Texas English
When we were first married, my wife, who is a native New Yorker, was talking to a friend of ours from Houston (my hometown) on the telephone. When the conversation was over and my she had hung up the phone, I could tell by the expression on her face that she was completely perplexed by something. She asked, “What does ‘Fixin’ to put up the groceries mean?” I replied that it meant getting ready to put the groceries away – usually in the cupboard (or cubberd, the way I pronounced it) or on a shelf. She had just had a close encounter with Texas English, or TXE (G. Bailey & J. Tillery, Texas English, 2005), but she was sure it was a different language entirely. TXE is not actually a distinct language, but a dialect with various sub-dialects and plenty of peculiarities to go around for everyone.
Dialect is a regional form of a language spoken by people of that region that has its own differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation to other languages and dialects. To understand TXE, one must understand a little bit of the history of Texas. Before about 1820, when Anglos began migrating to what was then known as “Tejas”, Spanish was the predominant language. Other than the Native American languages being spoken by the Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita, Tigua, and countless other tribes, Spanish had been spoken in Tejas for centuries. Once the territory was opened to white settlers, English quickly became as widely spoken as Spanish (Bailey & Tillery). Although English did eventually become the dominant language, many Spanish words remained in the lexicon of Texas English. Almost without exception, any Texan who speaks English uses words originally borrowed from Spanish. Words such as lariat, arroyo, pilón, and bronco are still common in Texas, especially in areas where there remains a large Spanish-speaking population (Handbook of Texas Online, 2001).
Anglo migration into Texas came predominantly from the Lower South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) and the Upper South (Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina). Those from the Lower South tended to settle in east and southeast Texas, and settlers from the Upper South dominated in north and central Texas. Elements of the dialects and accents of those respective regions of the south can still be heard today, although with less frequency as, say, 50-100 years ago. To confuse matters more, there was direct migration to southeast and south central Texas from Europe. Ellis Island and New York City have always typified the great European migrations to America during the 19th and early 20th century. However, Galveston too was a major port of entry for Europeans – especially from Germany, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. Descendants of these immigrants spoke and preserved their languages as they influenced the English that was being spoken. Craig Carver (American Regional Dialects, 1987) illustrates dialect regions as layers that follow the migration patterns of various groups. Following those patterns, he delimits two dialect regions within Texas itself: “A South Texas layer that runs from the Texas-Mexico border and reaches up to San Antonio, and a Central Texas region that includes the areas where large numbers of speakers of German and other East European languages settled.” In towns and cities like New Braunfels, Richmond, Rosenberg, and several smaller hamlets surrounding Austin and San Antonio, the influence of these countries is still very strong in language, music, and cuisine.
Despite the presence of a multitude of influences, TXE is still a form of Southern American English and includes many of the lexical, grammatical, and phonological features of Southern American English (Bailey & Tillery). For one thing, the Lower South influence is distinguished by a more pronounced drawl while the Upper South influence is marked by a distinct twang. Coupled with regional phraseology and idiomatic speech, the drawl, the twang, and a host of variations can be as distinct as day and night. However, there is one key indicator of a Texas accent. Guy Bailey, Provost and Executive Vice-President at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Jan Tillery, associate professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, conducted a study called the National Geographic Survey of Texas Dialects, which examined the speaking habits of Texans. The survey divided the state into a grid of 116 areas with four people (native Texans) from each grid, aged 20-80. These people were interviewed and recorded to track different dialectical characteristics. What Bailey and Tillery found to be a constant across the state was a monophthong that created words like “fahr” for fire and far. It is only through context that the speaker’s meaning becomes clear.
Of course, everyone knows about ya’ll and fixin’ to; they are mainstay stereotypical words that immediately conjure up visions of Texas. Even non-native residents of Texas use these words as if they were born in Houston, Dallas, or Amarillo. However, there are many other features of TXE that vary from region to region. For instance, “fixin’ to” does not generally occur in south and south central Texas, but is commonly used elsewhere. Multiple modals like “might could” (as in, “I can’t go now, but I might could go later”) and the upgliding diphthong in dog which makes the pronunciation “dawg”, are also characteristic of west, east, and north Texas (Bailey & Tillery). In south and southeast Texas, one is very likely to hear the constricted post-vocalic /r/ (“r-lessness”) in words like “fohty” (forty) and “nawth” (north). There is a major street that runs through Queens and Nassau County in New York that I call “Nawthin Bullevahd” (Northern Boulevard). This “r-lessness” is not generally found in west and north Texas.
People from south Texas oftentimes employ vowel extensions in words with short vowel sounds. ‘Friends’, ‘things’, and ‘back’ are extended with the addition of a ‘y’ sound which makes those words sound like “free[y]end”, “thi[y]ings”, and “ba[y]ck.” Additionally, in the south Texas dialect one will find reverse lilt extensions on most long vowels. Words like ‘today’ and ‘green’ have a schwa added before the vowel (marked here with ‘u’) and become “tod[u]ay” and “gr[u]een” (IDEA, 2001). It is these extensions that give the south Texas dialect its “hick” or unsophisticated sound.
There are many features of TXE that can be found extensively throughout the state. “Vowel merger”, which is a blending of vowel sounds, causes words like ‘when’ and ‘win’ to sound like win, and ‘pen’ and ‘pin’ to sound like pin. There is the flattened /i/ which renders such words as ‘right’, ‘ride’, ‘I’m’, and ‘crime’ to sound like “raht”, “rahd”, “ahm”, and “crahm”. One might hear a gentleman say, “Ahm in thuh awl bidness.” The /oi/ blend is flattened so that a petroleum product is “awl” or occasionally “all”, a thin sheet of aluminum is “fawl” or “fall”, and hard work is “tawl” or “tall”. Another common dialectical feature replaces an /s/ with a /d/ which produces words like “bidness” for business, and “wuddn” for wasn’t. It is noted that replacements like that “are generally matters of mechanical efficiency.” Dr. Bailey puts it this way, “With ‘n’ and ‘d’ the tongue stays in the same position. It’s ease of articulation.” (Scholars of Twang Track All the ‘Y’alls’ in Texas, New York Times, 2003). TXE is also marked by shifts in accented syllables in some words. A guitar (gui-TAR) is a GUI-tar and a pecan (PEA-can) becomes a peh-CAHN.
Aside from flattened /i/s, dropped /s/s, and vowel extensions, there is a very distinct Texas vocabulary of idiomatic expressions that cannot be found anywhere else. These are the words and expressions that cause non-Texans to scratch their heads and wonder what was just said to them. “All swole up” (irritated, or in other connotations, obstinate, overly proud, or self-absorbed), i-o-no (I don’t know), nut’nduin (nothing doing – will not, would not, could not should not do that), whole nuther thang (something else entirely), over yonder (over there), and pole-axed (knocked flat with dramatic force) (K. Friedman, Guide to Texas Etiquette, 2001) are wonderful examples of the color that is added to TXE simply by mashing words together, or using imaginative figures of speech.
Two interesting aspects of Texas English are that Texans’ word pronunciation, by and large, are not moving to a national norm, and “those who described the state as an ‘excellent’ place to live were five times more likely to use monophthongs as residents who characterized it as ‘poor’ ” (P. Colloff, American Varieties, 2003). As to the first point, it seems that people living in mid-sized cities like Lubbock and Beaumont sounded just as regional as their rural counterparts. But in the larger cities (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) and their suburbs, TXE is on the decline; urbanites and non-natives in these areas don’t want to sound “country”. As to the second point, it is interesting that people who would say they are proud to be from Texas retain their accents and idiomatic speech more than those who could, in a sense, take it or leave it.
Many years ago, when I was attending art school in Oakland, California, I was talking to the model in my life drawing class who happened to be from Dallas. We were good-naturedly ribbing each other about how our respective hometowns were superior to the other’s. A friend, listening in on the conversation, laughed and, attempting his best “Southern” accent, remarked, “You all are SO Suthern.” The model and I looked at each other and shook our heads. I said, No, that’s Scarlett O’Hara from Joe-gia. We're from Texas. We sound like hicks.” Perhaps Texans do sound like hicks to the uncultured ear, but it is, as Colloff points out, a strong point of pride for many Texans to sound just the way they do. Or as a friend of mine from Odessa once said, “It don't mean a thang if it ain’t got that twang.”
Works Cited
Friedman, K. (2001). Kinky Friedman’s Guide to Texas Etiquette or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth. HarperCollins
Colloff, P. (2003). Drawl or Nothin’: Is Texan a Thing of the Past? Retrieved August 22, 2006 from http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/texan/drawl/
Blumenthal, R. (2003). Scholars of Twang Track All the ‘Y’alls’ in Texas. Retrieved August 22, 2006 from http://www.bigradios.com/shadow/yall.htm
Bailey, G. & Tillery, J. (2005) Texas English: Lone Star Language. Retrieved August 22, 2006 from http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/texan/
Handbook of Texas Online (2001). Dialect. Retrieved August 22, 2006 from http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/DDpcd1.html
International Dialects of English Archive (2001). Texas Four – Text. Retrieved August 22, 2006 from http://www.ku.edu/~idea/northamerica/usa/texas/texas4.htm
