I guess that's where we'd need a historical linguist, to say whether such patterns existed in any kind of written/reported form prior to the war. I mean, the patterns are all over the post-war/reconstruction period, but a lot of that genre's fictions were actually written by non-Southerners (and could feasibly be characterized as a kind of 'colonization' process that imposes a new mythology on a subjugated people)... so finding the patterns in fiction isn't reliable at all. (And it's also possible just like the stereotype of the Southern Lady and the Southern Gentleman were derived from that fiction, so might the speech patterns be, too.)
The crazy thing is that the vast majority of the South, before the war, was... one big honking wilderness that'd only been frontier a generation before. The massive plantations were concentrated along riverfronts (easy access in/out), and once you get inland or into the mountains, there were slaves but nothing on the scale of the massive plantations. More like subsistence farming where "one to six slaves" is considered as necessary as "pot for cooking" and "one horse". (And in many cases, the white owners worked alongside the slaves, because every hand was needed.) It's still ownership, it's just ownership with different dynamics than the big-house-on-the-hill. Anyway, for all that the external representation of the South was a lot of drinking mint julep while the darkies sang, the majority of the South was pretty hardscrabble poor and stiff-backed proud despite that poverty (thank you, Scots immigrants influence). And I wouldn't really expect a lot of gratuitous politeness from a Scots-influenced culture, at least that's my guess (but as always, could be way off on that).
Maybe it's somewhere in-between, that the courtesy-levels were applied from without (as part of the myth-making) but then adopted by the subjugated people as a way to differentiate themselves, and to shove down or cover over the racial tensions? The whole 'if you ask politely enough you can ask for the most incredibly rude things, as long as you do it politely'...
I dunno, really. I've never really stopped to ask where the specific speech patterns originated. I would guess someone's studied it, but not sure where I'd go about finding such studies.
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Date: 13 Jan 2011 06:28 pm (UTC)The crazy thing is that the vast majority of the South, before the war, was... one big honking wilderness that'd only been frontier a generation before. The massive plantations were concentrated along riverfronts (easy access in/out), and once you get inland or into the mountains, there were slaves but nothing on the scale of the massive plantations. More like subsistence farming where "one to six slaves" is considered as necessary as "pot for cooking" and "one horse". (And in many cases, the white owners worked alongside the slaves, because every hand was needed.) It's still ownership, it's just ownership with different dynamics than the big-house-on-the-hill. Anyway, for all that the external representation of the South was a lot of drinking mint julep while the darkies sang, the majority of the South was pretty hardscrabble poor and stiff-backed proud despite that poverty (thank you, Scots immigrants influence). And I wouldn't really expect a lot of gratuitous politeness from a Scots-influenced culture, at least that's my guess (but as always, could be way off on that).
Maybe it's somewhere in-between, that the courtesy-levels were applied from without (as part of the myth-making) but then adopted by the subjugated people as a way to differentiate themselves, and to shove down or cover over the racial tensions? The whole 'if you ask politely enough you can ask for the most incredibly rude things, as long as you do it politely'...
I dunno, really. I've never really stopped to ask where the specific speech patterns originated. I would guess someone's studied it, but not sure where I'd go about finding such studies.