Texan English

Last updated
Texan English
Region Texas
Ethnicity Texans
Early forms
Latin (English alphabet)
American Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
Glottolog None
IETF en-u-sd-ustx
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Texan English is the array of American English dialects spoken in Texas, primarily falling under Southern U.S. English. As one nationwide study states, the typical Texan accent is a "Southern accent with a twist". [1] The "twist" refers to inland Southern U.S., older coastal Southern U.S., and South Midland U.S. accents mixing together, due to Texas's settlement history, as well as some lexical (vocabulary) influences from Mexican Spanish. [1] In fact, there is no single accent that covers all of Texas and few dialect features are unique to Texas alone. The newest and most innovative Southern U.S. accent features are best reported in Lubbock, Odessa, somewhat Houston and variably Dallas, though general features of this same dialect are found throughout the state, with several exceptions: [2] Abilene and somewhat Austin, Corpus Christi, and El Paso appear to align more with Midland U.S. accents than Southern ones.

Contents

History

After Mexico gained independence in 1821, Mexican Texas legally permitted an influx of American settlers from the United States (mainly the Southern United States), [3] who within a decade outnumbered Hispanics in Texas, [4] making English as common as Spanish in central and north Texas. After Texas became an independent republic in 1836, English, with its distinct Southern influences, became the predominant language. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, a great number of Spanish-speaking Mexicans immigrated to Texas, [5] [6] slowing down in the mid-20th century only to increase massively since 1990, [4] driving the development of a young Spanish-influenced dialect of Texan English: Tejano English.

Research

Some linguists draw dialect boundaries based upon phonological (sound-pattern) differences and others on lexical (word-usage) differences, leading to various views on how to classify dialects in Texas, often by dividing the state into an eastern versus a western dialect region. [7] 20th-century lexical research delimited Texas into two "layers": a southern Texas layer along the Mexican border with several Spanish loanwords and a central Texas layer settled by speakers of German and other European languages amidst a dominant Anglo-American settlement. [8] [9] 21st-century phonological research reveals accents in Texas grouped in a way not easy to demarcate in terms of simple geographical boundaries, [10] and ongoing research reveals an urban–rural divide within Texas becoming more significant than a region-wide divide.

Some linguists propose that urbanization, geographic and social mobility, and the mass media have homogenized the speech of the United States to a national norm. [11] Due to rapid urbanization, increasing dominance of high tech industries, and massive migrations, Texan speech has been reshaped as well, especially since 1990. [4] The general tendency in the phonology of Texas English is that mergers expand at the expense of distinctions, although traditional Southern-style Texan English preserved older phonemic distinctions. [11] Since much of the traditional regional vocabulary concerned farming and rural life, these terms are now disappearing or being replaced by technical terms. [11]

Urban–rural contrast

As stated above, an internal rural–urban split is emerging within Texan English, meaning that most traditionally Southern (or stereotypically Texan) features remain strong in rural areas but tend to disappear in large urban areas and small cities. [4] The urban-rural linguistic split mainly affects Southern-style phonological phenomena like the pen-pin merger, the loss of the offglide in /aɪ/, and upgliding diphthongs, all of which are now recessive in metropolitan areas. [4] Meanwhile, some traditional grammatical features like y'all and fixin' to are expanding to non-natives in metropolitan areas as well as to the Hispanic population. [4]

Phonology

Essentially all Texas English phonologically falls under the Southeastern super-dialect region of the United States and often specifically the Southern dialect region, though noticeably not the cities of El Paso, Abilene, and Austin, and not particularly Houston and Corpus Christi. [2] Moreover, as of 21st-century research, the accents of Dallas show enormous variability. [10]

Grammar

Texas English may use many grammatical constructions typically associated with Southern U.S. English, including fixin' to, [19] multiple modals like might could and should oughta (reportedly used by every social class and, as of the 1980s Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, predominately in Upper and Lower East Texas), and plural verbal -s as in Our father and mother helps used by both Black and (somewhat less commonly) white Texans. [20]

Vocabulary

Many of these lexical terms are shared with the Midland and Southern dialects generally:

Statewide Spanish loanwords

Due to Spain's past influence in Texas, the vocabulary of Texas is much more influenced by Spanish than the vocabulary of other states. Some of the Texan terms that originated from Spanish are listed below. [22]

South Texas vocabulary

Central Texas vocabulary

In the media

Texan English frequently shows up in the media. In the 1950s and 1960s, many Hollywood western movies like Giant, Hud, and The Alamo were set in Texas. In those movies, Hollywood stars like James Dean, Rock Hudson, Dennis Hopper, Paul Newman, and Patricia Neal first had to learn how to speak Texan English and were instructed by native Texans. Also the famous TV series Dallas was often characterized by Texan English.

Texas Instruments sometimes uses Texan English in its products. The TIFORM software for its TI-990 minicomputer sometimes displayed "Shut 'er Down Clancey She's a-Pumping Mud" as a humorous error message. [28]

The Texan accent gained nationwide fame with the presidency of native Texan Lyndon B. Johnson. A lifelong resident of the Texas Hill Country, Johnson's thick accent was a large part of his personality and brought attention and fame to the dialect. [4] [29]

The Texan dialect gained fame again when George W. Bush started to serve as president. He had moved to West Texas at the age of two and has since retained the Texan dialect. In his speech, words like "America" sometimes sound like "Amur-kah" or even just like "Mur-kah". [4] [30] Former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also speaks with a distinctively Texan accent. [31]

Tejano English

Due to hundreds of years of Spanish and later Mexican intermingling, around 6 million (ca. 29%) people in Texas speak Spanish as the first language. [32] Recent data shows that Spanish is still increasing. [33] Since there are so many Spanish speakers in Texas, Spanish has a high impact on the English dialect spoken in Texas. [34] Many Mexican Americans in Texas speak their own variety of English which has many Spanish features (terms, phonology, etc.), Tejano English, a Chicano English dialect mostly spoken by working-class Mexican Americans. A very distinctive feature of that dialect is the /-t,d/-deletion in words which contain a /t/ or /d/ in the final position. [35]

Related Research Articles

American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances is the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce. It is also the official language of most US states. Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide.

North American English is the most generalized variety of the English language as spoken in the United States and Canada. Because of their related histories and cultures, plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, and grammar of American English and Canadian English, the two spoken varieties are often grouped together under a single category. Canadians are generally tolerant of both British and American spellings, with British spellings of certain words preferred in more formal settings and in Canadian print media; for some other words the American spelling prevails over the British.

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Southern American English or Southern U.S. English is a regional dialect or collection of dialects of American English spoken throughout the Southern United States, though concentrated increasingly in more rural areas, and spoken primarily by White Southerners. In terms of accent, its most innovative forms include southern varieties of Appalachian English and certain varieties of Texan English. Popularly known in the United States as a Southern accent or simply Southern, Southern American English now comprises the largest American regional accent group by number of speakers. Formal, much more recent terms within American linguistics include Southern White Vernacular English and Rural White Southern English.

New Orleans English is American English native to the city of New Orleans and its metropolitan area. Native English speakers of the region actually speak a number of varieties, including the variety most recently brought in and spreading since the 20th century among white communities of the Southern United States in general ; the variety primarily spoken by black residents ; the variety spoken by Cajuns in southern Louisiana ; the variety traditionally spoken by affluent white residents of the city's Uptown and Garden District; and the variety traditionally spoken by lower middle- and working-class white residents of Eastern New Orleans, particularly the Ninth Ward. However, only the last two varieties are unique to New Orleans and are typically those referred to in the academic research as "New Orleans English". These two varieties specific to New Orleans likely developed around the turn of the nineteenth century and most noticeably combine speech features commonly associated with both New York City English and, to a lesser extent, Southern U.S. English. The noticeably New York-like characteristics include the NYC-like short-a split, non-rhoticity, th-stopping, and the recently disappearing coil–curl merger. Noticeably Southern characteristics include the fronting of and possible monophthongization of.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicano English</span> Dialect of English spoken in the Southwestern United States

Chicano English, or Mexican-American English, is a dialect of American English spoken primarily by Mexican Americans, particularly in the Southwestern United States ranging from Texas to California, as well as in Chicago. Chicano English is sometimes mistakenly conflated with Spanglish, which is a mixing of Spanish and English; however, Chicano English is a fully formed and native dialect of English, not a "learner English" or interlanguage. It is even the native dialect of some speakers who know little to no Spanish, or have no Mexican heritage.

In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.

North-Central American English is an American English dialect, or dialect in formation, native to the Upper Midwestern United States, an area that somewhat overlaps with speakers of the separate Inland Northern dialect situated more in the eastern Great Lakes region. In the United States, it is also known as the Upper Midwestern or North-Central dialect and stereotypically recognized as a Minnesota accent or sometimes Wisconsin accent. It is considered to have developed in a residual dialect region from the neighboring Western, Inland Northern, and Canadian dialect regions.

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Pacific Northwest English is a variety of North American English spoken in the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon, sometimes also including Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Due to the internal diversity within Pacific Northwest English, current studies remain inconclusive about whether it is best regarded as a dialect of its own, separate from Western American English or even California English or Standard Canadian English, with which it shares its major phonological features. The dialect region contains a highly diverse and mobile population, which is reflected in the historical and continuing development of the variety.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inland Northern American English</span> English as spoken in the US Great Lakes region

Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western American English</span> Dialect of American English

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Midland American English</span> Variety of English spoken in the United States

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Northern American English</span> Class of historically related American English dialects

Northern American English or Northern U.S. English is a class of historically related American English dialects, spoken by predominantly white Americans, in much of the Great Lakes region and some of the Northeast region within the United States. The North as a super-dialect region is best documented by the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE) in the greater metropolitan areas of Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, Western and Central New York, Northwestern New Jersey, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Northern Ohio, Northern Indiana, Northern Illinois, Northeastern Nebraska, and Eastern South Dakota, plus among certain demographics or areas within Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and New York's Hudson Valley. The ANAE describes that the North, at its core, consists of the Inland Northern dialect and Southwestern New England dialect.

The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.

The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change is a 2006 book that overviews the pronunciation patterns (accents) in all the major dialect regions of the English language as spoken in urban areas of the United States and Canada. It is the result of a large-scale survey by linguists William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. Speech data was collected, mainly during the 1990s, by means of telephone interviews with individuals in metropolitan areas in all regions of the U.S. and Canada. Using acoustic analysis of speech from these interviews, ANAE traces sound changes in progress in North American English, and defines boundaries between dialect regions based on the different sound changes taking place in them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Canadian English</span> Variety of Canadian English

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References

  1. 1 2 Colloff, Pamela (27 March 2019). ""Drawl or Nothin'." Do you speak American?". pbs.org.
  2. 1 2 Labov et al., 2006, p. 126-131.
  3. ↑ Walsh, Harry, and Victor L. Mote. "A Texas Dialect Feature: Origins and Distribution." American Speech, 49.1-2 (1974). 40-53.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Texas English." Do you speak American?. 6 Sept 2012
  5. ↑ Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English: Dialects and Variation. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
  6. ↑ Atwood, E. Bagby. The Regional Vocabulary of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962.
  7. ↑ Underwood, Gary N. (1990), "Scholarly Responsibility and the Representation of Dialects: The Case of English in Texas", Journal of English Linguistics 23: 95-112.
  8. ↑ Walters, Keith. "Dialects". Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Web. 14 August 2012
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Carver, Craig M. (1987), American regional dialects : a word geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
  10. 1 2 Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg Charles (2006). Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 Bailey, Guy. "Directions of Change in Texas English." Journal of American Culture 14.2 (1991): 125-134.
  12. 1 2 Labov et al., 2006, p. 61.
  13. 1 2 Feagin, Crawford. "Vowel Shifting in the Southern States." English in the Southern United States. Ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 126-140.
  14. ↑ Labov et al., 2006, p. 129.
  15. 1 2 Jung, Natalie A. (2011) "Real-Time Changes in the Vowel System of Central Texas English". "Texas Linguistics Forum" 54:72-78.
  16. ↑ Bailey, Guy. "Directions of Change in Texas English.".Journal of American Culture 14.2 (1991): 125-134.
  17. ↑ Thomas, Erik R. (2004), "Rural Southern white accents", in Schneider, Edgar W.; Burridge, Kate; Kortmann, Bernd; Mesthrie, Rajend; Upton, Clive (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English, vol. 1: Phonology, Mouton de Gruyter, p. 308, ISBN   3-11-017532-0
  18. ↑ Labov et al., 2006, p. 71.
  19. ↑ Pederson, Lee, ed. Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States: Social Pattern for the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. (Shows the term used by 57% of the population of Upper Texas and by 43% in Lower Texas
  20. ↑ Bailey, Guy, Natalie Minor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila. "Variation in Subject-Verb Concord in Early Modern English." Language Variation and Change, 1 (1989): 285-300 (Shows that 70% of the black population and 43% of the white population put an –s on the third person plural in folk speech.)
  21. ↑ Barkley, Roy. "Blue Norther" .2012. Texas State Historical Association. 5 Sept 2012.
  22. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Metcalf, Allan. How We Talk: American Regional English Today. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2000.
  23. 1 2 3 "Texas English". Do you speak American? Web. 14 August 2012
  24. 1 2 3 "Drawl or Nothin'". Do You Speak American?. PBS. 2005. Retrieved 3 September 2010.
  25. 1 2 3 "The Handbook of Texas Online".
  26. ↑ Hisbrook, David (August 1984). "Texas Primer: The Icehouse". Texas Monthly .
  27. ↑ Pelado
  28. ↑ Lener, Jeffrey (1984-04-03). "TI Talks Texan". PC Magazine. p. 49. Retrieved 24 October 2013.
  29. ↑ "Do You Speak American . Sea to Shining Sea . American Varieties . Texan - PBS". www.pbs.org.
  30. ↑ "Drawl or Nothin’" Do you speak American?. 6 Sept 2012
  31. ↑ Sarah Jasmine Montgomery (February 4, 2017). "This Week in Texas Energy: Rex Tillerson Sworn in as Secretary of State". Texas Monthly. Austin, Texas. Retrieved February 9, 2024. he stated in his notable Texas accent,
  32. ↑ Feal, Rosemary G., ed. "MLA Language Map Data Center." Modern English Association. 4 Sept 2012
  33. ↑ Feal, Rosemary G., ed. "MLA Language Map Data Center." Archived 2006-06-19 at the Wayback Machine Modern English Association. 4 Sept 2012
  34. ↑ "MLA Language Map Data Center." Modern English Association. Ed. Rosemary G. Feal. 4 Sept 2012
  35. ↑ Bayley, Robert. "Variation in Tejano English: Evidence for Variable Lexical Phonology." Language Variety in the South. eds. Cynthia Berstein et al. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997. 197-210.
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