Regional differences
The U.S. is commonly divided into distinct regions: the West, the Midwest, the Southwest, the Southeast and the Northeast. But broad accent categories based on these regions are more accurately broken down into diverse dialects across different localities.
Dialects in the Deep South—encompassing Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina—are distinct from those in Texas, a large state that’s home to several linguistic varieties, as well as a mix of Spanish and English (nicknamed Spanglish) closer to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The South gets stereotyped as a monolith, which is really unfair,” says Nicole Holliday, a linguist at Pomona College.
The many variations in the American South include South Midland, Ozark, Coastal Southern, Virginia Piedmont, Gullah, Cajun English and Gulf Southern.
The popularity of specific dialects is often tied to regional history. When English colonists first arrived in North America in the early 17th century, they landed on the East Coast, establishing English-speaking communities in the North and the South. The French, the Dutch, the Spanish and other European powers also introduced their own languages as they colonized different parts of the continent. Speaking styles in different colonies remained distinct because travel opportunities were limited at the time, says Jessi Grieser, a linguist at the University of Michigan. “Historically, it’s about migration and who went where,” she adds.
English settlers succumbed to competing influences when they came into contact with Native Americans and colonists from other countries, all while isolating themselves from England. Centuries of settlement on the East Coast resulted in more linguistic variation among the region’s cities because English was spoken there longer, Holliday says.
Colonists’ ways of speaking were also influenced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which brought individuals kidnapped from Africa to North America.
Within the Black community, the mixing of West African languages and English resulted in different linguistic quirks, too. Some academics argue that this coupling created African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a speaking style alternatively defined as a dialect or language. Common English words potentially rooted in AAVE include banana, yam, okra and gumbo; distinct features of the linguistic variety include using “ain’t” instead of “haven’t” as a negative and stressing the first syllable in words like “hotel” and “July.” Today, AAVE is spoken throughout the U.S., particularly in cities. When the formerly enslaved and their descendants migrated to the North during both Reconstruction and the civil rights era, they brought their regional vernacular with them.