Where Does the American Southern Drawl Come From?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this and where are you calling from?

This is Barbara from Norfolk, Virginia.

Welcome, Barbara. What can we do for you?

I was just curious about Southern drawl. Since I’m a Northerner and I’m currently living in the South, then I just thought about that.

Well, let’s talk about this, because when we talk about people having a drawl, it’s one of those imprecise words that is hard to define. Linguists often make a little collection of words that non-linguists use to describe the language of other people. The linguist Bill Labov has done this, and some of the words that he’s come up with do include words like drawl and twang or brogue. We might say nasal. And they’re imprecise because they mean different things to different speakers.

But for a draw, when we’re talking about Southern American English, we can kind of zero in on what people mean because there’s something that happens that linguists call a vowel glide. It’s where in dialects of Southern American English, including some of the English spoken in Virginia, they take a single vowel phoneme and they make it into two. They turn it into a diphthong. So a word like kid, K-I-D, might come out like kid, something like that. I’m exaggerating for a fact. So it kind of sounds like it’s stretched a little bit. It sounds a little longer. And if you listen to Southern American English speakers, you’ll hear a lot of this stuff. And it gives the impression that they’re talking more slowly. And it’s true for those single words. But interestingly, most of the studies that have been done on the speed of speakers across all American dialects show that people tend to speak, on average, the same speed. It’s just for certain words they’re slower. So Southern American English speakers aren’t slower overall. It’s just for certain words.

So it’s that vowel glide for certain words that’s just a little elongated into a diphthong. That’s what you’re hearing that sounds like a draw, keyed. And we don’t know where that comes from. Well, there’s a strange thing that happens that I think I’m the only one that uses this term, but I call it the vowel rotisserie, where because of different social factors, a vowel might change in the local dialect. And when one vowel changes, the other vowels in the local dialect kind of bounce around. So there’s not a lot of collision because we don’t want our A’s to sound like our E’s and our E’s to sound like our I’s. And so typically when one vowel changes, the others kind of push around over time. It can take some decades to do this. And so typically a vowel glide might come about because of this vowel rotisserie, this steady shifting of these vowels. And if there’s enough influence from the people whose vowels are moving, then those vowels move for a lot of people and it’ll become a thing for many people in the region. But the language is shifting all the time. And whether it shifts in one direction or another is completely up to forces that are beyond any one person’s control.

Definitely. There’s a little subset of sociolinguistics called perceptual dialectology. My colleague Dennis Preston does a bunch of this. And what he does is he asks people what they think of the way other people talk. I highly recommend that you look him up. Again, it’s Dennis Preston, Oklahoma State University, perceptual dialectology. Just Google some combination of those words and you will find them. They’re very readable. He’s got these maps where people have circled things and talked about how people think they talk in New York and Texas or Michigan and wherever. And it’s really interesting to see that people sometimes judge their own speech very harshly or the speech of their neighbors. And often people judge the speech of other regions based only on what they’ve seen on TV and movies. And so it’s really revealing about our biases and how little we truly know about language and how poorly we’re equipped to talk about the language of other people.

Yeah, his work is really interesting and really accessible.

I think so, too.

How we talk.

Well, I’m glad that you let me know that I’m not weird because I was thinking.

No, not at all.

Who thinks about something like how someone says something, you know, says a word?

Barbara, we do. You’re our people.

Well, thank you very much.

All right. You call us again sometime, all right?

Thanks for calling.

All right. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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