If you listened to our episode on Southern American English, you can read more about it below. If you haven’t listened yet, you can find it here.
What other features are there in Southern American English (SAE)? We mentioned many features of Southern American English but managed to leave out a few interesting ones. My favourite one that we skipped is double (or even triple) modals. Modals are auxiliary verbs (in English, anyway) that tell you something about likelihood, ability, permission or obligation (e.g., ‘would’ or ‘can’, etc.). In SAE you can double up on modals, unlike in most other dialects of English. So you can say “I might could go to the store”. Why might speakers use more than one modal at a time? Because they can. But also, double/triple modals might be more polite than single modals, in dialects that allow them.
Continue reading “Episode 3: Southern Fried Addendum”