Part of
The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyondEdited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 331–348
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 331–348
When did Southern American English really begin?
Testing Bailey’s Hypothesis
This paper uses the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, comprising several thousand documents written by minimally literate privates in the conflict, to analyze grammatical features such as you-all and fixing to. The authors respond to the proposal of Bailey (1997) that white Southern American English shifted rapidly and radically in waning decades of the 19th century, and show that the shift was not as rapid, but may have been quite as radical, as Bailey argues. That is, the grammar of white SAE had more continuity between the antebellum and post-bellum periods than Bailey posits, but began becoming distinct from the English of the northern U.S. earlier. The paper concludes that white SAE “began” prior to 1850.
References (39)
Ayres, E.L
1992 The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bailey, G
1997 When did Southern American English begin? In Englishes around the World. Vol. 1: General Studies, British Isles, North America. Studies in Honour of Manfred Görlach [Varieties of English Around the World G18], E.W. Schneider (ed.), 255–275. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
2001 The relationship between African American and White Vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and some phonological evidence. In Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English [Varieties of English Around the World G27], S. Lanehart (ed.), 53–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bailey, G. & Ross, G
1992 The evolution of a vernacular. In History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, M. Rissanen, O. Ihalainen, T. Nevalainen & I. Taavitsainen (eds), 519–531. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bailey, G. & Tillery, J
2003 Urbanization and the evolution of Southern American English. In English in the Southern United States, S.J. Nagle & S.L. Sanders (eds), 159–172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bailey, G., Wikle, T., Tillery, J. & Sand, L
1991 The apparent time construct. In Language Variation and Change 3(3): 241–264.
Bean, J.M
1991 The evolution of inchoatives go to and get to
. SECOL Review 15: 69–86.
Bridenbaugh, C
1952 Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South. Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University.
Brooks, C
1937 The English language in the South. In A Southern Treasury of Life and Literature, S. Young (ed.), 350–358. New York NY: Scribner’s.
1985 The Language of the American South. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures no. 28. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.
Carpenter, J.T
1930 The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789–1861: A Study in Political Thought. New York NY: New York University Press. Reprinted in 1990 with a new introduction by J. McCardell, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia.
Cassidy, F.G. & Hall, J.H.
(eds) 1985–2012 Dictionary of American Regional English, 5 vols. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Combs, J.H
1916 Old, early, and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains. Dialect Notes 4: 283–297.
Cukor-Avila, P
Fc. Rural AAVE. In Oxford Handbook on African American Language, S. Lanehart, L. Green & J. Bloomquist (eds) Oxford Oxford University Press
Elliott, C.M. & Moxley, L.A.
(eds) 1922 Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires. 5 vols. Easley SC: Southern Historical Press.
Ellis, M
2013 North Carolina English, 1861–1865. Knoxville TN: University of Tennessee Press.
Faust, D
1988 Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press.
Fischer, D.H
1989 Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kautzsch, A
2002 The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krapp, G.P
1924 The English of the Negro. American Mercury 2(5): 190–195.
Kytö, M. & Romaine, S
2005 ‘We had like to have been killed by thunder & lightning’: The semantic and pragmatic history of a construction that like to disappeared. International Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6(1): 1–35.
McDavid, R.I
Jr 1958 The dialects of American English. In The Structure of American English, W.N. Francis (ed.), 480–543. New York NY: Ronald Press.
McMillan, J. & Montgomery, M
1989 Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English. Tuscaloosa AL: University of Alabama Press.
Mishoe, M. & Montgomery, M
1994 The pragmatics of multiple modals in North and South Carolina. American Speech 69(1): 3–29.
Montgomery, M
1980 Inchoative verbs in East Tennessee English. SECOL Bulletin 4: 76–84.
1998 In the Appalachians they speak like Shakespeare. In Myths in Linguistics, L. Bauer & P. Trudgill (eds), 66–76. New York NY: Penguin.
2003 The structural history of y’all, yóu all, and you’uns
. Southern Journal of Linguistics 3: 19–27.
2006a From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation.
2006b ‘Hit’ll kill you or cure you, one’: The history and function of alternative one
. In Language Variation and Change in the American Midland [Varieties of English Around the World G36], T.E. Murray & B.L. Simon (eds), 141–152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fc. The crucial century for English in the American South. In Language Variety in the South: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, M.D. Picone & C.E. Davies (eds)
Montgomery, M. & Johnson, E.
(eds) 2007 The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Vol. 5: Language. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Pederson, L., McDaniel, S.L., Bailey, G. & Basset, M.H.
(eds) 1986 The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States: A Concordance of Basic Materials. Ann Arbor MI: University Microfilms.
Picone, M.D. & Davies, C.E.
(eds) Fc Language Variety in the South: Historical and Comparative Perspectives Tuscaloosa AL University of Alabama Press
Schneider, E.W
1989 American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa AL: University of Alabama Press.
Fc. Earlier Southern Englishes in Black and White: Corpus-based approaches. In M.D. Picone & C.E. Davies (eds)
Schneider, E.W. & Miethaner, U
2006 When I started to using BLUR: Accounting for unusual verb complementation patterns in an electronic corpus of Earlier African American English. Journal of English Linguistics 34(3): 233–256.
Schneider, E.W. & Montgomery, M
2001 On the trail of early nonstandard grammar: An electronic corpus of Southern U.S. antebellum overseers’ letters. American Speech 76(4): 388–410.
Stephenson, E.A
1968 The beginnings of the loss of the post-vocalic /r/ in North Carolina. Journal of English Linguistics 68(2): 57–77.
Wilson, J
2004 Letters of a Confederate Private: Thomas O. Wilson, Company F, 51st Virginia Infantry, Whartons Brigade. Blacksburg VA: Pocahontas.
Cited by (1)
Cited by 1 other publications
Kytö, Merja & Lucia Siebers
2022. Earlier North American Englishes. In Earlier North American Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G66], ► pp. 1 ff. 
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.