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Breaking, Umlaut, and the Southern Drawl
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Extract
In 1955, in a review of the Trager-Smith Outline of English structure, I made a first attempt at phonemicizing an old-fashioned dialect of Atlanta, Georgia, which did not seem to fit the overall pattern of nine vowels and three semivowels that Trager and Smith had proposed. Further discussion followed at the First Texas Conference in 1956, where the arguments for a tenth vowel were strengthened by Raven I. McDavid and Sumner Ives; but even the rebellious, at that time, were still working within the Smith and Trager framework, and when their arguments were published in the proceedings of the Conference, they suffered because the secretary who transcribed them had been unable to cope with so many different dialects and because proof-reading had been peccable. A tentative report on the Conference to the 1956 Linguistic Institute at Ann Arbor was received with benevolent amusement, and ensuing debates with myself and Hans Kurath appeared in later numbers of Language and in my Short introduction to English grammar.
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- Copyright © 1966 by Linguistic Society of America
References
1 Lg. 31.312–45 (1955).
2 33.111–22 (1957), 34.252–60 (1958).
3 Chicago, 1959.
4 Ann Arbor, 1961 (with Raven I. McDavid).
5 Ann Arbor, 1964.
6 Springfield, 1944.
7 11th ed.; London, 1956.
8 London, 1962.
9 Gimson 117.
10 Phonology 120.
11 Op.cit. 108, 81.
12 It seems necessary here to say !r! plus major morpheme boundary instead of !r! final, for inflected and derived forms of words with final !r ! have been reshaped by analogy with the simplices: carry and hurry show that starry and stirring are not regularly developed. The analogy belongs to history, not description, which it awkwardly complicates. For example, between a tense vowel and intervocalic !r! in hairy, boring, and the like, one hears the same glide as in hair and bore; but the glide of feel does not appear in feeling, though the two liquids are governed generally by the same rules.
To say ‘word boundary’ would confuse the absolute final of star with the medial !r! of starry; and to say ‘major’ is necessary because the boundary in error is not the same as the boundary in erring.
13 The pronunciation of American English 116 (New York, 1960).
14 The argument about identifying stressed 
with unstressed 
loses much of its interest when one characterizes the two by their distinctive features. The 
is simply the back reduction vowel as opposed to the front reduction vowel, but 
must be further specified as lax, noncompact, etc. The choice of an alphabetic writing is practical, not theoretical.
15 For a few such forms, see James B. McMillan, Phonology of the standard English of east central Alabama 57, 62, 93 (University of Chicago dissertation, 1946).
16 PEAS 100.
17 Kurath, Phonology 106 f.
18 PEAS 122.
19 PEAS 19, 22.
20 PEAS 165.
21 ‘Southern “L” plus a consonant’, American speech 15.259–61.
22 There is no final -!lg!, and syllable-break hinders the vocalization. In a more precise statement, !g! might not need to be excepted, Cf. McMillan 18.
23 PEAS 8 f.
24 Kurath, Phonology 123 f.; PEAS 8 f.
25 Dialect notes 1.319–23 (1894).
26 Sumner Ives, ‘The phonology of the Uncle Remus stories’, Publications of the American Dialect Society 22.29 (1954).
27 Op.cit. 26, 67 f.
28 American speech 9.36–45 (1934).
29 All taken from Oma Stanley, ‘The speech of east Texas’, American speech 11.159–64 (1936).
30 PEAS 21.
31 McMillan, op.cit.; Robert Howren, ‘The speech of Ocracoke, North Carolina’, American speech 37.163–75 (1962); etc.
32 George P. Wilson, ‘Some unrecorded southern vowels’, American speech 9.212 (1934); Howren 167; McMillan 44.
33 McMillan 49 n., citing Wilson 210.
34 The intonation of American English 105 f. (Ann Arbor, 1945).
35 Op.cit. (fn. 32).
36 ‘A southeast Texas dialect study’, Orbis 5.76 (1956).
37 ‘Three generations of east Texas speech’, American speech 34.91 (1959).
38 The phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain speech 28 (New York, 1942).
39 ‘The speech of the Shenandoah Valley’, American speech 12.284–88 (1937).
40 Op.cit. (fn. 32) 211.
41 ‘The pronunciation of English in the state of Washington’, American speech 27.186–89 (1952).
42 An introduction to the phonetics of American English 2 63, 75 (New York, 1958).
43 McMillan passim.
44 Lg. 26.330 n. 4 (1950).
45 Lg. 28.147 (1952).
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