I Reckon in the US vs. UK

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are y’all doing? This is Landon. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Landon?

Hi, Landon. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Hi, thank you.

Well, I had a question about the word reckon, as in, you know, people say I reckon or reckon when. I’m from a pretty rural area, and I grew up saying that. But in the U.S., it has kind of a stigma as kind of a, I guess, tailbilly or redneck term, somebody who’s uneducated. But I watch a lot of British television and stuff like that, and they tend to say it kind of all the time, just regardless of class or education level, and there’s really no stigma attached to it. So I was wondering how that kind of happened in the U.S., where it became kind of just like, you know, when somebody says it, all of a sudden they’re looked at as kind of like country or rural.

Yeah, I reckon definitely it’s marked, is what sociolinguists say, that it means it’s marked as having an extra value beyond its meaning, and in this case, rural or rustic or uneducated. What’s really interesting, if you look at a map of the United States, it’s very southern and very, very strong in the southeast. In Texas, there’s little bits of it.

Are you from rural Texas?

Yeah, yeah, I’m from rural East Texas.

Rural East Texas, yeah, it’d be perfectly appropriate for you to use this word. And that kind of unfortunately exposes this bias we have in the United States against the Southern American dialects. They are often portrayed as being uneducated or being unacceptable in a variety of different ways. Or films and TV definitely do it. I see it happen all the time.

When you look back at the history of English, reckon is just one of many words that when we kind of forked off from the UK, when we took a different path, when we became our own nation and our two languages started to diverge, reckon is one of the words that they kept more than we kept, and they kept it more universally than we kept it. But even there, it’s still considered a little old-fashioned and a little folksy, maybe is a better word for it. It’s not the kind of thing that probably is going to be used in parliament during question time. And it’s hundreds and hundreds of years old.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s really old. It predates English. It’s older than English, the various forms that it comes from.

Okay, wow.

Do you think the reason it stayed in the southern United States is because there’s a lot more people of English descent there, and it’s kind of, they’re more isolated, so we kind of kept some of those words that a lot of people in other parts of the country kind of abandoned?

Not quite that way. There’s two things that you need to know when you think about why some places talk differently than others. One is, we don’t move around nearly as much as we think we do. And two, we talk a lot more like our neighbors than we think we do. And so that first one means that when our ancestors came and settled into a part of the country, they all kind of came from some of the same places, like people from Scotland or Ireland or different parts of the UK would tend to move together to different parts of this country. And some of those language patterns and traits still exist here. So they persist.

There’s a myth that we’re all going to talk one English, and our Englishes are all merging and the dialects are disappearing. As a matter of fact, our dialects are still transforming, and we still have these really strong regional and geographic ways of speaking. And reckon is a really classic example of that.

Okay, cool.

Well, yeah, that definitely answered my question.

Thanks, Landon.

Appreciate the call.

We’re glad to help.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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