� Linguistics experts study �Texas Twang�

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Y'all listen up!

Thu Jan 6, 9:40 AM ET   Top Stories - Chicago Tribune


By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent

Turns out it's all in the y'all.


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If you ever find yourself in a group of Southerners and want to spot the Texan in the bunch, listen hard for the y'alls. Most of them will surely use the expression--a contraction of "you all"--to refer to a group of people ("Are y'all goin' to the store?"), but the Texan is more likely to employ it to refer to a single individual as well.


That's just one of the unusual discoveries made by two linguistics professors at the University of Texas-San Antonio who are studying Texas Twang, the distinctive dialect of English proudly spoken by natives of the Lone Star State--and sometimes ridiculed by the rest of the country.


The husband-wife team, Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery, are fixin' to complete the last of their research this summer. When they're done finished with their work, which is underwritten by the National Geographic (news - web sites) Society, they might could write the definitive guide to what they lovingly call TXE, or Texas English.


"Texas is different--it's the only state that was its own country at one time and has its own creation story," said Bailey, a native of Alabama and provost and executive vice president of the university. "Out of that has come a sense of braggadocio and a strong desire to hold on to a unique way of speaking."


Y'all is a case in point. Use of the term is spreading beyond the South throughout the U.S., Tillery noted, largely because it fills a linguistic need: It's a clearer way to denote the second-person plural than the existing--and confusing--"you."


But Texans, in a kind of defiant counterreaction to the mass appropriation of their beloved term, now also use it to refer to one person as well as many ("Y'all are my beautiful wife"), Tillery said. That, of course, is precisely the kind of confusion that y'all evolved to clear up in the first place.


"If the rest of the country says you can't use y'all except for more than one person, then of course we're going to take it and say, no, you can use it for one person," said Tillery, whose drawling speech bears the marked twang of her childhood home in Lubbock.


"For me it's a conscious effort, because I was treated as such a backwards pea-brain because of how I talked that I decided I would just be very upfront and even more pronounced," she said. "I'll tell you something--it's a good way to hide an intellect."


To conduct their research, Bailey and Tillery have divided the state into 116 geographic grids and have sought to interview four representative Texans in each one. Ideally they try to find four generations of a single family, to chart linguistic changes over time. To locate their subjects, they often approach small-town postmasters for referrals.


250 key questions


Interviewees are asked 250 questions to check unique Texas pronunciations and determine whether they use certain words and phrases, such as "polecat" for skunk or "snake feeder" for dragonfly. Some of the terms are used elsewhere across the Southern U.S. as well, but many combinations are distinctively Texan.


Then the interview subjects read aloud a brief story, "My Friend Hugo," designed by Tillery to contain every vowel sound and phonetic variation in the English language. To an expert linguist, how a person reads the story can reveal where that person comes from.


Most native Texans, for example, use a flat "i", saying "naht" for night and "rahd" for ride, and they don't make any audible distinction when pronouncing such words as "pool" and "pull" or "fool" and "full." Midwesterners, by contrast, exhibit their own characteristic linguistic quirks, such as something experts call a fronted "o" in words like "about."


The researchers have found that some distinctive Texas speech patterns, such as saying "warsh" instead of "wash" and "lard" instead of "lord," are beginning to disappear as younger generations abandon them.


Also vanishing is much of the traditional regional vocabulary, such as "light bread" for white bread and "snap beans" for green beans.


But in other ways, Texas English is expanding. Newcomers to the state soon begin sounding like Texans, Bailey noted, tossing around y'alls and saying "Ahma fixin' to" (generally defined as "I will do it if I get around to it").

   



`Might could' explained

The infamous double modal ("might could," "may can," "might would"), a hedging construction denoting less certainty than "might" alone, remains more elusive, however.

"It's very easy for people who move into Texas to pick up `y'all,'" Bailey said. "It's a little bit harder to pick up `fixin' to.' But `might could' is another matter. We have found that unless you're born and raised in Texas, you don't pick up the double modals."

When all is said and done, do Texans sound funny?

"Not to Texans," Bailey said, "and not really to other people in the South.

"You know, there's a lot of comment about President Bush (news - web sites)'s speech, but Bush has a fairly typical Texas accent. The person who had the more distinctive accent was President Clinton (news - web sites)."

- - -

A glossary of Texas Twang

Y'all: You-all (can be used as singular or plural).

Croker sack: Burlap sack.

Snake feeder: Dragonfly.

Mosquito hawk: Dragonfly.

Snap beans: Green beans

Light bread: White bread.

Flitter: Pancake.

Corn dodgers: Hushpuppies.

Pulleybone: Wishbone. Polecat: Skunk.

Cold drink: Soda pop.

Tank: Pond.

Dinner on the ground:

Potluck dinner.

yes, i came across this earlier and ofcourse thought of our Cornellia!

Some of those terms can be heard often throughout the South. Have never heard of a dragonfly called a "Snake feeder" even though i spent many summers as a kid in Texas. "Snakedoctor" yes, "Mosquito hawk" is common.

Texas is different--it's the only state that was its own country at one time

That is not exactly true. Not at conception but Mississippi was its own country briefly before the Civil War.
      'The Republic of Mississippi'

Originally posted by Catt That is not exactly true. Not at conception but Mississippi was its own country briefly before the Civil War.       'The Republic of Mississippi'

And IIRC Vermont was its own country as well for a short time.
and of course Hawaii

I guess your right Mixcoatl, Vermont did have a period of sovereignty as well with Mississippi. It wasnt as proud and aknowledged as Texas' though.