulary there are a great many, as the maps in the Linguistic Atlas of New England show. The Connecticut dialect, moving up the Connecticut river valley, not only prevailed in most of western New England, but also barged into upper New York, and from there spread westward as the basis of General American. For that reason, says Kurath, “it impresses most Americans as less distinctive than that of the seaboard.” This is not saying that it lacks local peculiarities – as a matter of fact, it still shows plenty of them —,
²
but at bottom it is less aberrant than the Boston dialect, and much less than those of Appalachia and the South.

E. H. Babbitt, one of the founders of the American Dialect Society in 1889, undertook soon afterward a study of the speech of his native region – the hilly district west of the Connecticut river, running along the Housatonic. He found that it was very close to the dialect of the Ithaca region in New York State – in other words, to General American.
³
In 1905 William E. Mead and George D. Chase followed with a report on the dialect of Middleton, on the west bank of the Connecticut river, with some additions from Windham county in the northeastern corner,
⁴
and in 1932 M. Cordelia Fuller made a brief one on that of Danbury, in the western end of the State, based upon the speech of her mother, then ninety-three years old.
⁵

In 1933 Greet made a linguistic survey of the region that its inhabitants called Delmarva,
i.e.
, the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, and most of Delaware. He found a variety of speechways, including Tidewater Southern, General Southern, and, rather curiously, even Appalachian. Indeed, he came to the surprising conclusion that the common dialect of Delmarva was closer to “the speech heard in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Madison county, Virginia,” than to any lowland Southern dialect. Even the “more formal speech” of the region, he reported, was “similar to what you hear in the towns of southwestern Virginia and of Tennessee, in Fort Worth (Texas), and in the cattle country as far west as Roswell, New Mexico.” He went on:

Greet did not offer any surmise as to how and why the Appalachian speech threw this anomalous outrider into a region so different geographically and so far away. In the lower reaches of Delmarva, of course, he found that the influence of Tidewater and General Southern was rather more marked, and on the islands in the lower Chesapeake and off the Atlantic coast he encountered people speaking a dialect “related to the speech of the Guinea region of Gloucester county, Virginia.”
¹

The same influence of Appalachian is visible among the crackers of western Florida, “especially those living along the rivers which flow from the Georgia and Alabama uplands,”
²
but here it is obviously
due to immigration. So far as I know, no general investigation of Florida speechways has ever been made, and the literature of the subject is confined to a few brief notes. In 1916 the late F. Sturges Allen (1861–1920), then general editor of the Webster New International Dictionary, sent to
Dialect Notes
¹
twenty-five terms picked up mainly at St. Petersburg, but subsequent research by Wentworth and others has shown that only a few of them could be called peculiar to Florida,
e.g., bomb
, a wad of paper soaked in kerosene, used to kindle a fire. The dialect of the Conchs, as they are called, who inhabit the Florida Keys, has been reported on by Thomas R. Reid, Jr.
²
He says that they lengthen the short
i
to a long
ee
-sound, confuse
w
and
v
, drop their
h’s
like Cockneys, use
ain’t
for
won’t
and
haven’t
, and translate many Spanish idioms.