- Joined
- Sep 2, 2019
- Location
- Raleigh, North Carolina
When I imagine southerners talking during the Civil War era, I tend to hear them speaking what we call "country" today, at least here in North Carolina. (Unless they're "cultured" ladies and gentlemen, in which case they sound like characters from Gone With the Wind.)
I just read an article from a couple of days ago in Atlas Obscura ( https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/north-carolina-linguistics ), which has some interesting things to say about how people in NC, and the South in general, might have spoken in the mid-19th century. I've met some of the linguists quoted in this article -- they're professors here in Raleigh at NCSU. Here are a couple of intriguing quotations from the article:
"Before the Civil War, white Southeasterners did not seem to have spoken in what would be a recognizably Southern accent by modern standards... There were differences in the way people talked, but it wasn’t split as evenly along North/South lines as one would think.
"Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) 'The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,' says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.
"In Southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, regional dialects sprung up seemingly overnight, influenced by a combination of factors including the destruction of infrastructure, the panic of Reconstruction, lesser-known stuff like the boll weevil crisis, and the general fact that regional accents tend to be strongest among the poorest people. In the post–Civil War period, Southerners left the South en masse; the ones who stayed were often the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, and often the keepers of the strongest regional accents. A lack of migration into the South, either from the North or internationally, allowed its regional accents to bloom in relative isolation."
Roy B. -- 13 Dec. 2019
I just read an article from a couple of days ago in Atlas Obscura ( https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/north-carolina-linguistics ), which has some interesting things to say about how people in NC, and the South in general, might have spoken in the mid-19th century. I've met some of the linguists quoted in this article -- they're professors here in Raleigh at NCSU. Here are a couple of intriguing quotations from the article:
"Before the Civil War, white Southeasterners did not seem to have spoken in what would be a recognizably Southern accent by modern standards... There were differences in the way people talked, but it wasn’t split as evenly along North/South lines as one would think.
"Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) 'The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,' says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.
"In Southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, regional dialects sprung up seemingly overnight, influenced by a combination of factors including the destruction of infrastructure, the panic of Reconstruction, lesser-known stuff like the boll weevil crisis, and the general fact that regional accents tend to be strongest among the poorest people. In the post–Civil War period, Southerners left the South en masse; the ones who stayed were often the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, and often the keepers of the strongest regional accents. A lack of migration into the South, either from the North or internationally, allowed its regional accents to bloom in relative isolation."
Roy B. -- 13 Dec. 2019