Dialectology [Repost]

I have been fascinated by the particulars of the dialect of English spoken by my students (and some other teachers and staff), and its divergence from my own dialect (and from the somewhat artifical standard). I’ve begun compiling a list of features, in no particular order, and what follows is a non-exhaustive sample.

Sugar as a noun for diabetes. When told not to chew gum or eat candy in class, students will sometimes claim that they need it because they “have sugar.” The teacher with the classroom next door (and who is from the area) has said to me, “I don’t have sugar per se, but I’m border-line, and I like to keep a snack around.”

Sinuses as a noun for allergies. When a sniffling student with red, watery eyes is asked how he is feeling, he might respond, “I’m okay, I just got sinuses.” (Responding with the information that we all have sinuses is met with blank stares.)

There are several peculiarities of prepositions, the most strange to me the use of on with relative days or times: “On tomorrow we will hold a meeting,” “on yesterday we won the game,” “on this evening we have a lot of homework.” It’s perhaps not so strange when one realizes that the same preposition is perfectly standard and conventional for absolute dates (“on the 15th,” “on Thursday,” “on Thanksgiving”). Still, I wonder where this use came from.

More widely known (from rap music?) is the redundant preposition: “it stinks up in here,” “get yourself up out of here.”

Evening is often used where I would say afternoon. When we have a faculty meeting after school (3:00), teachers say that we have a meeting this evening. I believe I’ve even had my sixth and seventh period students come to me in the morning to ask about what we’d be doing this evening.

Supper is the word for dinner. It sounds archaic and folksy to me, but it’s the first word used for the evening meal. I’m not sure if dinner presents connotative differences or if it is simply unused. (I believe the local way precedes my own, since I think etymology suggests that dinner should mean breakfast.)

To lose one’s manners as a verb meaning to fart. I hear this one every day. “Mr. Pollack! Somebody done lost his manners over here!”

Na’un. I’m still unsure of this one. I’m fumbling to spell it phonetically (the vowels are different enough here that I have trouble replicating or reliably remembering them). This word (construction?) is not particularly common, but I’ve heard it several times, and always as a negation when two (or more?) options are presented. Is it a contraction of neither one? Of neither of them? Of (could it even be?) nary a one?

Carry as a very broad verb meaning to take or to escort. May be used even of people, as in, “She carried us to Memphis when she got a job there,” or, “He carried her to the movies for a date.”

The Mississippi Long U. (Is it the Delta Long U? Is it shared by any white populations?) Sometimes it sounds like an r is being interposed after every long u, sometimes like a German ö (or oe, as in Goethe). It’s very clear in words like community, excuse, computer, cute, which can almost sound like commurnity, excurse, compurter, curt. I’ve got a student whose last name is Hughes, and it’s very clear there, too.

Dropped copula on predicate nominatives (as in Greek or Latin — which likeness comes as a great surprise to my students). I think this construction is recognized and understood everywhere in the English-speaking world(as a result of movies? music?): “He working right now,” “You sick?”

Well known, again, is the use of the verb to be very differently than in my own or the standard dialect, though I’m not sure I understand the morphological distinctions. There might be a distinction between a phrase that drops the copula and one that uses to be: “You happy” vs. “you be happy.” If there is a distinction (of aspect?), I’m not sure what it is. Most of the standard conjugations of to be seem not to be used much (despite my pesterings to use them when writing S.A.E. — Standard American English — essays).

The third-person singular verb is never conjugated, which is another widely recognized feature of Southern and of African American speech, though it is quite unsurprising phonetically: the final s is almost never pronounced. It is not a peculiarity of third-person verbs. No s is pronounced at the ends of plural nouns, of genitive nouns, or even of many words which ordinarily ends in the letter. “My friend’s car” becomes “my friend car;” “all my friends go” becomes “all my friend go.” Sometimes some kids will even pronounce a word like glass as glah, though this is less common, and the missing s seems to become an aspiration. (It is interesting that Spanish dialects in much of Latin America do the same thing — and are even similarly associated with rural areas and lower economic classes, I think. Spanish even does it with a medial s, [in Buenos Aires, obelisco is just as often obelihhh-co] but I don’t think I’ve heard that in Mississippi.)

Another widely known: the healthy reflexive verb, as in, “I ate me some food.”

One of the first features I noticed, which I had never heard before and which is totally ubiquitous is the inverted syntax on questions. “What is that?” becomes “What that is?”

The dummy pronoun on existential to be is it, not there as in my dialect and the standard. Thus, “there is something” becomes “it is something.” I still can’t force my ear to hear this construction as existential, and have to perform a conscious translation each time. I’ve explained this to my students with the insight that there’s no reason for any pronoun there apart from convention (in Spanish, for instance, one uses the verb haber) but they didn’t seem particularly interested.

The pluperfect verb seemingly to introduce a preterite narrative. The most common use is the phrase, “what had happened is” to begin a story in the past-tense. The pluperfect is not generally used again once the narrative has been so introduced. I don’t think it should be heard as a pluperfect, just as an indication of the tense of the whole narrative to follow. (My kids don’t much use perfects or pluperfects in the standard way, I think, and I’m not sure if they hear in them the distinction that I do — again, an analog to Spanish or French.)

Trying to as a verbal phrase to mean wanting to or about to or starting to, which may be used for inanimate objects. “My tooth is trying to hurt.”

Ain’t as a past-tense negation. Of course I’m familiar and comfortable with ain’t, but don’t think I had ever known it to be used in the past-tense. “I ain’t know” (for “didn’t know”).

Room for class. “Mr. Pollack, what grade am I getting in your room?” Once, when my class was in the library, someone referred to “this room” but they meant my class, and not the library.

I will add more as I discover or remember them.