The Southern Drawl: Is It Spreading?

True story: A North Carolina teacher gave an example to his class of a statement by the school's football coach: "I'll be done drove there by 3 o'clock." Now, the teacher said, give the correct future perfect tense of that sentence. A boy's hand shot up. "I'll be done drive," he said proudly.

(AP Photos)

Borne out in grammatical and metaphorical mazes, talkin' Southern -- or talkin' country -- is the cadence of Atticus Finch and Andy Griffith, presidents and preachers, ballplayers and businessmen in Brooks Brothers suits. To many Americans, it's also the lingua franca of honky-tonk pluckers, bumpkins, rascals and hicks.

Yet in an urbanized America drawn ever closer by high-speed communications and swirling migrations, a quiet debate is now surfacing among linguists -- in all kinds of English -- about whether Southern talk is spreading or becoming as quaintly provincial as a coon hunt.

Some believe that the Southern drawl has expanded to the point where, arguably, more than half of all Americans now glide their diphthongs and hush their Rs like modern-day Rhett Butlers. Some professionals who travel around even adopt different regional dialects as they go, knowing it's one of the best ways to get ahead.

But other experts believe mass communications and urbanization are cutting away at the distinctiveness of the Southern voice, resulting in a more mono-pitch America.

John Fought is in the expanding camp. The linguist from Diamond Bar, Calif., points to several factors leading to the growing use of "y'all," "fixin' to" and other dialectical Dixie quirks: the migration of Northerners to the South, the link between notions of masculinity and language, the appeal of country roots, and the influence of cultural phenomena like NASCAR.

"The boundary for Southern speech actually has spread," says Fought. "And we're seeing fairly large fingers and puddles of more or less Southern speech north of the Ohio River and West of the Mississippi into the Plains."

Other linguists aren't so sure, noting that locale doesn't always dictate dialect. Indeed, Erik Thomas, a vowel expert at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says research shows that mainstream English, otherwise known as American Standard, is actually nibbling away at both the borders and the urban core of the South.