Torsten wrote:
>This is the way I reconstruct it, without too many hard facts:
There are basically three dialects in the USA: New England, Southern
and Standard. Standard stretches from New York west like smoke from a
smokestack. New England is the old North, behind the port of Boston,
and Southern is the old South, based in Virginia.>
You're right, Torsten, about the New Yorkish accent in old movies; when I
was a child that was the norm for national radio announcers. Replaced since
about the 50s by our flat Midwestern norm, and when you still hear it in
movies or TV, it's invariably from upper-class or hoity-toity characters.
And you're essentially correct on the 3 dialects.. It had to do with
settlement patterns. The first English settlers (from many regions, many but
not all r-less) were succeeded by large numbers of English from the north,
Welsh, Scots and Irish-- mostly r-ful. How they spread out from the major
port cities depended on geography.
In the South, the first settlers grabbed the land and became, by and large,
a wealthy elite. The later Scots/Irish became the Southern proletariat, and
it was mostly this group who later emigrated by various routes west as far
as Texas, to grab land for themselves...(beyond Texas it's a total
mish-mash). So, in the South, you actually find two accents-- the prestige
r-less one, and the more common r-ful one (but they all drawl their
vowels...). Many of the Fine Old Southern Families were undone by the Civil
War, while their more numerous proletarian neighbors did a little better in
the aftermath-- and their r-ful accent is heard much more nowadays (though
still disdained by many old "upper-class" Southerners).
Humorous "How to Talk Southern" articles offer examples like "tarred =
tired", "far = fire" etc.
Many Northerners hold all Southern accents in low regard, for a variety of
reasons that we needn't go into.
Two interesting old recordings (vinyl LPs from the 50s) that presumably
reflect the old prestige dialect--
--a Civil War album that includes Robert E. Lee III reading his
grandfather's Farewell Address-- (Tidewater Virginia dialect, sounds almost
RP-ish)
--Tennessee Williams (also from an Old Family, though much reduced) reading
his story "The Yellow Bird"-- ("Delta" dialect, from New Orleans north up
the Mississippi to about Memphis).
Both men pronounce the stressed schwa-r+C sequence as [&j], and Lee also
pronounces /aw/ as [&w]-- sounding like "boyd" and "hoose" = house to the
untrained ear. By and large, I think those pronunciations are dying out;
I've heard them lately only from elderly folks, both black and white.
(Let's hope this OT also dies out; on Conlang-L we label them
YA(D)EPT --"Yet Another (Dreaded) Engl. Pronunciation Thread"--, but they
also come in Swedish, Dutch, French and Spanish flavors....). I'm a
linguist, but not a US dialectician, though I know the bare bones; it's more
that in 70 years I've been around and heard a lot.)
Roger Mills