The subject of people speaking with twang (country music) came up, and I got interested in when and where it started. The dictionary says that the word twang is from 1553 or so, so it is fairly old. I wonder if it is native to American English or people somewhere else also speak with a twang? Also, why is it mostly widespread only in the South? I am researching the topic right now, will post what I find..
I'm not sure what you're referring to. American Southern dialect is often called a "Southern drawl," highlighting the fact that--in addition to its other characteristics--it's spoken more slowly than standard American, which in turn is spoken more slowly than R.P. and other British dialects. I've only heard "twang" used in discussing country music, specifically the sound of bending one of the lower-pitched strings on an electric guitar with the tone adjusted toward treble. So I don't know what aspect of Southern dialect you're referring to as "twang." As for the origin of Southern dialect, many decades ago I read somewhere that it is in fact very conservative speech, and sounds more like the vernacular language of the British colonists in the 16th-17th centuries than any other contemporary American (or British) dialect. Like most non-standard dialects in Western countries, it's changing slowly and coming into conformance with standard, due to the pressures of regional migration and electronic media. Apparently it was originally non-rhotic like old Boston speech and most of the U.K.--"wezz yo ca?" instead of "where's your car?" My friend's 80-year-old father talks that way and if you listen to Southern characters in old movies they often talk that way. Today most Southerners are rhotic like the rest of America, with one exception: you sometimes still hear: "yo" instead of "your."
Well, the dialect what most country music stars speak. I guess it is closest to the Southern drawl, or it is actually the same... The thing is, why is it native only in the South? Were the incoming colonists different than the ones who ended up in the North?? I had this theory that they might have learnt it from the slaves, and since there were more slaves in the South, the influance was stronger...
Actually there were slaves throughout the north as well, the north simply phased it out earlier because the plantation system did not make it as integral to northern life. There were thousands of slaves in the north in about 1750. Slavery in New York, for example, wasn't abolished until 1827 (though the numbers had steadily declined before then, though not to zero). The reasons a dialect develop are complicated, but are roughly based on the populations one finds in a certain region, and what their accents are. Remember that the British Scottish and Irish have a large number of distinct accents despite the regions not being all that big, and yet when people emigrate there is a tendency to disproportionately go to places were others from your area have gone. While those tend to get homogenized after moving, even in the South there are distinctions between accents. The tidewater accent is noticeably different from "Ozark English." It is undoutedly true that West African dialects and accents played a role in forming some of the sounds in certain southern dialects, I would guess it would mostly be the case amongst people heavy contact with slaves, suggesting that urbanized southerners would probably have less of that. As for why the southern accent is different, the answer is just that these things grow organically, and never happen the same way twice. Why did the Philadelphia accent become rhotic, when New York, only 100 miles away, was non-rhotic? It starts with the basic populations that move to a region and the dialectical elements they brong, but then how it evolves from there is all random.
Really? Who would have thought? Seriously, I said MORE, nobody said there were no slaves in the North. So you basicly agree with my theory...
No. Quite the contrary: AAVE (African-American Vernacular English, occasionally called "Ebonics" by government agencies) was influenced by Southern American as well as the substratum of African languages. It's unusual for the language of a conquering people to be highly influenced by the language of a conquered people--although this is by no means unknown, and the exceptions are noteworthy. The Aramaeans were slaves or vassals within the Achaemenid Empire. But their language became the common speech among all the subject peoples, and was eventually adopted by the rulers. Due to this accident of fate Aramaic subsequently became the lingua franca of the entire Mesopotamian realm and much of the Bible was written in the language. It retained this position for a millennium until it began to be supplanted by Arabic, and it is still spoken, written, and now chatted on the Internet. Ango-Saxon was the language of the people of "Angle-Land" in 1066 when they were conquered by the Norman French, who imposed their own language on the island. The Norman rulers assimilated many English words and their language gradually evolved into Anglo-Norman. Yet a few hundred years later they gave it up and adopted Middle English, which by now had been even more heavily influenced by French. Like Aramaic, Modern English, the language of an occupied people, is one of the most historically significant languages. The Wikipedia article on Southern American English more-or-less accurately describes what I have read in many sources over the decades: This American dialect is derived from the speech of the people who settled in the American South, including: Southwestern England or what they call "the West Country" Protestants from Northern Ireland Scotland France--recall that roughly half of the Confederacy was originally the Louisiana Purchase and its first European inhabitants spoke French.
The problem is that those people also settled in the North but they never developed the same dialect. What's up with that?
Not in the same proportion. Different parts of America were settled by people from different parts of the British Isles. The Irish Protestants from what is now Northern Ireland, for example, formed a community in Appalachia. The Irish in the North were Catholics from what is now Ireland proper. A large portion of the South was occupied by the French before the British even got there. Half the cities and half the people in Louisiana still have French names, and their culture and language were strong influences on Southern culture and language. Cajun French is still spoken down there and the original non-rhotic Southern dialect is alive and well in Louisiana--although I'm not clear how silent R's are the result of French influence. In any case there's very little French influence on the language of the North because there weren't a lot of French settlers up there. On the other hand the Dutch had established settlements in the North--New York used to be called New Amsterdam. You can still hear wisps of Dutch in the dialect of that region, such as the pronunciation of "New Jizey." There's no Dutch influence on Southern American dialect.
No, or at least not entirely. What we call "twang" or "drawl" (which, technically, are two somewhat distinct variants of Southern speech) is the aggregate set of phonetic differences between Southern American and Standard American. Each of those differences may have come down from a different source, but in any case they did not all come down from a single source. Each community of immigrants contributed its own influence to the dialect: West Country, Northern Irish Protestants, Scots, original French settlers, the later wave of Acadian ("Cajun") French, Creole, et al. Such a recently developed dialect, in a country well endowed with scholars, has obviously been studied exhaustively, judging from the wealth of detail available just on Wikipedia. I imagine there are entire books--or at least university papers--that trace the origin of every phonetic, grammatical and vocabulary feature of each regional variant of Southern American.
Since the twang appears to correlate with the non-French south, the answer suggested might be that the French caused the drawl. Or perhaps plantation influence marks it - the twang appears to be associated with the Scots-Irish hill settlements less adulterated by other influences, where small tobacco plots and more subsistence farming with few African slaves established the norm, rather than the great lowland town-sized slave populations in close relationship with French colonials. I've also heard at least one theorist argue (with examples and evidence, including Al Gore's body language) that the culture the smaller slave country white farmers developed was in resistance to, separation from, the nearby slave culture - that the "high lonesome" singing with string instruments and no drums, the twanging and nasal speech rather than the throaty and deeper drawl, the tight hips and lifted shoulders rather than the swinging booty and realxed arms, the food and drink preferences etc, were partly a status claim of a kind (culturally mediated via existing speech etc of course).
