Research in language attitudes has clearly shown that for many Americans the US South is a place embroiled in misinformation and mythologies (e.g. Preston 1989, 1996). With regard to the speech of this region, the negative views of “dumb but friendly,” or “slow, uneducated, and uncultured” endure, even among Southerners themselves.
In this paper, we examine views of language, culture, and identity in the American South and present a new theoretical lens for examining the persistent stereotypes of US Southern speech.
Specifically, this analysis centers on the terms used by respondents in discussions of Southern speech and Southern identities. Unlike perceptual studies that use traditional draw-a-map tasks, the labels given by our respondents are elicited through sociolinguistic interviews and pile sort tasks. Thus, we discuss the following:
· What are the language attitudes of long-term Southerners, particularly those living in an area of dramatic population growth and with an influx of residents from areas outside of the South?
· What does a change in the methodology reveal about attitudes towards Southernness in comparison to more traditional work in perceptual dialectology?
Additionally, we take these findings and analyze them through the metaphor of Carroll’s (2016) planets of belief, which posits:
Planets don’t sit on foundations; they hold themselves together in a self-reinforcing pattern. The same is true for beliefs: they aren’t (try as we may) founded on unimpeachable principles that can’t be questioned. Rather, whole systems of belief fit together with one another, in more or less comfortable ways, pulled in by a mutual epistemological force (108).
As perceptions of Southernness often appear as unchanging and unquestionable, we believe such a metaphor provides an appropriate framework for understanding how Southern dialects are continually perceived as the “worst” dialect of American English (Preston 1996).
References:
Carroll, Sean. 2016. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. New York: Penguin.
Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual Dialectology: Nonlinguists’ Views of Areal Linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris.
Preston, Dennis R. 1996. Where the worst English is spoken. In Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), Focus on the USA. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 297–369.
