In his book, “The Ozarks,” he gives the following specimen:
Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an’ biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin’ o’ mother-wit, an’ he aint nothin’ on’y a tie-whackin’ sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an’ his least chaps a-bustin’ out middles down in ol’ man Price’s bottom t’other ev’nin’, a-whoopin’ an’ a-blaggardin’ an’ a-spewin’ ambeer all over each an’ ever’, whilst thet ’ar pore susy hippoed woman o’ hisn was a-pickin’ boogers out’n her yeller tags, an’ a-scunchin’ cheenches on th’ puncheon with a antiganglin’ noodle-hook. D’rectly Lee he come a-junin’ in all narvish-like an’ tetchous, an’ rid th’ pore ol’ trollop a bug-huntin’ — jes’ plum bodacious hipped an’ ruinated her. They never did have nothin’ on’y jes’ a heap o’ poke salat an’ a passel o’ these hyar hawg-mollies, but he must a got hisse’f a bait o’ vittles some’ers, ’cause come can’le-light he geared up his ol’ piedy cribber an’ lit as huck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol’ durgen — he, should orter be bored fer th’ simples’.
The pronunciation of this dialect, according to Mr. Randolph,109 is very much like that of general vulgar American as noted in Sections 2 and 4 of the present chapter, but it preserves many early forms that have fallen out of use elsewhere, and reinforces and exaggerates most of those that remain. The short a is so much favored that it appears even in balm and gargle, but in narrow and barrel a broad a is substituted, so that they become nahrr’ and bahr’l In other situations the broad a is turned into a u, as in whut, fur and ruther for what, far and rather. In have and gather the a becomes e, making hev and gether. A final unstressed a often becomes y, as in Clary, alfalfy and pneumony. Certain is nearly always sartain, and celery is salery. The u is seldom pronounced correctly. Brush is bresh, such is sich, sure is shore, until is ontil, gum is goom and ewe is yo. The au-sound is usually changed. Saucy, as in the general vulgate, becomes sassy, and jaundice is janders. In addition, haunt is hant and aunt is either ant or something like ain’t. The difficulties that all untutored Americans have with t are multiplied. “Such nouns as post and nest,” says Mr. Randolph, “drop the t in the singular, but in the plural the t is pronounced distinctly and an unaccented syllable added — nestes and postes. T replaces the final d in words like salad, ballad, killed, errand, scared and held, so that they are best rendered salat, ballat, kilt, errant, skeert and helt. Occasionally the final t is replaced by a k-sound, as when vomit is turned into vomick” An excrescent t is added to many words beside the familiar once, wish and close; thus sudden becomes suddint, trough is trought, cliff is clift and chance is chanct. An intrusive y appears in hear and ear, which become hyar and yhar. The sk of muskrat and muskmelon is changed to sh. “The -ing ending is always pronounced in, with the short i-sound very distinct.… The Ozarker says sleepin’ — never sleep’n’.… Sometimes the g is dropped from the middle of a word also, as in strength and length, which are nearly always pronounced stren’th and len’th”. In many words the accent is thrown forward; thus, catarrh, guitar, insane, harangue, relapse, police and hurrah are accented on the first syllable. The Ozarker borrows a cockneyism in hit for it, but he uses it “only at the beginning of a clause, or when unusual emphasis is desired.”110
In most ways the pronunciation of the hillmen of the main Appalachian range is identical with Ozarkian usage, but it shows a stronger influence of Tidewater Southern. There are, of course, many local variations, due to the extreme isolation of the mountain communities. Maristan Chapman discerns three chief sub-dialects — the first spoken in the Cumberlands of Kentucky and Tennessee, the second in the Great Smokies, and the third in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and West Virginia.111 Differences are to be found, not only in pronunciation, but also in vocabulary, and Mr. Chapman gives some curious examples. In the Cumberlands a small portion of anything is a smidgen, in the Great Smokies it is a canch, and in the Blue Ridge it is a tiddy-bit. In the Cumberlands a cow is a cow-beast, in the Great Smokies she is a cow-brute, and in the Blue Ridge she is a she-cow. In the Ozarks, it may be added, cow-brute is a euphemism for bull. But these differences are yielding to good roads and the automobile, and in another generation the mountain folk, for the most part, will probably be speaking the general vulgate.112 The mountain type of speech is not confined to the actual mountains. It has been taken to the Piedmont by hill-folk going to work in the cotton-mills, and Dr. W. Cabell Greet says that it is “well fixed on the Southwestern plains and in cities like Fort Worth and Dallas,” and has echoes on the Delmarva Peninsula and on the islands of Chesapeake Bay. He adds that “it is often slower than the speech of the lowlands, where rapid speech is more common than slow speech”; also, that it is “often nasal and high pitched.”113
The popular belief ascribes some of the characters of General Southern American — for example, the elision of the r before consonants and the intrusion of the y before certain vowels — to Negro influence. This belief is not of recent origin, for on April 15, 1842, Charles Dickens, who was then in the United States, wrote home to his wife: “All the women who have been bred in slave States speak more or less like Negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurses.” But Dr. Greet, in a notable essay,114 argues convincingly that the thing has really run the other way. “When the slaves were brought to America,” he says, “they learned the accent of their masters. There is literally no pronunciation common among Negroes, with possible exceptions in Gullah, that does not occur generally in vulgar or old-fashioned American speech.” In this judgment two other students of Negro speech agree completely. One is Cleanth Brooks, Jr., of Louisiana State University, who says:
In almost every case, the specifically Negro forms turn out to be older English forms which the Negro must have taken originally from the white man, and which he has retained after the white man has begun to lose them.115
The other is the late George Philip Krapp, who wrote in “The English Language in America”:
The Negroes omitted their r’s because they heard no r’s in the speech of their white superiors. Since they were entirely dependent upon hearing in learning the sounds of speech, their sounds could not be affected by the visual impressions of spelling, and for this reason their pronunciation of words with r final before consonants may seem broader, may seem fuller and franker, than that of educated white speakers. Even this difference, however, is likely to be an illusion on the part of the critical hearer, who is inclined to hear the speech of educated persons in terms of conventional spelling but of uneducated persons in terms of illiterate spelling.116
In another place117 Dr. Krapp argued that the common belief that the voice of the Negro differs from that of the white man is also unsupported by the facts. There is a slight difference, he said, in speech tunes, but not much. Put a Negro and a white man, both from the same part of rural Georgia and both on the same economic level, behind a screen and bid them speak the same words, and it will be difficult if not impossible to distinguish one from the other. Dr. Krapp was even indisposed to grant that the use of I is for I am among the lower orders of Negroes is a true Negroism: he tracked it down in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, and found that it was common in England so long ago as the Thirteenth Century.118 Nevertheless, there is a conventionalized Negro dialect, perhaps launched by the minstrel shows of the past generation, that all Americans recognize, and it plays a large part in American literature.119 Perhaps the Negro himself has imitated this dialect: nature, as Oscar Wilde once said, always imitates art. Walt Whitman not only believed in its existence, but saw vast potentialities in it. “The nigger dialect,” he said in “An American Primer,”120 “has hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes, on grand and simple principles.” But it is not cert
ain that Walt knew precisely what he was talking about here.121
Dr. Greet, in the essay above mentioned, says that there are “many varieties of speech in the South, all closely related to speech in other parts of the country.” He distinguishes three main varieties: the Virginia Tidewater type, the General Southern lowland type, and the Southern hill type. The first named prevails along the coast from the Delmarva Peninsula to South Carolina, and has colonies in the northern Shenandoah region and in the vicinity of Charlottesville. Its territory includes Richmond. The General Southern lowland type prevails everywhere else save in the mountains. In the Virginia Piedmont it is modified by the Tidewater type. The latter is, in general, more “Southern” than the other two: it embodies most of the peculiarities that Northerners associate with sub-Potomac speech, e.g., the intrusion of a y-sound before a after g or k, as in gyarden and cyar. “Elsewhere in the South and Southwest, hill and plain,” says Dr. Greet, “y often appears before [i, the short e of get and the flat a of hat], but never before [broad a].” Even in the Tidewater region the y is not often heard in “the speech of business and professional men, if we except Episcopal ministers,” but “certain gentlemen of the old school, many ladies of the old families, débutantes who have attended Episcopal institutions, professional Virginians, and parvenues are fond of the sound.” Before a as in gate, a as in carry, e as in get and i as in gift, however, it “has no social merit,” and before o as in cow it is “a real faux pas.” But it is favored before the ir in girls. “I am sufficiently under the influence of the sentimental South and speech snobbery,” says Dr. Greet, “to think that gyirls is a very fine pronunciation. Every man to his own choice.”122
The New England variety of American is anything but a homogeneous whole. In its coastal form, centering in Boston, it is very like the Standard English of Southern England, but as one moves westward it gradually loses itself in General American. The New England dialect that has been put to such heavy use in American literature since the close of the Eighteenth Century is the lingo of untutored yokels, and has many points in common with ordinary vulgar American. In other ways it suggests the dialect of the Appalachian hillmen. It made its first appearance in print, according to Krapp, in Royall Tyler’s play, “The Contrast” (1787), and it probably reached its apogee in Lowell’s “Biglow Papers” (1848, 1866). In an address “To the Indulgent Reader” prefixed to the First Series of the latter Lowell printed “general rules” for its compounding, as follows:
1. The genuine Yankee never gives the rough sound to the r when he can help it, and often displays considerable ingenuity in avoiding it even before a vowel.
2. He seldom sounds the final g, a piece of self-denial, if we consider his partiality for nasals. The same of the final d, as han’ and stan’ for hand and stand.
3. The h in such words as while, when, where, he omits altogether.
4. In regard to a, he shows some inconsistency, sometimes giving a close and obscure sound, as hev for have, hendy for handy, ez for as, thet for that, and again giving it the broad sound it has in father, as hânsome for handsome.
5. To ou he prefixes an e (hard to exemplify otherwise than orally).
6. Au, in such words as daughter and slaughter, he pronounces ah.
7. To the dish thus seasoned add a drawl ad libitum.
Krapp argues that, of these rules, only the fourth and sixth show any genuine differentiation from ordinary vulgar American.123 Other experts have wrestled with the peculiarities of this somewhat formalized Yankee more successfully than Lowell; it is best described, perhaps, by Grandgent in “New England Pronunciation.”124 An extensive literature deals with its local forms, and especially with differences in the vocabulary.125 The appearance of the Linguistic Atlas, the first sheets of which deal with New England, will make most of this literature useless. On the history of the coastal dialect the most useful work is “Early New England Pronunciation,” by Anders Orbeck, which is based upon an examination of the town records of Plymouth, Watertown, Dedham and Groton, Mass., for the period 1636–1707.126 Dr. Orbeck discusses at length the probable sources of this coastal dialect. He finds that 73% of the early settlers of the region where it is used came from the Eastern counties of England, including London. He reviews at length the previous speculations of G. F. Hoar, T. W. Higginson, Joseph L. Chester, H. T. Nöel-Armfield and Edward Gepp, and exposes their errors.127
Various authorities have sought to include New York City and Long Island in the New England speech area, but this is hardly justified by the facts. In a study made forty years ago B. S. Monroe found that there was some dropping of the terminal r in New York City and Kings, Queens, Suffolk, Westchester and Rensselaer counties, but that it was by no means general and was not accompanied by any significant use of the broad a in grass, path and laugh.128 The broad a actually heard in the metropolitan region is confined to a very small class of persons, chiefly of social pretensions, and among them it is not the Boston a that is used but the English one. In the rest of the State the flat a of General or Western American prevails, and the r is not elided.129 The common people of New York City have a dialect of their own, first described scientifically by Dr. E. H. Babbitt of Columbia in 1896.130 Its most notable peculiarity lies in the pronunciation of the e-sound before r, as in bird, third, first, nerve, work, earnest, curve, girl, perfect and pearl, which become something that is usually represented as boid, thoid, foist, noive, woik, oinest, coive, goil, poifect and poil. Contrariwise, the true oi-sound, as in oyster, noise and Boyd, gets a touch of the r, and in print these words are often given as erster, nerz and Byrd. Dr. Henry Alexander says that the true sound is the same in both cases, and lies between oi and er. To a person unfamiliar with it, it sounds like oi in the er-words and like er in the oi-words. Dr. Alexander thus explains the process:
Given two familiar sounds, a and b, and one unfamiliar sound, x, which, acoustically and phonetically, is intermediate between a and b. If a speaker is in the habit of substituting x for both a and b, then an untrained hearer will interpret x as b in words in which he expects to hear a, and x as a in words in which he expects to hear b.131
At the time the New York vulgar dialect first appeared in literature, in the early 90’s,132 this confusion between oi and er was not stressed; instead, the salient mark of the dialect was thought to be substitution of t and d for the unvoiced and voiced forms of th, respectively, as in wit and dat for with and that. This substitution, said Dr. Babbitt in 1896, “does not take place in all words, nor in the speech of all persons, even of the lower classes; but the tendency exists beyond doubt.” It is my observation that it has declined in late years, probably through the labors of the schoolmarm. But she has not been able to stamp out foist and thoid, if, indeed, she has been sufficiently conscious of them to make the attempt. Their use by Alfred E. Smith during his campaign for the Presidency in 1928 made the whole country conscious of the New York oi. I have frequently noted it in the speech of educated New Yorkers, and it is very common in that of the high-school graduates who make up the corps of New York stenographers. It extends into New Jersey and up Long Island Sound into Connecticut. The origin of the New York dialect has not yet been accounted for with any plausibility. Its current peculiarities seem to have been unobserved until toward the end of the last century. Perhaps it owes something to the influence of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Its oi-sound is certainly heard in Yiddish, and since 1900 the Jews have constituted the largest racial bloc in the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and probably also in that of Manhattan. At least one observer sees its genesis in a revolt of the submerged masses against their oppressors. He says:
This New York dialect, like its prototype in London [i.e., Cockney], represents a class-protest, largely unconscious, against a life of terrible sounds, sights, smells and contacts. These exploitees would be as their masters, but they can not. Resisting all instruction, they take on this speech, which is the precise opposite of the speech of their masters. “Look what you made
us,” they all seem to say, “but since you will not let us have what we want, we will pretend to glory in what we have, and will make ourselves as objectionable as possible to you in a way which you can not effectively penalize.”133
This theory sounds so dubious to me that I marvel that it has not been embraced by the proletarian Aristotles of the New Republic and New Masses. Among those New Yorkers to whom Yiddish is native there are forms reported in use that have not got into the general vulgate of the town, e.g., the interchange of e and flat a, as in baker for beggar and kettle for cattle; the interchange of k and g, as in glass for class and locker for lager; the interchange of b and p, as in bowl for pole and mop for mob; the interchange of long e and short i, as in dip for deep and beeg for big; the interchange of t and d, as in lid for lit and lift for lived. But these interchanges may be more apparent than real: perhaps what occurs in each case is a median sound, resembling that described by Dr. Alexander as lying between oi and er.134
In the other Middle Atlantic States, General or Western American prevails, save only for a small part of New Jersey adjacent to New York City, where the New York vulgate has some footing, and the lower part of the Delmarva Peninsula, where, as I have noted, something resembling Tidewater Southern is used. Most of the early observers of American speech-ways thought that the pronunciation of the Western Shore of Maryland was especially euphonious and correct. “When you get as far South as Maryland,” said J. Fenimore Cooper in 1828,135 “the softest, and perhaps as pure an English is spoken as is anywhere heard.” Two years earlier Mrs. Anne Royall said that “the dialect of Washington, exclusive of the foreigners, is the most correct and pure of any part of the United States I have ever yet been in.”136 Noah Webster also liked the pronunciation of this region, though he added that a t was added to once and twice by “a class of very well educated people, particularly in Philadelphia and Baltimore.”137 In parts of Pennsylvania, as we have seen in Chapter IV, Section 3, the German influence has not only introduced a number of words that are not commonly heard elsewhere, but has also established some peculiar speech-tunes. The Pennsylvania voice, indeed, is recognized instantly in the adjacent States. In the sentence “Are you going now,” for example, there is a sharp rise on go and a fall on now. For the rest, Pennsylvania speaks General or Western American. “The true Western Pennsylvanian,” says E. K. Maxfield, “pronounces a decidedly flat a … and his r gives him especial pride and a sense of superiority over both East and South.”138 This flat a and conspicuous r are also sounded in Philadelphia, save perhaps by a small faction of the élite.139 The speech of New Jersey, save in the New York suburbs, is likewise General American, but the vocabulary of the State is rich in locall terms.140 General American itself hardly needs any description here; it is the speech with which the present volume mainly deals. It has, of course, many minor variations, but they have to do principally with its vocabulary. In regions where there are ponderable minorities speaking non-English languages many loan-words are taken in — Spanish in the Southwest, German in parts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Scandinavian in Minnesota and the adjacent States. Some of these local borrowings have been noted in Chapter IV, Section 3, and Chapter V, Section 5. They are of small importance, for in pronunciation and intonation, as in the major part of its vocabulary, General American is singularly uniform.141
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