"A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"

[Katherine Hageland]

I'm a PhD graduate student taking my first linguistics class in many, many years. I guess I'm the traditional non-traditional student. I constantly hear people saying "a whole nother" when they mean something like "That's a whole other ball game." I also hear people saying, "Alls I know about it is this" when they mean "All I know about it is this." I'm originally from California, but now studying in the Midwest. Are the constructions I'm hearing part of a dialect or are they some other linguistic phenomenon?

Thanks!

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