Extra-Linguistic Features of the Southern Dialect of American English in the Novel of Harper Lee “Go Set a Watchman”

Abstract

The article discusses the multi-level linguistic features of the variations of the American English in the United States under the influence of territorial isolation, which forms the structure and functional use of the language. In the USA an extensive material on regional types of pronunciation has been collected in the fields of sociolinguistics and dialectology while the variability of English speech on the territory of the United States of America remains practically unexplored. In this article the extra-linguistic features, namely, territorial peculiarities of the southern dialect are considered in combination with the features of the dialect of the South Mountain region and the dialect of South Coast area on the example of the novel “Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee. Phonetic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities of the southern dialect have been studied. The examples from the book enabled us to see the specific nature of the dialect of the Southern United States. We have also compared phonetic, lexical and grammatical features of this dialect with the literary English language and saw huge differences. Having analyzed the grammatical peculiarities of the southern dialect, for example, we conclude that the most common grammatical error of the local population is the incorrect formation of general questions, the use of the tense forms of the verbs and the absence of auxiliary verbs in the sentences.