Language Variation

In Christopher Paul Curtis’ The Watsons Go to Birmingham, “talk about talk” figures prominently among the members of the Watson family, who observe how certain “southernisms” differ from their own midwestern style of speaking.

As the only member of the Watson family not born in Flint, Michigan, Wilona Watson is sometimes teased by her family for “talking Southernstyle,” particularly when she gets excited. For example, when Kenny’s big brother Byron’s mouth freezes to the outside mirror of his dad’s car, Kenny observes a shift in his mother’s speech. Kenny explains,

Instead of saying ‘here’ she said ‘he-uh’ and instead of saying ‘you all’ she said ‘y’all’.

When Rufus and his little brother Cody move to Michigan from Mississippi and greet everyone on the bus with a “Hiya y’all,” they get mocked by the other kids’ for their “polite” but “country” style of talking.

And, in Birmingham, as Kenny listens to his mother and grandmother conversing with one another, he finds their speech almost incomprehensible to his midwestern ears. Kenny observes,

It took us even longer to get used to the Southern style of talking. Man! Grandma Sands and Momma would get yakking to each other and we could only understand half of the things that they said.

While the suggestion that Southern varieties of English would be unintelligible to Midwesterners is, of course, an exaggeration, largely grounded in regional stereotypes, it does speak to some of the actual language differences that would have existed in the 1960s and, indeed, persist even today.

When language differences develop across geographical boundaries, they form what are known as “regional dialects”. In the United States, the most distinctive regional dialects are based along the eastern seaboard, where northern and southern dialects were formed through early settlement patterns, which preserved some of the dialectal differences brought over by settlers from various parts of England. As these settlers migrated westward, many of those differences began to blend together, making mid-western and ultimately western dialects sound more neutral in comparison to those found in the northeast and southeast.

Because the largest populations of early African Americans were brought to the southeastern U.S. via the Atlantic slave trade, African American English shares many features in common with Southern varieties of American English, which would have been heavily influenced by African languages as well. However, during the “Great Migration” of the early 20th century, many African Americans left the rural South for job opportunities and better living conditions in the north and Midwest. And while many southern language features would likely have traveled with them, those who migrated away from the South would have learned and/or created new words, phrases, and pronunciations that were characteristic of the regions to which they traveled.

It is this rich history that Christopher Paul Curtis draws upon as he develops the dialogue for his characters and their commentary about language. He brings his characters to life by drawing on some of the actual language differences that one might encounter while traveling from the Midwest to the South. But, in highlighting these differences, he also highlights some of the regional stereotypes that have formed over time, which portray southern speech as more distinctive or exotic and midwestern speech as more neutral.

About the Author

Tracey Weldon is a professor of English and Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost of Graduate Education at the University of South Carolina. Weldon is also a co-associate producer of the documentary Talking Black in America.