“Southern” features

Many features that are characteristic of southern accents are heard throughout the Midwest and West as well though their occurrence is more scattered than the items discussed above. In terms of the traditional dialectological divisions, many of these pronunciations are associated with the South Midlands (or Upper South) rather than with the South proper. More background and information about the distribution of these features in the South can be found in Thomas (this volume).

One of the most common of these southern features is the fronting of the nucleus of /aʊ/ to something like /æʊ/ often with a lowering of the glide to [æɔ] . Despite its Southern associations, this feature is heard well north of the Ohio river across roughly the lower halves of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. It can also be heard across most of Missouri and Kansas and into Iowa and Nebraska. Linguistic atlas records (Allen 1973-76) document this pronunciation as far north as Minnesota, and the Telsur project shows that it is also heard throughout the West.

Also widespread in the Midwest and West is the merger of the vowels of KIT and DRESS before nasal consonants, a feature known as the pin/pen merger. The geographical distribution of this merger resembles that of /aʊ/-fronting though the merger’s occurrence seems to be more spotty. The Telsur data suggest the merger is scattered across Ohio and Illinois and is more common in Indiana. Telsur also recorded several speakers in Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska with the merger. In the West, the pin/pen merger appears less common among Telsur informants, but it is documented throughout the region including the Pacific Northwest and California. The fact that the Telsur project concentrated on urban speech may have resulted in its underrepresenting the appearance of this merger. For example, studies of rural speech in Ohio indicate the merger is much more common than the Telsur sample suggests. Similarly, none of the Los Angeles informants for Telsur gave clear evidence of the merger, but Metcalf (1972) reports the merger to be quite common further inland in Riverside, CA.

The distributions of other southern features in the West and Midwest are less well documented. These include variants of /ɔ/ as upgliding diphthongs, that is [ɔu] or [ɔo] . These variants are particularly common in the context of a following /g/ as in dog or log. They have been recorded in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri and can certainly be heard elsewhere in the Midwest as well. The same can be said for monophthongal variants of /aɪ/. In the South monophthongized /aɪ/ appears before obstruents (e.g., side, prize), but here such variants are generally heard only before resonants (e.g., time, tire).

The appearance of “Southern” features in Midwest and West is clearly a result of the settlement patterns discussed above. Many of the early American settlers to this region came from states like Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina. In central states such as Missouri and Illinois, these Southerners, being the first Americans to homestead there, came to occupy the prime farming lands, while Northerners, who arrived later, often settled in towns. Thus, the fact that many of the features discussed are more common among rural speakers is no doubt a reflection of such early settlement tendencies.