4.1 Verbs

Throughout the history of English, verbs have been a fertile area for variation. In the U.S. South, modals, verbal -s, perfective done, and several permutations of the verb be have undergone changes and carried their share of social meaning. Double modals, such as I might could make it Friday, are holding their own (Reed & Montgomery, 2021) and even expanding outside the South by way of African American English (Bernstein, 2007), but it is unclear whether the range of possible types is narrowing or not. A quality of verb conjugation in modern English is that third-person singular subjects trigger the addition of a verbal -s in standard varieties. For many dialects of English, including the U.S. South, the loss of this suffix has been a variable process, occurring most prominently with some verbs such as do: She don’t want to go out. With most verbs, the loss of this verbal suffix has declined over time, becoming rare for many parts of the South although findings indicate that it is more common in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) than in White varieties in both rural and urban areas.

An area of continuing variability between regions and social groups is perfective done. As an auxiliary verb, this use of done indicates that an action is complete (e.g., We done washed the dishes), and it has been reported as declining in the U.S. South (Bernstein, 2007) including Appalachia (Hazen et al., 2010). When perfective done is expressed, it functions as a part of the verb phrase, usually immediately preceding another verb, although there are instances when other specifiers come between done and the verb (e.g., I done already put in for my social security). Despite this widespread usage, perfective done is generally stigmatized outside of these speech communities, and it has become a sociolinguistic stereotype that is often employed in the use of racist or otherwise socially demeaning jokes (Rickford & Rickford, 2000).

Since the beginnings of English, the verb be has been subject to more variation and more types of variation than any other verb in English. Variation with be started in Old English and continues today in the U.S. South. Invariant be has been part of Southern English since the Scots Irish immigration, and African-American Vernacular English borrowed from that variety the habitual aspect, with She be laughing all the time as a contrast to the progressive aspect of She is laughing (Bernstein, 2007, p. 139; Rickford, 1999, p. 175). Because of the stigma associated with it and perhaps because of the use of it by non-native speakers in ungrammatical ways in social media, traditional uses of habitual be appear to have declined since 2000 but remain strong in rural areas for African Americans. In another corner of be variation, copula absence has had a long history in the U.S. South. Copula absence, the non-production of present tense be as in she Ø gonna go tomorrow, has been a feature of Southern speech generally, although its range of environments is wider in AAVE (Feagin, 1979; Green, 2002). For many White Southern varieties, copula absence primarily occurs in traditional are environments (e.g., They Ø complaining every chance they get), aided often by phonological R-dropping. For AAVE, copula absence occurs in both is and are environments (e.g., She Ø the president; they Ø winning) (Hazen, 2000). Copula absence from the U.S. South played an important role in the debate about the origins of AAVE (Green, 2002; Mufwene et al., 2007).

In many vernacular dialects, speakers often pair plural subjects with the singular verb form of past tense be (e.g., We was there). Was leveling has a rich history in English. It continues on throughout the U.S. South, despite its increase in social saliency and its decrease in overall frequency. In the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the vernacular past be paradigm is organized by polarity, with the negative past be leveled to weren’t (e.g., He weren’t there) and positive past be leveled to was (e.g., We was there) (Wolfram et al., 1999). In most of the U.S. South, including Appalachia, was leveling occupies the entire past be paradigm (e.g., We was there; we wasn’t there). In some rural areas there are past be forms analogous to ain’t, as in We wont there (Hazen, 1998). Across North America, including the U.S. South, there are relatively high rates of leveled was in plural existential environments (e.g., There was three of them). The kind of grammatical subject has a wide range of influence on the rate of was leveling, as has been found in most varieties of English. Often conjoined NPs show the highest rate of was leveling (e.g., The dog and the cat was fighting). In many parts of the U.S. South, the social class effect on the rates of was leveling is apparent: the lower the social class, the higher the rate of leveling. Other social factors also play a role, as those speakers with no college experience have dramatically higher rates of was leveling (Hazen, 2014).

4.2 Other Morphosyntactic Variation

A-prefixing is a morphological feature with phonological constraints that is probably used in more areas of the South performatively than otherwise in casual conversation (Montgomery, 2009; Wolfram, 1988). A-prefixing is a showcase feature of country speech and has been used widely in media representations over the last century. Like leveled was, this feature has deep roots, as it is believed to be derived from the prepositions at or on (Montgomery, 2009). It originated in sentences like She is at working, meaning that the action was going on at that moment. The final consonant was eventually lost through a phonological change, and the vowel became an [ə] attached to the verb. At one point a-prefixing was common throughout many varieties of English, but its rate has dropped precipitously in modern times. One study of Appalachia did not find any speakers born after 1947 who used a-prefixing in interviews (Hazen et al., 2010). As used in regular conversations, a-prefixing is a feature that is more often found among lower-class speakers without post-secondary schooling. Burkette and Antieau (2021) examined a-prefixing in the Linguistic Atlas Project, finding over 3,800 a-prefix usages from 1,527 speakers from across the United States (collected from 1931 to 2006). They found that a-prefix usage was not exclusively a Southern feature as much as it was predominantly an Eastern U.S. feature. People around the world are exposed to this feature through various forms of media, including The Dukes of Hazard and The Beverly Hillbillies, as well as comic strips such as Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. A-prefixing is, in fact, not a common part of everyday English in the U.S. South although some areas such as Appalachian Tennessee use a-prefixing in their home registers (Hazen, 2020, Chap. 3), and it is part of family narratives (Burkette, 2013).

The variable (ING) accounts for the variation of the production of two previously separate morphemes: an alveolar nasal [-ɪn] and a velar nasal [-ɪŋ], as in I was walk[ɪn]/[ɪŋ] and Walk[ɪn]/[ɪŋ] is fun. For over two centuries, nonlinguists and linguists alike have discussed the prescriptive and descriptive values of this variable. Houston found an early negative prescriptive evaluation in a 1902 editorial letter that decried “a disloyal crusade against the Queen’s English . . . which . . . will . . . deprive present participles of their final ‘g’” (Houston, 1985, p. 338). This complaint is an indication that, at least by the 20th century, the [-ɪŋ] was considered the unmarked form. The alveolar nasal form [-ɪn] has been linked with rural speech and U.S. Southern speech in particular (Labov, 2001). Hazen (2008) conducted a study of ING variation in the West Virginia area of Appalachia and found that women, Southerners, and those with no college experience all had higher rates of alveolar (ING) than their demographic counterparts. Most other studies in North America have found that men lead with higher rate of ING. Additionally, the rate of alveolar (ING) has an inversely proportional relationship with social class. Syntactic context is the predominant and usually only linguistic conditioning factor for the U.S. South. Gerunds and adjectives have considerably lower rates of alveolar (ING) than do progressives and gerund participles.

4.3 Pronouns

Demonstrative pronouns in modern English standardly have four forms: this, that, these, those. The four forms are divided strictly by number (singular this and that; plural these and those) and loosely by ‘distance’ (proximate this and these; distal that and those, although there is a great deal of variation in actual speech). For vernacular dialects in the U.S. South, there is another option for the plural form: them as in Get some of them chairs. From assessing the distribution of demonstrative them (Hazen et al., 2011), it appears that it alternates primarily with those. In what few studies have been done, speakers prefer combinations such as them chairs and these people, where them is paired with inanimate complements and these is paired with animate complements. This dialect feature has been prominent in the stereotypes of English in rural areas generally, including Appalachia and the U.S. South, and it is strongly associated with stigmatized social perceptions. Most likely because of its negative stereotype, the use of demonstrative them decreased dramatically across the 20th century. Demonstrative them still maintains a foothold in some rural communities, especially among working-class speakers.

Pleonastic pronouns are pronouns used to sum up a preceding noun phrase. The pronouns “she,” “he,” “it”, “we,” and “they” have all been found to serve as pleonastic pronouns (e.g., Amanda, she was loud; Hazen et al., 2010). Although pleonastic pronouns are present throughout English dialects in the United States, they are usually identified as a vernacular feature (Schilling-Estes, 2002) and are part of Southern dialects broadly and AAVE (Rickford & Rickford, 2000). Though long noun phrases usually accompany pleonastic pronouns in most dialects of English, shorter preceding noun phrases of one, two, and three words can be common. For U.S. dialects, the shorter the noun phrase in this construction, the more vernacular it may be considered. The biggest linguistic predictor for pleonastic pronouns is the animacy of the preceding noun phrase, and their use has continued apace in parts of the South (Hazen et al., 2010).

Personal datives are also a construction used in the U.S. South as in She_i went to the store to get her_i some candy (Webelhuth & Dannenberg, 2006, p. 31). Sometimes, these are known as the Southern Double Object Construction, and they are considered normal features for Southern vernacular varieties and hence are not generally stigmatized for those varieties.

Personal datives have been much researched since Christian (1991), as there are syntactic implications in their usage. Wood and Zanuttini (2018) examined the syntactic underpinning of the Southern personal datives as in I love me some baked beans and its non-use of reflexive morphology. Their findings support Christian’s (1991, p. 18) claim that not only are personal datives part of Southern U.S. English but that they are expanding beyond the region.

A popular slogan in the fight for LGBTQ rights across the U.S. South has been Y’all means all. The slogan conveys that the quintessential Southern pronoun includes all people. It also shows how certain pronouns become a badge for the region. Before the mid-1600s, English speakers had a more diverse repertoire of personal pronouns. For a little over a thousand years in English, the pronouns for second-person singular were different from those of second-person plural. People could say “Thou were right!” and everyone knew that sentence referred to one person. By the 1700s, thou, thee, and thine had lost the competition with you, and people began to use you as both singular and plural. To fill the gap in second-person singular and repair the unbalanced pronoun paradigm, many English dialects have attempted to innovate new second-person plural pronouns. In the U.S. South, the pronoun y’all developed over time, with the earliest citations coming in 1824 (Tillery et al., 2000). As Montgomery (1989) noted, variant spellings have arisen, and the origins of the form have been debated for decades. Some areas of the upper South have two forms, either you all or the shorter y’all for second-person plural. In the Smoky Mountains, the plural you’uns, was the dominant form for decades, but it gave way to you all in many spots (Montgomery & Heinmiller, 2021). Tillery and colleagues (2000) found that an increasing number of speakers use y’all across apparent time and that a sizable number of non-Southerners use y’all. Maynor (2000) found that as more Southerners were adopting y’all as a form, more Southerners were also willing to use you guys at times. Within most of the U.S. South, y’all is unmarked in daily speech. It has also taken on an enthusiastic crowd of adherents. Y’all means all has been taken up as a slogan, and it has become a positive symbol of inclusivity, adding to its semantic range.

5.1 Prosodic Variation

There is little research on prosody for U.S. Southern English. The available studies compare ethnic or regional groups of speakers.

Thomas (2015), McLarty (2018), and Holliday (2021) investigated intonation of African Americans in the U.S. South. Making a comparison of formerly enslaved African Americans and European American Confederate-era speakers with modern speakers from Raleigh, North Carolina, McLarty (2018) found that African Americans across time averaged more pitch accents per syllable than their European American counterparts while also producing higher ratios of the rising L + H* pitch accent to other pitch accents. Thomas (2015) reviewed available studies of prosodic features for all varieties of African American English, concluding that African American intonation is distinctive in many communities but exactly in what ways it is distinctive varies (2015, p. 425), as the intonational features are “subject to style shifting, social class variation, and quite likely, regional variation.” Bringing an extra layer to that broader variation, Holliday (2021) examined biracial Black men in Washington, D.C., and found that they controlled their racialized stylistic variation, especially L+H* pitch accents, in accordance with topic and audience when they discussed police narratives, avoiding African American intonational features.

Reed (2016) compared southern Appalachian accents with other Southern varieties: Overall, Appalachians in Tennessee showed a greater incidence of the rising L+H* pitch accent in comparison to the falling H* than other Southern varieties. Reed (2020) set this variation in context as part of the distinguishing phonological profile of English variation in Appalachia.

Thomas and Carter (2006) found that White Southern speech has remained highly stress timed. In contrast, Southern African American speech was more syllable timed (even intervals) in the mid-19th century but converged with white speech by 1900 (2006, p. 349). By comparing North Carolina speakers with Jamaican English for prosodic rhythm, Thomas and Carter found that “African American English was once similar to Jamaican English in prosodic rhythm” (2006, p. 345). Looking to other ethnic variation, Coggshall (2008) analyzed Cherokee and Lumbee speech in North Carolina and found that Cherokee was stress timed across generations. In contrast, Lumbee speech had been highly stress timed since at least the 1950s but had moved toward syllable timing after the 1990s.

Regional comparisons of prosodic features include those between the U.S. South and other regions and between smaller areas in the South. The most frequently commented on prosodic feature is the term Southern Drawl, which, when used by the general public, refers to supposedly slower speech by Southerners. Thomas (2020) reviewed several studies concerning the timing of speech and found that the few studies that exist have mixed reports about the rate of speech for Southerners compared to other regions. Several studies have compared Southern speakers with speakers from the Midwest. Clopper and Smiljanic (2011) found that Southern males produce more pauses whereas Southern women had more intonational differences when compared to Midland women. Fox et al. (2013) showed that North Carolinians had earlier peaks and greater falls from those peaks than Midwesterners when examining F0 contours for stressed vowels. They also corroborated the finding that variation in pitch is wider for those vowels that move more in vowel space. In a study comparing six U.S. regions, Clopper and Smiljanic (2015, p. 1) found “that Southern American English is characterized by a slow overall articulation rate, long pauses, and highly variable syllable-to-syllable vowel durations.” In contrast, Ray and Zahn (1990) and Kendall (2013) found no regional difference for the South in terms of speech rate.

The perceived rate of speech might connect to vowel durations. Jacewicz et al. (2007) found that their Southern Appalachian community had the longest duration for all of the vowels they analyzed. Fridland and colleagues (2014) showed that Southerners had longer KIT durations than FLEECE durations, which differentiated the South from other regions.

5.2 Consonant Variation

Consonant variation overall has received less scholarly attention than vowels, but the 2010s saw numerous studies begin to explore the wide range of possible variation for English in the U.S. South. Studies focused on voicing are the most numerous, followed by those on VOT and place assimilation. In terms of social salience, it is perhaps R-vocalization, popularly known as R-dropping, that became the showcase variable for Southern consonant variation. The related L-vocalization is also part of Southern speech, but it does not maintain the same social salience.

Herd (2020) reported from Mississippi data that African Americans demonstrate prevoicing voicing of /p, t, k/ more to a greater extent than European Americans. These two ethnic groups did not, however, differ in respect to their production of VOT for the voiceless consonants when reading a word list. For both groups, gender differences were not significant, pointing to a strong dialect difference rooted in the social motivation of ethnicity. Jacewicz et al. (2009, p. 367) found significant dialect differences in western North Carolina for the voicing of /b/. This examination took place within the specific context of the “juncture of two words such as small bids, in a position between two voiced sonorants.” The defining characteristic of the North Carolina speakers were “fully voiced closures.” Through further examination of emphasis and voicing, the authors concluded that the North Carolina speakers perform “active articulatory maneuvers” in the voicing of consonants.

Beyond stops, fricatives are a fertile area for voicing studies of consonants, as well as a long-standing area of interest for fricative stopping (Dubois & Horvath, 1998). Like Jacewicz et al. (2009), Walker et al. (2017) found that European Americans from southwest Virginia produce greater voicing of /z/ and that rurality and orientation to the South play a role in this variation. Walker et al. (2017) also investigated variation with following environments and discovered /z/ productions are least voiced before pauses. Lastly, their southwest Virginia speakers demonstrate greater phrase final fortition. Apparently, context is correlated with consonant variation for Southern speakers.

Several studies take up /s/ retraction in /str/ clusters, so that it has a palatal realization more than an alveolar realization, including Wilbanks (2017) and Stuart-Smith et al. (2019). Raleighites (North Carolina) have higher levels of /s/ retraction than most other varieties in the United States and England, and this variable can have social indexing in some communities.

Relatedly, Hazen et al. (2016) investigated voicing of /w/ and /h/ lenition in West Virginia speakers. For /w/ voicing, the historical merger of <wh> and <w> has been in progress for centuries and is seemingly almost complete in the United States. Labov et al. (2006, p. 50, Map 8.1) found that large areas of the South still maintain the distinction, but most of the United States does not. Hazen et al. (2016) did find wide variation for their West Virginia speakers, with some producing much greater voicing for some historical /w/ words, but they also found some speakers producing more voicing for historical /ʍ/ words, indicating that voicing is highly variable but that speakers are no longer constrained by historical patterns of word classes, with fully voiced /w/ being the most frequent production. For /h/ lenition, they investigated H + vowel combinations, finding that the /h/ segments contained little voicelessness and that longer segments led to greater degrees of voicelessness.

Deletion of final coronal stops has been a cottage industry of sociolinguists since the 1970s, and numerous studies have included the U.S. South. Farrington (2018) investigated glottalization and deletion for African Americans from three Southern cities in regard to alveolar stops. Deletion was more frequent for /d/ and glottalization was more frequent for /t/, and these two processes result in widespread final neutralization for these African American varieties. Considering such neutralization, Farrington found that preceding vowel duration is significantly longer for /d/, and that this phonetic cue may be the primary indicator of voicing rather than the articulation of the consonant itself. Also for coronal stop deletion, Hazen (2011, p. 133) compared Appalachian data with other Southern varieties drawn from Childs and Mallinson (2004), Mallinson and Wolfram (2002), Wolfram et al. (2000), and Wolfram and Thomas (2002),. Across the South, in both African American and European American varieties, rates of coronal stop deletion are high in following preconsonantal environments. African Americans have higher rates before following vowel environments than do European Americans.

Thomas and Van Hofwegen (2019) examined light and dark L in Anglo and Mexican Americans in Texas. Their Anglo speakers produced predominantly dark Ls whereas the Mexican Americans of all ages more often produced lighter (less velarized) Ls.

Perhaps the most important type of consonant deletion in the U.S. South is R-vocalization (Carmichael, 2017; McDavid, 1979b; Thomas, 2007). As a sociolinguistic pattern, it was brought by British English speakers in the mid-1700s and was associated with upper-class Southerners until World War II. For various reasons of social stigma, its social meaning became connected to rural African Americans and European Americans. Because of the Great Migration, in northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, it came to be seen as an African American feature. Since WWII, R-lessness has been declining in the U.S. South for European Americans (Thomas, 2007). African Americans have consistently been found to have higher rates of R-lessness than other ethnic groups in the U.S. South (Wolfram & Thomas, 2002).

5.3 Vowel Variation

Because vowels vary more often and change more quickly over time as compared to consonants, scholars prefer to study vowels to assess sociolinguistic patterns. Vowels in varieties of the U.S. South have been the most examined component of language for the region since at least Labov and Ash (1997).

Within vowel space, mergers occur when the phonemic contrast between two vowel classes is lost. The merged vowel may occupy the space of one or the other of the previously distinct vowels, or it may encompass the area of both the previous vowels. In the U.S. South, one vowel merger is more renowned than any other, the front-lax merger, also known as the pin~pen merger. Unlike some other regions, in the U.S. South this merger is usually a conditioned merger in that it happens only before nasal consonants. The merger happens between the historically separate vowel classes of KIT and DRESS in words such as tin/ten, rim/REM, and ping/penguin. As Brown (1991) found, the front-lax merger appears to have developed after 1875, and it has been a regular part of the U.S. South ever since. For commonly used words involved in the merger, lexical solutions have been developed to reduce any confusion. For example, ink pen and stick pin have been staples throughout many parts of the region. As Labov et al. (2006, Map 9.5) demonstrated, the reach of the front-lax merger covers the widest area of the cultural South and greatly overlaps with /ai/ ungliding.

Historically, the front-lax merger in the United States was considered a Southern merger (Montgomery & Eble, 2004), and the low-back merger originated in the Northeast and ran through western Pennsylvania and out through the expanse of the West. In the 20th century, the low-back merger began to expand into the front-lax merger territory, including northern parts of the U.S. South. The low-back merger is an unconditioned merger in most of the United States: the historical vowel classes of LOT and THOUGHT merged together in the low, back region of vowel space, with words such as cot/caught, hock/hawk, and Don/Dawn holding the same vowels (Fridland, 2015). It seems that by the 1920s in West Virginia and Kentucky, the low-back merger had started to spread below the traditional northern boundary of the Mason–Dixon line. It may have spread simply through contact with people from western Pennsylvania, but Irons (2007) suggested that another process may have played in the advance of the low-back merger. He found that the nuclei of the LOT and THOUGHT did overlap for his oldest speakers, but that they distinguished the vowels through a long, rising offglide on diphthongal THOUGHT. His younger speakers reduced that offglide, at times completely, so that the vowels were merged when both were essentially monophthongal. Hazen (2005) found that most speakers born after 1980 had both the front-lax merger and the low-back merger in West Virginia. Socially, the low-back merger is not stigmatized, as its social indexicality is so widely dispersed, whereas the front-lax merger, being associated with the South in contrast to the rest of the nation, is often more stigmatized.

Pre-L mergers are increasingly common throughout the United States, including the South, since the mid-20th century (Thomas, 2001). These include pull/pool and heel/hill mergers. Labov et al. (2006) showed that African Americans produced these mergers more often than European Americans.

Within vowel variation, vowel shifts are often more socially impactful than vowel mergers. Certainly, the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) is a variable pattern that has been socially indexed in several ways and is important for synchronic variation in the U.S. South (Fridland & Kendall, 2015).

The SVS is not a singular or categorical process. Like the Great Vowel Shift, it can be seen as a unified event only after it is complete and even then only for some speakers (Labov, 2001). Over the millions of speakers in the U.S. South who participate in some aspect of the SVS, a small minority have a completely SVS system. The SVS is defined by three main stages although a fourth component is usually considered part of the process.

In Stage 1, the nucleus of the PRIZE vowel either fronts or backs along the periphery while the off-glide is reduced. At times, the PRIZE vowel may be fully monophthongized, but often the offglide is uprising but shorter or actually lowers and finishes at the nucleus, thus remaining diphthongal but not stretching beyond where it started. Bailey (1997) posited that this /ai/ ungliding started after 1875 and increasingly became part of Southern identity in the 20th century. Only in some regions of the South do speakers produce the unglided PRICE vowel (see Labov et al., 2006, Map 11.5). The pre-voiceless environment is a special case and was used in many parts of the South to index ethnic divisions, as unglided PRICE was part of the White community but was not part of the Black community before the 21st century (Fridland, 2003a, 2003b; Kohn et al., 2021). Labov et al. (2006) presented Map 11.3 to show the geographic boundaries they found for /ai/ ungliding. It incorporates large parts of Texas, the southern half of West Virginia, and most of the East Coast from approximately Richmond, Virginia, and then south to the Florida state line, excluding Charleston, South Carolina. Map 11.6 of Labov et al. (2006) showed different dialect levels (1–9) based on the SVS, and although a couple of intensely Southern level 7 speakers are in southern Ohio and West Virginia, fewer SVS shifted speakers are north of the /ai/-ungliding line across Clarksburg, West Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland. The next two stages of the SVS are geographically contained within Stage 1’s domain, as shown in Map 11.4 of Labov et al. (2006).

In Stage 2, the mid-front vowels FACE and DRESS shift past each other in a coordinated pattern. The FACE vowel is lowering and backing, possibly reducing its offglide (FACE is often diphthongal in American English); the DRESS vowel is raising and fronting, gaining a rising offglide (Labov et al., 2006, p. 125). Like Stage 1, Stage 2 is a sliding scale of shiftedness. As the Euclidean distance of DRESS and FACE vowels grows smaller, this stage of the SVS is more advanced (Dodsworth & Kohn, 2012; Farrington et al., 2018). In the most advanced speakers, DRESS and FACE are essentially switched, with DRESS in the periphery of front vowel space (Fridland, 2012; Thomas, 2003). Between these two vowels, a highly shifted DRESS vowel (e.g., bed [be^ɪd]) is more salient as Southern or rural than a highly shifted FACE vowel (e.g., date [dɛt]) (Kendall & Fridland, 2012).

In Stage 3, the high-front vowels FLEECE and KIT shift past each other like the mid-front vowels of Stage 2 (Labov et al., 2006, p. 125). The KIT vowel is rising and fronting, gaining an in-gliding offglide (e.g., bit [bi^ət]). That particular shifted vowel is the most stigmatized for many communities. The FLEECE vowel is lowering and centering with a reduced off-glide (e.g., beet [bɪt]). Stage 3 of the SVS is the most geographically limited and the one that has retreated the most from the northern edges of the U.S. South (Hazen, 2018; Labov et al., 2006). The front-lax merger has taken on an additional role of prominence within the context of the SVS. With both KIT and DRESS vowels being raised, fronted, and diphthongized, the social indexing of their merged status at times goes unnoticed. When a sentence like I dropped my pen is rendered as [aː dɹap maː pʰi^ən] the state of merger for the speaker most likely goes unrecognized in the face of the socially more salient shifted front lax vowel.

The fourth component of the SVS is the fronting of back vowels. Usually two vowels are involved, the GOOSE and GOAT vowels, although FOOT can also be fronted. How fronted these vowels are and to what extent they are back-gliding diphthongs varies from community to community (Koops, 2010; Labov et al., 2006). For many SVS speakers, the three vowels are fronted at least to the center of vowel space, and by the end of the 20th century, they were front of schwa on the F2 dimension (Thomas, 2001). Lee (2016, 2018) characterized back vowel fronting for African Americans in Washington, D.C. Whether the fronting of back vowels is a necessary component of the SVS is an open question, as fronted back vowels can be found in Ohio as well as California (Thomas, 2001). Yet it is part of Southern U.S. English, and the presence of these variations in other dialects does not discount its reality as part of South English. Stanley et al. (2021) found that back vowel fronting has been part of Southern English since the end of the 19th century and has had well defined diachronic paths.

The stages of the SVS are set up in what is estimated to be their chronology. The oldest changes have the widest geographic distributions. Accordingly, Stage 1 is also the variable of the SVS that has undergone the most institutional enculturation: Forrest et al. (2021) found that /ai/ ungliding is used professionally in white-collar jobs to show authenticity as a Southerner. In line with the stages of the SVS’s geographical spread has come the reversal of the SVS, with the later stages retreating sooner and covering a smaller geographic area in the U.S. South. Dodsworth and Kohn (2012) found that all of the front vowels of the SVS were reversing toward non-SVS standards within the first generation of speakers who grew up with the large influx on northerners in Raleigh, North Carolina. Dinkin and Dodsworth (2017) showed intraregional differences in the South in conditioning of glide weakening of PRIZE/PRICE, finding that these vowels have a continuous distribution within the inland South but a more discrete separation outside of that subregion.

The SVS analysis in Labov et al. (2006) also includes /æ/ breaking, where /æ/ is raised and gains an offglide (Koops, 2014). Labov et al. (2006, p. 123, Map 11.2) found that /æ/ breaking falls in a well-defined area of the inner South. Dodsworth and Kohn (2012) showed that the reversal of /æ/ breaking is part of the larger reversal of the SVS. Perceptually, Allbritten (2011) found that /æ/ breaking and the Stage 2 lowering of the FACE diphthong were more correlated with identifications as Southern than monophthongization of PRICE/PRIZE or alveolar ING.

There are also differences in the South in regard to the SVS in African American communities. Fridland (2003a, 2003b) found that /ai/ ungliding has gone to completion for African Americans, and Thomas (2007) reported that glide weakening of /ai/ before non-voiceless obstruents for Southern African Americans has been documented for decades. In addition, Fridland also found that African Americans in Memphis have adopted a few of the vowel shifts associated with Southern Whites, including lowering of the FACE nucleus and fronting of GOOSE. Holt and colleagues (2015, 2016) showed that North Carolina African Americans had longer durations of their lax vowels than their tense vowels in reading word lists.

Kohn et al. (2021) conducted a large study of changes over the lifespan for African Americans in Durham, North Carolina, to assess ways the African American Vowel Shift differs from the SVS (see also Kohn & Farrington, 2013). For example, the TRAP, DRESS, and KIT vowels front and rise, but unlike the SVS they do not diphthongize, a key difference for listeners. Both Holt (2018) and Holt and Ellis (2019) corroborated these findings when they compared African Americans to Whites in eastern and western communities in North Carolina; they found that African Americans lacked fronting of GOAT and GOOSE but had more raised TRAP, BAIT, and DRESS. Kohn et al.’s study (2021) also found longitudinally that vowel space for African Americans shrank from early elementary school through their teens. While assessing many factors that could potentially influence their vowel systems, Kohn et al. (2021) showed that participants’ communities were the main indicators for vernacular variants of African American English.