Charleston, SC, dialect

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've heard East Tennesseans do something like this. It's usually subtle, though. If you're listening closely, it can sound surprisingly Irish. If you're not, it's barely noticeable.  Certainly it hasn't become a staple of parody or eye-dialect.

  Rather than a direct survival, it may come from a slight fronting of the first element in the usual / aI /, with the second element moving just as slightly toward / i /.  That second element is often reduced to a glide, or to zero. I think that "night," e.g., more often has /  aI /, but the stereotypical / a / is very frequent among older, less well educated country people. I can't assign the "noit" variant so glibly because I haven't heard it nearly as often as the others.

  Pretty obviously I'm no phonetician.

  JL
Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Charleston, SC, dialect
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Two women from Charleston appeared on a judge show and they both
pronounced "night" approximately as "noyt." I've never been to
Charleston, so this may be nothing surprising to those older and
wiser, but it certainly grabbed my attention!

-Wilson
--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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