Current issues

The most pervasive issue in studies of rural Southern white accents has been their relationship to African American vernaculars. This issue includes several more specific questions. Did African American vernacular speech arise from an earlier rural Southern white vernacular, or have they always differed? Did African American speech influence Southern white speech, and if so, how? Has rural Southern white speech been moving away from or toward African American norms in recent decades? What sorts of features have spread across ethnic lines, and which ones have not? At present, there is no consensus on any of these controversies. For example, it has been suggested that non-rhoticity spread from slave speech to white speech in the South, a contention supported by early accounts of white children adopting accents from slave children, by the concentration of non-rhoticity in former plantation areas, and by the consistently higher incidence of non-rhoticity in African American speech (Feagin 1997). However, others have argued that non-rhoticity emerged as an imitation of British usage, largely because Southerners of means often sent their children to England to be educated (e.g., Johnson 1928). The fact that Southerners with sufficient wealth to send their children to school tended to be slaveholders might explain why non-rhoticity was concentrated in plantation areas. A third explanation for non-rhoticity is that the original English settlers brought it, but rhotic regions in English-settled areas, such as the Pamlico Sound region, would seem to militate against that possibility (though settlers could have brought non-rhoticity in unstressed syllables). At any rate, while it appears clear that whites borrowed some morphological processes from African Americans, it is nearly impossible to prove or disprove that phonological borrowing occurred.

Similarly, the contemporary relationship between African American and Southern white vernaculars is open to dispute. There is ample evidence that African Americans in the South are not participating or barely participating in several aspects of the “Southern Shift” that typify the speech of Southern whites, such as GOOSE and GOAT fronting and FACE lowering. Whether this division reflects African American reaction against white norms, white reaction against African American norms, or a combination is not entirely clear. Even though the two ethnic groups have been diverging for those vowel quality features, the possibility that they may borrow other features from each other, such as pre-/l/ mergers, deserves some scrutiny.

Other issues have received less attention. The origins of white Southern English have sparked some inquiry, and some evidence suggests that many defining features of Southern speech, such as glide weakening of PRIZE, may not have spread widely until the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries (Bailey 1997). Another issue is what effects the recent population movements of the South, especially the heavy in-migration of Northerners, are having on Southern speech. It appears that these movements have made more of an impact on urban centers than on rural areas. However, it is difficult to say how impervious rural areas are to such changes. Rural areas may be intensifying Southern dialectal features in reaction to the cities, or they may eventually succumb to urban influences. The status of individual features has garnered considerable attention. Two of the most intensively studied changes are the spread of rhoticity and the disappearance of [j] in words such as tune. The speed of these changes and the reasons for them have been debated. Among other issues, the Southern drawl is still poorly defined and it has not been determined whether the vowel quality changes associated with the Southern Shift are still spreading or have begun to retreat. The disappearance of certain local features, such as the ingliding forms of FACE and GOAT in the Low Country, has attracted some research.

Clearly, the extensive research conducted on rural white Southern speech in the past has not exhausted the potential research topics on this group of dialects. Future work can be expected to address the issues noted above and open new questions. The intricacies of ethnic relations, population movements, shifts in prestige, and linguistic structure, as well as the historical differences that set the South off from the rest of the United States, combine to make the South a fertile ground for linguistic inquiry.