Scholars track Texas twang

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the New York Times, November 28, 2003
Scholars of Twang Track All the 'Y'Alls' in Texas

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

COLLEGE STATION, Tex.  "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the
ah-deah?" That was the idea. John O. Greer, an architecture teacher at
Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators
and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it
waddn what he said that interested them most. It was how he said it. Those
responses, part of an ambitious National Geographic Society survey of
Texas speech, with its "y'alls," "might-coulds" and "fixin' to's," are
helping language investigators throw a scientific light on a mythologized
and sometimes ridiculed mainstay of Americana: the Texas twang.

Among the unexpected findings, said Guy Bailey, a linguistics professor at
the University of Texas at San Antonio and a leading scholar in the
studies with his wife, Jan Tillery, is that in Texas more than elsewhere,
how you talk says a lot about how you feel about your home state. "Those
who think Texas is a good place to live adopt the flat `I' it's like the
badge of Texas," said Dr. Bailey, 53, provost and executive vice president
of the university and a transplanted Alabamian married to a Lubbock
native, also 53.

So if you love Texas, they say, be fixin' to say "naht" for "night,"
"rahd" for "ride" and "raht" for "right." And by all means say "all" for
"oil." In addition to quickly becoming enamored of Western garb like
cowboy boots and hats, big-buckled belts, western shirts and vests,
newcomers to the state and there are a lot of them are especially likely
to adopt the lingo pronto.

At the same time, the speech of rural and urban Texans is diverging, Dr.
Bailey said. Texans in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio are
sounding more like other Americans and less like their fellow Texans in
Iraan, Red Lick or Old Glory. Indeed, Dr. Tillery and Dr. Bailey wrote in
a recent paper called "Texas English," a new dialect of Southern American
English may be emerging on the West Texas plains. It is not what a
linguist might expect, they wrote, "but this is Texas, and things are just
different here."

The changes are being tracked by researchers for the two San Antonio
linguists, who are working with scholars from Oklahoma State University
and West Texas A&M in Canyon, outside Amarillo, under the sponsorship of
the National Geographic Society. They divided Texas into 116 squares and
are interviewing four native Texans spanning four age groups from the 20's
to the 80's, in each. As part of the latest effort, two master's students
in linguistics from the University of North Texas at Denton, Amanda
Aguilar, 24, and Brooke Earheardt, 23, arranged recently to record Mr.
Greer, 70, as he responded to an exhaustive 31-page questionnaire.

Ms. Aguilar first probed some of Mr. Greer's attitudes toward Texas. Was
it a barren state? "It's in the ahs of the beholder," responded Mr. Greer,
who was born in Port Arthur. The state, he said, was "dee-vahded, you kin
almost draw a lahn." Was it a progressive state? "Compared to who?" he
said. "Califohnia? Baghdad? Ah'd have to say Texas is a progressive
state."

Distinctive?

"Most are distinctive in their own way," he said, smiling, "with the
possible exception of Ah-wah." (That was Iowa.) Next Ms. Aguilar quizzed
Mr. Greer on a lexicon of Texas words and phrases. Had he ever heard the
expression "y'all?" Of course. "Ah think `you' sometimes just duddn't work
bah itself." Could you use it for just one person?

"Ah would trah to confahn it to the plural," he said. "It's just like
`youse guys.' " Had he heard "fixin' to?" Of course again. " `Ahma' often
goes with it," he said. "Ahma fixin' to go." The questions and Mr. Greer's
answers kept coming. A dragonfly? That's a "miskeeta hahk." A wishbone was
a "pulleybone." A cowboy's rope was a lasso or a lariat, or just a "ropin'
rope." A drought was worse than a "drah spell"; no rain, or "it haddn for
a long tahm." You wait "for" a friend who haddn shown up, but you wait
"on" someone who is nearby and delayed, perhaps upstairs putting on
makeup.

Afterward, Ms. Aguilar and Ms. Earheardt said that Mr. Greer, though
white, employed some noticeable African-American and Deep South speech
patterns. There were also Spanish influences, common in Texas, where
Spanish was widely spoken for nearly a hundred years before English. Dr.
Tillery and Dr. Bailey warned that it was possible to exaggerate the
distinctiveness of Texas English because the state loomed so large in the
popular imagination. Few speech elements here do not also appear
elsewhere.

"Nevertheless," they wrote in their paper on Texas English, "in its mix of
elements both from various dialects of English and from other languages,
TXE is in fact somewhat different from other closely related varieties."
Perhaps the most striking finding, Dr. Tillery said, was the spread of the
humble "y'all," ubiquitous in Texas as throughout the South. Y'all, once
"you all" but now commonly reduced to a single word, sometimes even
spelled "yall," is taking the country by storm, the couple reported in an
article written with Tom Wikle of Oklahoma State University and published
in 2000 in the Journal of English Linguistics. No one other word, it turns
out, can do the job.

"Y'all" and "fixin' to" were also spreading fast among newcomers within
the state, they said, particularly those who regard Texas fondly. Use of
the flat `I,' they found, also correlated strikingly to a favorable view
of Texas. But they found some curious anomalies, as well. One traditional
feature of Texas and Southern speech pronouncing the word "pen" like
"pin," known as the pen/pin merger is disappearing in the big Texas
cities, while remaining common in rural areas, Dr. Tillery said.  Texans
in the prairie may shell out "tin cints," but not their metropolitan
brethren.

Urban Texas is abandoning the "y" sound after "n," "d" and "t," exchanging
dipthongs for monophthongs. So folks in the cities read a "noospaper"
what their rural counterparts call a "nyewspaper." They'll hum a "tyewn"
on the range, a "toon" in Houston. The upgliding dipthong, too, is an
endangered species in the cities, where a country "dawg" is just a dog.
Why city Texans, more than country folk, should disdain to write with a
"pin" is not clear, although it seems that some pronunciations carry a
stigma of unsophistication while others do not.

It was such mixed patterns that suggested the emergence of a new dialect
on the West Texas plains, Dr. Tillery said. Other idiosyncrasies have all
but vanished over time. Texans for the most part no longer pray to the
"Lard," replacing the "o" with an "a," or "warsh" their clothes. How the
interloping "r" crept in remains an especially intriguing question, Dr.
Bailey said. Trying to trace the peculiarity, he asked Texans to name the
capital of the United States, often drawing the unhelpful answer "Austin."

The opposite syndrome, known as r-lessness, which renders "four" as "foah"
in Texas and elsewhere, is easier to trace, Dr. Bailey said. In the early
days of the republic, plantation owners sent their children to England for
schooling. "They came back without the `r,' " he said. "The parents were
saying, listen to this, this is something we have to have, so we'll all
become r-less," he said. The craze went down the East Coast from Boston to
Virginia (skipping Philadelphia, for some reason) and migrating
selectively around the country.

Other common Texas locutions that replace an "s" with a "d"  "bidness" for
"business," "waddn" for "wasn't"  are simply matters of mechanical
efficiency, Dr. Bailey said. "With `n' and `d' the tongue stays in the
same position," he said. "It's ease of articulation." So even "fixin' to"
becomes "fidden to" or "fith'n to." And fixin' to where did that come
from, anyway?

"Who knows?" Dr. Bailey said.