contributed by Ellen Johnson,
Ph.D.
Athens, Georgia
LESSON EIGHT
'Suh-prise, suh-prise,
suh-prise!’ Who can forget Gomer’s enthusiastic rendition of the Southern
English accent? We all have heard the exaggerated imitations of the missing
‘r’ in the Southern drawl. Not in words like Rhett or Tara, where the
‘r’ comes before a vowel, but only where ‘r’ comes before a consonant or
at the end of a word. As in putting the ‘caht’ before the ‘hoss’ or in
the much maligned ‘y’all come back now, heah?’
Despite the unsophisticated qualities of the characters on
television who talk this way, Southerners know the truth about the missing
‘r’: that it is a mark of aristocracy, if a bit old-fashioned.
Paradoxically, it can also help identify a speaker as African American, and it
is a feature that was exported to Northern cities along with the Great Migration
of Southern blacks. This is the story of a sound that first went missing from
the speech of both the poorest and the wealthiest Southerners, that at one time
was in danger of being lost entirely in the South, but that is making a rapid
comeback, with ‘r-lessness’ beating a hasty retreat.
Why was the ‘r’ lost, then found again? Linguists agree
that at the time the American colonies were settled, most speakers of British
English pronounced the ‘r,’ quite strongly in fact. (Of course, it could be
argued that there was no such thing as ‘British English’ until 1776, that it
was just English before then.) Dialects in the eastern and southeastern part of
England began to lose the ‘r,’ and this would have included the speech of
London. Quite a lot of commerce linked the Eastern Seaboard with Britain, and
the fashions of London in dress, music, and yes, language, spread across the
Atlantic. Not only did traders come from England bringing the latest trends, but
the wealthier colonists long followed a tradition of sending their sons to
England for an education. As today, those who went away to college came back
with their speech patterns altered, for better or worse. ‘R’s’ disappeared
in Charleston and Savannah, which were great port cities, and also in the speech
of New York City and Boston (‘pahk the cah in the yahd’).
Alert readers will notice that in this tale of colonists from
England, commerce, fashions, and higher education, someone has been left out:
the involuntary immigrants who began to populate the South in large numbers,
African slaves. Like anyone else who learns a foreign language, Africans would
have substituted sound patterns from their native language for unfamiliar sound
patterns in the new language. The quest to trace any African American language
feature back to a specific African language is complicated by the fact that West
Africa is one of the most polyglot (from Greek ‘many’ + ‘tongues’) areas
of the world. Those who live there routinely speak four or more languages just
in the course of their everyday lives. We know, however, that a majority of
these West African languages end each syllable with a vowel. English syllables
like ‘cart,’ ending in two consonants would be hard for speakers of
languages like this to pronounce, whether the language is West African or
Japanese. So the slaves who were learning English would have had tendency to
drop ‘r’s’ that occurred at the end of a word or before a consonant,
exactly the context where Londoners were dropping them.
This language change from two sources caused the r-lessness
of Southern speech to spread inland much further than in New York or New
England, throughout the whole of the plantation country. Up until World War Two,
Southerners who still pronounced their ‘r’s’ gave away their origin in the
poor whites who worked the small farms and cotton mills of the sand hills and
the upcountry areas that couldn’t support plantation agriculture. Poorer
settlers, many of them of Scottish ancestry (Scots-Irish) arrived in the South
in the eighteenth century from Ireland. The choice lands of the coastal plain
were already occupied, so they moved on to the back country, the higher, hillier
land, where they met with other Scots-Irish who had travelled from Pennsylvania
down into the Southern Appalachians. While the planters and their slaves, and
the descendents of these groups as well, did not pronounce the postvocalic
‘r,’ the descendents of the Scots-Irish did pronounce it.
The ‘r’ became a marker of poverty among white
Southerners. Dialectologist Raven McDavid, himself a South Carolinian who did
not pronounce the ‘r,’ went so far as to suggest that the presence of
‘r’ might indicate a person who was more likely to be racist and hence unfit
for certain roles, police work, for example. He based this idea on the
long-standing reality of economic competition between blacks and poor whites and
the hostility it engendered. Nevertheless, McDavid foresaw a time when the more
widespread American habit of pronouncing the ‘r’ might come to prevail,
noting that ‘the presence in local military posts of many Northern and Western
servicemen, with strong. . . ‘r’ as well as with a different and more
sophisticated line of conversation, has led many Southern girls to the
conclusion that a person with ‘r’ can be acceptable as a date for the
daughter of generations of plantation owners.’
In the end, again there are at least two sources of language
change that have converged to introduce the ‘r’ back into the speech of
Southerners of the higher social classes. The first is this influence of the
national norm, intensifying with the current migration of Northerners to the
‘Sun Belt.’ The second is the rise of Piedmont cities—Birmingham, Atlanta,
Greenville/Spartanburg, Charlotte, and Raleigh/Durham—to dominate Southern
urban culture. No longer are cities like Charleston and Savannah fashionable
centers of culture that set the trends for outlying areas. Economic changes have
isolated them in the way geographical barriers isolated islanders and
mountaineers in days gone by, so that their dialect has become a ‘quaint’
one rather than a model to imitate. Although the upper classes throughout the
South had become accustomed to dropping the ‘r,’ r-lessness was never as
strong in the Piedmont region, the region that is now asserting its linguistic
as well as economic superiority in the South. Atlanta and its upcountry sisters,
where more ‘r’s’ were pronounced, have taken on the status of role models.
Unfortunately, yet another force may be playing a role in the
resurgence of ‘r,’ racism.* In many parts of the country, the speech
patterns of African Americans and whites seem to be moving apart in some ways.
White Southerners could be using more ‘r’s’ as a way of distinguishing
themselves from African Americans, in a backlash against integration and other
changes brought by the Civil Rights Movement. R-lessness is alive and well in
the black community, though it is rapidly disappearing elsewhere.
Indeed, the loss of ‘r’ that once prevailed across the
South, and that is still parodied by those who would mimic Southern speech, only
exists today among African Americans, Southerners over the age of sixty, and in
the most rural areas, especially among males there. It is no longer a feature of
the speech of most white Southerners. Researchers have shown us that when
language varieties are dying out (for example, the use of German in Michigan or
certain Native American languages), the last speakers are usually men. There are
reasons for maintaining features of speech that run contrary to mainstream
standards, reasons that go to the very heart of our identity. So it is that
‘r’ has not found its way back into the speech of all Southerners just yet.
Forrest Gump says, ‘You got to put the pas’ behin’ you
befo’ you can move on.’ Language change proceeds slowly. ‘R’ is now
respectable, and the language seems to be moving on, but the past is never
completely behind us.
Ellen Johnson teaches linguistics at the University of
Georgia, and has published a book about the changing vocabulary of Southern
English.
* [Editor’s Note: The League of the South
respectfully disagrees with the use of the word ‘racism’ in this context. We
fail to see how changing one’s speech to distinguish it from another’s
qualifies as ‘racism.’ Even if it did qualify, the ‘moving apart’ of the
speech patterns of the races might more readily and convincingly be attributed
to ‘racism’ on the part of blacks trying to distinguish themselves from
whites–or else attributed to the ‘racism’ of radio and television media
people, whose speech is decidedly ‘r-ful’ and apparently sets the
‘standard’ for blacks & whites alike.]
An R-Ful Change in Southern English