American Dialects Geography in Linguistic Thesis

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Thus, when it comes to vowels, this short comparison led me to believe the southern dialect uses longer, more rounded, looser vowels than the inland North dialect.

Consonant sounds also differ between the two regions; or perhaps it is more accurate to note that consonants are used in different ways in the southern and inland northern areas of the United States. Take, for instance, the word "white." While I pronounce this word with a defined, voiced [j] sound at the end, the southern speaker allows it to conclude by lengthening the [a] vowel, as in father. This difference leads to southern words sounding softer and more rounded than the hard, tight edges of Northern words. Although there is a great deal of bias regarding the Southern dialect in the United States today, with some saying it sounds uneducated, listening to the features alone reveal it as a beautiful, if different, use of spoken word.

Finally, syntactical variations in the way Southern speakers formed sentences existed, in addition to differences in the way I formed sentences.

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For instance, one southern speaker consistently used the term "was," when I would have used "were." An example of this is the fact that she used the phrase, "We was," when I would have said, "we were." Although another southern speaker did not mimic this construction, her words had a formal element that mine, and the other southern speaker's, did not. This seems to imply that there are other influences on linguistic variation besides geography. Ethnicity, family life, occupation, etc. may all account for variation.

Thus, the differences in pronunciation from one person to the next can be based on many variables. Geographical location, however, seems to largely account for dialectical variation. The differences in dialects reinforce the theory that no language is superior to another, and they make listeners wonder what causes these variations......

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