Southern American English

If you are not from the South, chances are that when you think of what it means to have a Southern accent, your mind goes straight to the stereotypical renditions you have heard from media portrayals of the South. Probably, the examples you think of are highly exaggerated, like Scarlett O’Hara’s Deep South, r-less rendition of a Southerner exclaiming Well ah nevah! (Bailey 11) or like those in “Gone with the Wind” or “Dukes of Hazzard County,” both of which reinforce the negatively stigmatized, stereotypical Southern accent (Lippi-Green 218). Southern American English (SAE) is in fact the most widely recognized regional dialect in America, but unfortunately, it also almost always carries with it the most negative associations of any American
This dialect is closest to what would be considered the stereotypical “hillbilly,” or “mountain talk” accent, and it is described as having a pleasing “twang,” which despite the common misconception, is not present in all SAE dialects. This characteristic “twang” is most clearly heard in the diphthongization of words like bear and hill, pronounced bayer and heal and the “broad, unglided version of /i/” in words like bright and fire, pronounced brat and far (Mallinson 24). Smoky Mountain English also incorporates a wealth of regional vocabulary like holler, meaning a valley, young’uns, used when referring to children, over yonder, used synonymously with over there, and britches, referring to pants or shorts. In contrast to the stereotypical Southern usage of the word y’all, Smoky Mountain English speakers often use the word you’ns as the second person plural pronoun. However, they do follow with many other Southern dialects in using double (or triple) modals such as might could or even might should ought (Mallinson 25-27). All of these characteristics as well as other linguistic features like the intrusive /r/ in words like feller for fellow and verb changes like we was eatin’ instead of we were eating help set Smoky Mountain English apart from other American dialects (Mallinson 24). Sadly, while Smoky Mountain English is just as legitimate and functional of a dialect as any other, these characteristics also represent some of the primary features that are deemed incorrect and inferior in comparison to Standard American