A Kentuckian named Sheila moved out of state for several years, but now that she’s returned to work at Western Kentucky University, she finds that many students no longer seem to have a stereotypically “Southern” accent...
In parts of Appalachia, the southern United States, and a few other places, the expression I don’t care to is understood to mean “I wouldn’t mind to.” In other words, I don’t care to may mean exactly the opposite of...
How long do you have to remain in a place before you can truthfully say you lived there, as opposed to just visiting it? What’s the difference between to live somewhere and to stay somewhere? This philosophical question is complicated by the...
Barbara in Norfolk, Virginia, wonders about the drawl of Southern American English. A great resource on how people perceive others’ dialects is the work of linguist Dennis Preston and his book Perceptual Dialectology. This is part of a...