Southern Accents
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
The Southern accent (of which there are several) is characterized mainly by the dropping of Rs in certain totally-predictable phonological contexts. Example:
- My mother ate breakfast.
- My mother, my father and I ate breakfast.
In example #1, the R in 'mother' is dropped. In example #2, the R of 'mother' is not dropped, but the R in 'father' is. The dropping is governed by the presence of a certain initial vowel of the next word (this is akin to the phenomenon of liaison in French). Standard German has the same phonological rule.
Among native speakers,R-dropping accents are in the majority, world-wide. The 'standard' American accent, along with the Canadian accent, and a few West-Country accents in England (from which the first two originated) do all their Rs.
Southern accents do not have intrusive R, which is encountered in British English as well as Eastern Seaboard Americian English. An intrusive R is where 'drawing' sounds like 'draw ring'.
The English spoken natively by the upper crust of Charleston, South Carolina forms its own unique dialect, which even other native speakers of Sothron don't understand. For the rest of the South, there is wide variation, from the Tidewater of Virginia to what Lady Bird Johnson did on the banks of the Perdanales.
The drawl comes from where R-dropping comes up against double vowels, with the dropped R being one of them. "Sho' 'nough" ("sure enough") is a contraction that saves a breath.
