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A diversity of earlier Southern dialects once existed: a consequence of the mix of English speakers from the British Isles (including largely English and Scots-Irish immigrants) who migrated to the American South in the 17th and 18th centuries, with particular 19th-century elements also borrowed from the London upper class and enslaved African-Americans.
Dialects can be classified at broader or narrower levels: within a broad national or regional dialect, various more localised sub-dialects can be identified, and so on. The combination of differences in pronunciation and use of local words may make some English dialects almost unintelligible to speakers from other regions without any prior ...
Older Southern American English is a diverse set of English dialects of the Southern United States spoken most widely up until the American Civil War of the 1860s, gradually transforming among its White speakers—possibly first due to postwar economy-driven migrations—up until the mid-20th century. [1]
The map above shows the major regional dialects of American English (in all caps) plus smaller and more local dialects, as demarcated primarily by Labov et al.'s The Atlas of North American English, [105] as well as the related Telsur Project's regional maps. Any region may also contain speakers of a "General American" accent that resists the ...
A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect. A dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can be termed an ethnolect. A geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolect [4] (alternative terms include 'regionalect', [5] 'geolect', [6] and 'topolect' [7]).
This shift involves multiple elements, including that the vowel in words like toe, rose, and go (though remaining back vowels elsewhere in the Western dialect), and the vowel in words like spoon, move, and rude are both pronounced farther forward in the mouth than most other English dialects; at the same time, a lowering chain movement of the ...
Regional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard, due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston, New York City, and certain Southern cities, all of these accents historically noted by their London-like r-dropping (called non-rhoticity), a feature gradually receding among younger ...
Other features of the dialect, such as the dental pronunciations of d and t, and related th-stopping, likely come from contact with foreign languages, particularly Italian and Yiddish, brought into New York City through its huge immigration waves of Europeans during the mid-to-late nineteenth century and twentieth century. Grammatical ...