The beauty of Southern dialect...

I majored in English at THE University of North Carolina. Go Heels! (It's March. I have to say that or I could get a nasty rash from suppressing the sentiment.)

In my time at Chapel Hill, I was blessed to have Connie Eble as my grammar instructor for a couple of different classes. What I loved most about her class was that she taught grammar from a linguist's perspective. Now if you don't know what a linguist's perspective is, the short explanation is that they observe and report language without pronouncing the superiority of one form over another. As a matter of fact, you give a linguist a dialect and they just revel in the ins and outs of things like vocabulary and syntax and idiom. It makes them absolutely giddy.

One of the greatest exercises I have EVER encountered in an English classroom -- graduate, undergraduate or secondary-- was the Shibboleth exercise we did when we began our unit on usage. I fell in love with language on that day.

Three other things from Connie Eble's class that stuck in my brain and became part of my personal language philosophy are as follows:

1. English is essentially a Germanic language, although we have borrowed nearly 50% of our vocabulary from Latin. Yet, in all our academic brilliance, we have decided to define our language structure by the rules that govern the Romance languages. Basically, our method of diagramming sentences is the linguistic equivalent of putting square pegs into round holes. No wonder so many people hate doing it.

2. English grammar is helpful but not essential in writing. Writing is like driving a car. You can drive a car and get exactly where you want to go every time and never have a clue how the engine works. But if you want to drive a race car for maximum performance or if you're car breaks down and you don't want to be stranded forever, it behooves you to understand how the engine works. So it is with language. If you want to use the language well, you need to know how to maximize its performance. And certainly if your writing breaks down and can't communicate to your reader, you need to know how to fix it.

3. Who sets the rules of grammar? Well...? OK, think about who taught YOU the rules of the language. Your English teacher. Your English professor. Maybe a journalist here or there. Basically, the "safe-keepers" of the English language are English instructors. They write books about what's right and what's not. Woo Hoo! I can feel the surge of power coursing through my veins.

Now where on Earth was I going with this post? Oh yes... the beauty of Southern dialect... Before I sat under Dr. Eble's instruction, I had a distinct feeling that there was a right and wrong way of doing things. If I did wrong, there would be red. If I did right, there would be an "A."

Having a linguist teach language, I became aware for the first time of the beauty of language in the vernacular. The speech of the native speaker. The glory of dialect. My dialect is Southern American English. I never really appreciated SAE before that moment. Now, it's a treasure.

Some of my favorite SAE sayings:

1. "fixing to" - indicating preparation for an impending course of action. I am fixing to get up and go cook dinner.

2. "might could" - a double modal that is MOST helpful in indicating potential without certainty. I might could cook dinner a little better if I actually went to the grocery store and bought food.

3. "y'all" - properly used as the collective/plural second person pronoun. Y'all need to come over and eat dinner with us after church on Sunday.

4. "won't" - Unique to certain parts of the South, won't is a substitute for the first person singular form or the verb to be. Q: Who ate the last piece of sweet potato pie? A: It won't me.

5. "Bless your heart" - That one is very complex. Here's a nice summary of it. It could possibly be the ultimate Southern Shibboleth.