Texan English
Texan English is the array of American English dialects spoken in Texas, primarily falling under Southern U.S. English. As one nationwide study states, the typical Texan accent is a "Southern accent with a twist". The "twist" refers to inland Southern U.S., older coastal Southern U.S., and South Midland U.S. accents mixing together, due to Texas's settlement history. In fact, there is no single accent that covers all of Texas and few dialect features are unique to Texas alone. The newest and most innovative Southern U.S. accent features are best reported in Lubbock, Odessa, somewhat Houston and variably Dallas, though general features of this same dialect are found throughout the state, with several exceptions: Abilene and somewhat Austin, Corpus Christi, and El Paso appear to align more with Midland U.S. accents than Southern ones.
History
After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, Mexican Texas legally permitted an influx of American settlers mainly from the Southern United States, who within a decade outnumbered Hispanics in Texas, making English as common as Spanish in central and north Texas. After Texas became an independent republic in 1836, English, with its distinct Southern influences, became the predominant language.Research
Some linguists draw dialect boundaries based upon phonological differences and others on lexical differences, leading to various views on how to classify dialects in Texas, often by dividing the state into an eastern versus a western dialect region. 20th-century lexical research delimited Texas into two "layers": a southern Texas layer along the Mexican border with several Spanish loanwords and a central Texas layer settled by speakers of German and other European languages amidst a dominant Anglo-American settlement. 21st-century phonological research reveals accents in Texas grouped in a way not easy to demarcate in terms of simple geographical boundaries, and ongoing research reveals an urban–rural divide within Texas becoming more significant than a region-wide divide.Some linguists propose that urbanization, geographic and social mobility, and the mass media have homogenized the speech of the United States to a national norm. Due to rapid urbanization, increasing dominance of high tech industries, and massive migrations, Texan speech has been reshaped as well, especially since 1990. The general tendency in the phonology of Texas English is that mergers expand at the expense of distinctions, although traditional Southern-style Texan English preserved older phonemic distinctions. Since much of the traditional regional vocabulary concerned farming and rural life, these terms are now disappearing or being replaced by technical terms.
Urban–rural contrast
As stated above, an internal rural–urban split is emerging within Texan English, meaning that most traditionally Southern features remain strong in rural areas but tend to disappear in large urban areas and small cities. The urban-rural linguistic split mainly affects Southern-style phonological phenomena like the pen-pin merger, the loss of the offglide in /aɪ/, and upgliding diphthongs, all of which are now recessive in metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, some traditional grammatical features like y'all and fixin' to are expanding to non-natives in metropolitan areas as well as to the Hispanic population.Phonology
Essentially all Texas English phonologically falls under the Southeastern super-dialect region of the United States and often specifically the Southern dialect region, though noticeably not the cities of El Paso, Abilene, and Austin, and not particularly Houston and Corpus Christi. Moreover, as of 21st-century research, the accents of Dallas show enormous variability.- Of the three possible stages of the Southern Vowel Shift, the first two stages occur throughout Texas, except in El Paso, Abilene, Austin, and Corpus Christi—the first stage alone appears in Houston. This means monophthongization of in many contexts and lowering of → and /ɛ/ → e.
- *Monophthongization of in all contexts, even before voiceless consonants, is a linguistic innovation concentrated in the [Texas Panhandle and North Texas: the whole northern half of the state. This makes words like mite, rice, life, type, etc. sound like,,, and.
- *A study of Texas Triangle English shows a strong orientation of primarily young, female, and urban speakers towards a diphthongization of /aɪ/ in all contexts. In fact, the monophthongization of /aɪ/ has left Texas Triangle speech almost entirely. 89% of the speakers born in the 1980s use diphthongal realizations of /aɪ/, whereas only 11% use monophthongal or intermediate realizations of /aɪ/.
- The cot-caught merger of the two historical vowels sounds and, in words like caught and cot or stalk and stock, is becoming increasingly common throughout the United States, thus affecting Southwestern and even many Southeastern dialects, towards a merged vowel. The ANAE reports a completed merger in Amarillo, Odessa, and variably El Paso, but the rest of Texas is also rapidly transitioning towards the merger.
- A few younger speakers realize the vowel, unlike typical Southerners, as open front, which is more in line with the Western U.S. dialect. This lowering occurs only in speakers with the cot-caught merger, and is not yet as common as in California and Canada.
- Three mergers before /l/ are recorded in some Texas English: the fill–feel merger, the fell–fail merger, and the full–fool merger.
- Non-rhoticity has reversed on a massive scale, as in most of the Southern U.S., and is now only heard in some older speakers.
Grammar
Vocabulary
Many of these lexical terms are shared with the Midland and Southern dialects generally:- buzzard: vulture
- blue norther: The term blue norther refers to a weather phenomenon that often appears in the temperate zones all over the world. It is a quickly moving autumnal cold front which drops the temperatures rapidly and brings along rain and after a period of blue skies and cold weather. The derivation of this term is unclear. Some people say that the term refers to a norther which sweeps "out of the Panhandle under a blue-black sky" – from the heat to the blue black cold. Others suggest that blue norther denotes the color of the sky that appears after the bad weather front has passed. Yet others say that people associate blue with the cold that the front brings along. Variants of this term are blue whistler, blue darter and blue blizzard. Whereas the term blue whistler is also used in Texas the two latter terms are from out of state. Blue norther, however, is purely Texan. Since Spanish times, the effect of blue norther has been noted in Texas and this phenomenon has often been exaggerated. But contrary to the belief of many people, blue norther is not unique to Texas.
- bowie knife: a long hunting knife. Named for Alamo hero Jim Bowie.
- dogie: calf.
- fixin' to: a future-tense modal verb analogous to "about to" or "going to" in much of American English. E.g., "I'm fixin' to leave for school."
- geddup: outfit
- howdy: a general greeting; a shortened form of "How do you do?"
- looker: an attractive woman
- maverick: stray or unbranded.
- motte : The term motte or mot refers to a small grove of trees in open grasslands. It was first introduced by Irish immigrants in the 1830s. They brought this term from Ireland where people used to call similar woods this way. In the United States one hears of motte only in Texas.
- plumb: superlative adjective, equivalent to "absolutely" or "very much". E.g., "He's plumb out of luck."
- pole cat: a skunk
- shinnery: a well-known term in western Texas for a shinnery oak or a sand shinnery oak. These trees grow in Texas, western Oklahoma, and eastern New Mexico. The term shinnery can also mean the area or landscape in which shinnery oaks grow.
- spindletop: a gushing oil well
- tank: stock pond.
- varmint: a wild or rascally animal, especially a mammal. Derivative of vermin.
- y'all: a second-person plural pronoun; a shortened form of "you all"
- yonder: an adverbial used to designate a faraway place; analogous to "over there"
South Texas vocabulary
- acequia : an irrigation ditch.
- arroyo : a gulch, ravine, creek bed
- caliche : a hardened layer of calcium carbonate in the ground.
- chaparral : brush-covered terrain
- frijoles : beans
- hacienda : the main house of a ranch
- icehouse: a term used in the San Antonio area to mean a convenience store. Elsewhere, this denotes an open-air tavern, the origin of which dates back to the times when fresh beer was stored in "ice houses" placed strategically along beer delivery routes for local and regional delivery. Over time these locations began to serve cold beer, since it was stored there already, and other conveniences, such as food items, cigarettes, etc. In more modern times, the surviving ice houses are little more than open air beer bars. It is the "open air" feature, in fact, that distinguishes an ice house from a tavern.
- llano : a plain
- olla : an earthenware pot or crock
- pelado : a catch-all term for low-class and popular-culture people. Now considered an offensive and derogatory word
- pilon : a bonus, lagniappe
- reata : a rope or lasso
- resaca : a small body of water
- toro : a bull
- vaquero : a cowboy