The urban South: phonology

The single most important social fact about the American South since 1880 has been the urbanization of its population. Much of the current social fabric of the region, including increased educational levels, the existence of a substantial middle class, and both the Jim Crow laws that formalized racial segregation after 1890 and the Civil Rights movement that eliminated those laws after 1964, developed in part because of the emergence of Southern towns and cities. Urbanization has had profound linguistic consequences as well, initially forging a number of local vernaculars into the regional dialect we know of as Southern American English (SAmE) and later reshaping and transforming that dialect. A brief overview of urbanization in the South will illustrate how this process could factor in both the formation and the transformation of a dialect. A review of some phonological features of the urban South (and a comparison with the features of rural Southern phonology outlined in Thomas [this volume]) will illustrate the extent of the transformation.