“So Don’t I,” A New England Dialect Feature Meaning “So Do I”

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon. How are you?

I’m doing well. How are you? And who are you? And where are you?

My name is Jeremy. I’m calling out of Charleston, South Carolina.

Very excited to be on the show today. I’ve been a long-time listener and a fan of the show.

Hi, Jerry. What’s on your mind?

Well, so I grew up in the southeast corner of New Hampshire, and there was this odd form of speech that I never was able to quite understand the root of it. And I’m hoping that you can help me out. So it’s an odd use of a negative. My example is that, let’s say I have a red car, and you also have a red car.

If I made the statement, I drive a red car, you could respond, well, so don’t I.

Or you could say, well, so doesn’t Susan.

It’s this odd negative where the contraction doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense where you could say, well, so do not I have a red car?

And I didn’t know if you could shed any light on it.

What’s odd about it is that it’s a positive and not a negative, right?

That’s correct.

Right. So what is meant is, I also have a red car.

Yes, it is the opposite. Yeah. So you’re trying to express that you have the red car, but you’re using the negative to express it.

Whereas in the rest of the country and most of the English-speaking world, people would say, so do I, instead of so don’t I.

Yes, this is what perplexes me.

Definitely. When linguists have studied this, one of the things they almost always point out at the top of the papers that they write on this is how perplexing it is to people who don’t have this in their dialect.

This so-don’t-die construction. And there are other ways that it appears, and I’ll get to those in a minute.

And it is primarily found, but not exclusively, in New England in the United States.

So having it in New Hampshire is exactly on target, but you will find it in Vermont and New York and Rhode Island and other places.

I have lived in Vermont and Rhode Island, so that fits as well.

Yeah, but there are other constructions that don’t involve the verb do.

For example, and these come from the linguist Jim Wood of Yale University who’s written excellent papers on this topic.

For example, you might say, sure, it’s Trinity, but so aren’t most nightclubs.

And what you mean is, so are most nightclubs.

Or you could say, yes, the clerks should be cheated with respect, but so shouldn’t the customers.

And what you mean is, so should the customers.

And all of these are curious because they just sound wrong if you don’t have them in your dialect, and they sound perfectly fine if you do have them.

But it’s not the only place in English where we mean a positive, but we use a negative construction.

For example, we say, well, don’t you look pretty?

When in fact we’re saying you do look pretty.

Right.

Or we say, aren’t they lucky?

Oh, I follow.

Yeah, I never connected this before.

They are very lucky.

Or wouldn’t you like to know?

That means you would really like to know.

So it’s very similar to those.

And so these semantically negative sentences are all positives.

And interestingly, it can work the opposite as well.

You can have sentences that have one negative marker or even no negative marker at all, but they’re actually positives.

For example, you can say, like he would know anything about it, meaning he doesn’t know anything about it.

That’s a negative, but there’s no negative in the sentence.

How does that work?

And so when we start to look at these other examples, it starts to, the so don’t I starts to fit into this pattern.

We go, oh, so it’s not really this outlier.

It’s only an outlier because in this one dialect, this particular construction exists where it’s not part of the whole set that the rest of the mainstream English uses.

And do you find that those other forms of the negative are also typical in New England?

No, they’re widespread.

Oh, they’re widespread.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, but the so don’t I is really, really localized.

Yeah, the so don’t I is localized.

Yeah.

Is that what you were asking?

The so don’t I is in New England.

But when we talk about, well, don’t you look pretty or aren’t they lucky, that’s national or even international.

That’s all of English has that.

Right.

There’s something in there which is there’s kind of an implicit question-answer pair with the so don’t I.

So what’s happening is there, what is understood is when you say so don’t I is, do I not? I do so.

That’s kind of what’s happening with the so don’t I.

So I have a red car, and then the other person says, do I not? I do so.

That’s kind of what the so don’t I is saying.

I think I follow that.

I was trying to parse it out as extending the contraction and perhaps forming it as a question.

So do I not have a red car?

It doesn’t quite work, though, does it?

Yeah.

No, it doesn’t.

If you want a really detailed but very readable explanation of this, there is a great page at the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.

Just Google Yale Grammatical Diversity Project and so don’t I, and you’re sure to come up with it.

I love that there’s research on this.

Yeah.

There absolutely is.

And if you hear it in South Carolina, I think that’s a conversation starter.

I think we know what your next question to that person.

Let me guess.

You’re from New England.

They’re going like, how did you know?

Yeah, they will.

That would be the bellwether right there.

Hey, thanks so much for calling.

We appreciate it.

I appreciate the information.

Have a great rest of the day.

Take care and be well, Jeremy.

Take care.

And if you want to get really wonky, you can find linguist Jim Wood’s paper on So Don’t I.

Just Google affirmative semantics with negative morphosyntax and make that your next email password.

And if you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language whatsoever, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or find us on Twitter.

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