southern dialect
Below-the-line speech
A southern dialect refers to varieties of a language spoken in the southern region of a country or territory, most often meaning the American South.
These dialects share distinctive features in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar: Her southern dialect came through in words like "y'all" and "fixin' to".
The term sometimes carries class connotations, as southern speech has been both romanticized and stigmatized.
- drawlUnhurried, elongated speech pattern
- double negativesPaired denials in speech
- monophthongizationDiphthong reduction to singleton
- twangSharp vibrating sound
- y'allInformal plural you
fixin' to · storytelling · contractions · oral traditions · colloquialisms · bless your heart · yes ma'am · Gullah · idiomatic expressions · sweet tea · front porch · rural imagery · ain't · might could · folk music · country roads
- Southern LiteratureWilliam Faulkner, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams
- Speech Varietiesvernacular, colloquial, register, jargon, regional speech
- Sinhala
- dialectologydialectology, linguistic atlas, fieldwork, Neapolitan, Sicilian
- linguisticslinguistics, phoneme, phonemes, morpheme, morphemes
- dialectspatois, vernaculars, vernacular, regional accent, pidgins
southern dialectNorthern English
Dialect from Britain's north
New England accent · Canadian English · Boston accent · Scottish English
south, southern, southerly, southward, southwards, southerner, southernmost, dialect, dialects