Southern American English

Southern American English or Southern U.S. English is a collection of related American

English dialects spoken throughout the Southern United States, though increasingly in more rural
areas and primarily by white Americans. Commonly in the United States, the dialects are together
simply referred to as Southern. Other, much more recent ethno-linguistic terms within American
linguistics include Southern White Vernacular English and Rural White Southern English.
A regional Southern American English consolidated and expanded throughout all the traditional
Southern States since the last quarter of the nineteenth century until around World War II, largely
superseding the older Southern American English dialects. With this younger and more unified
pronunciation system, Southern American English now comprises the largest American regional
accent group by number of speakers. As of 2006, its Southern accent is strongly reported throughout
the U.S. states of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, as well as much of Texas, eastern and
southern Oklahoma, southern Missouri, West Virginia, and metropolitan Jacksonville in
Florida, and eastern New Mexico; Southern accent features are also documented to a weaker extent
(often identified as a South Midland accent) in the Midland American English of central Oklahoma,
some of Maryland and Delaware, eastern Kansas, the southern halves of Illinois and Indiana, the
Miami Valley of Ohio, and south-central Pennsylvania.
Southern American English as a regional dialect can be divided into various sub-dialects, the most
phonologically advanced (i.e., the most shifted) ones being southern varieties of Appalachian
English and scattered varieties of Texan English. African American Vernacular English (AAVE)
has many common points with Southern English dialects due to the strong historical ties of African
Americans to the region.

Geography

The dialects collectively known as Southern American English stretch across the south-eastern and
south-central United States, but exclude the southernmost areas of Florida and the extreme western
and south-western parts of Texas as well as the Rio Grande Valley (Laredo to Brownsville). This
linguistic region includes Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas, as well as most of Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West
Virginia, and northern and central Florida. Southern American English dialects can also be found in
extreme southern parts of Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Illinois.
Southern dialects originated in large part from a mix of immigrants from the British Isles, who moved
to the American South in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the creole or post-creole speech of
African slaves. Upheavals such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II caused
mass migrations of those and other settlers throughout the United States.

Modern phonology
The Southern United States underwent several major sound changes from the beginning to the
middle of the twentieth century, during which a more unified, region-wide sound system developed,
markedly different from the sound systems of the nineteenth-century Southern dialects.
South

A list of typical Southern vowels

The South proper as a present-day dialect region generally includes all of these pronunciation features
below, which are popularly recognized in the United States as a "Southern accent". However, there is
still actually wide variation in Southern speech regarding potential differences based on factors like a
speaker's exact sub-region, age, ethnicity, etc. The following phonological phenomena focus on the
developing sound system of the more recent Southern dialects of the United States that altogether
largely (though certainly not entirely) superseded the older Southern regional patterns: