10 - The English dialect heritage of the southern United States

Summary

Introduction

It is a widespread stereotype, a ‘persistent urban folk belief’ (McMillan 1979: 359), in the American South that the dialect of the region, Southern English (SAmE), descends directly from (or is sometimes even claimed to be identical with) Elizabethan English or Shakespearean English. Consider, for instance, the following statement:

The correspondence and writings of Queen Elizabeth I and such men as Sir Walter Raleigh, Marlowe, Dryden, Bacon and even Shakespeare are sprinkled with words and expressions which today are commonplace in remote regions of North Carolina. You hear the Queen's English in the coves and hollows of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountains and on the windswept Outer Banks where timemoves more leisurely.

(A Dictionary of the Queen's English n.d.: Preface, unpaginated)

While being also motivated by the desire to grant historical dignity to one's own dialect which is known not to enjoy a high reputation outside the South (Preston 1996; Bailey and Tillery 1996: 308f.), this deeply rooted belief in the long standing of features of SAmE reflects the fact that it branched off of Early Modern (British) English, and it is in line with Kurath's claims that settlement history has determined the makeup of American dialects and with Marckwardt's (1958: 59–80) familiar notion of ‘colonial lag’. On the other hand, Görlach (1987) has shown that assuming ‘colonial lag’ as a diachronic explanation is frequently a myth, with many features of American English not directly descending from seemingly related British sources.