ABSTRACT
The nature of Southern has constituted one of the most controversial parts of American English dialectology. The controversies cannot be said to have been resolved, and certainly sweeping historical conclusions cannot be drawn from the dialect material generally made available. Special persistence of older English processes and strong Celtic (or Scotch–Irish) influences have been postulated from the anglophile point of view. The folk typology, on the other hand, has long held that Black influence on the language of Southern Whites was especially strong – a hypothesis rejected in its entirety by the Linguistic Atlas projects. Early observers such as Knight (1824: 34) focused upon ‘the slave-hording nabobs of the South’ as a characterization of that community, perceived as notably different from other American communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries.
