Consonants

Although it is clearly most different from other American dialects in its vowel system, SAmE also includes some distinctive consonant features. Unlike many other varieties of American English, traditional SAmE preserved h before w in words like which and white, maintained j after alveolar stops and nasals in words like Tuesday, due, and news, and had unconstricted r in postvocalic position. However, over the last 120 years, and particularly since World War II, all of these have begun to disappear in the urban South. In initial clusters, h is now usually lost before w and sometimes before j, so that which is typically [wIʧ] and Houston sometimes  . Likewise, among younger Southern urbanites, j is generally lost after alveolars so that do and due are homophones (both are usually realized as ).

The situation with r is somewhat more complicated. Although the Southern mountains and piney woods have always been rhotic, in the plantation areas of the South, earlier varieties of SAmE had unconstricted r in four environments:

(1) when r followed a vowel (as in fire, four, ford, and far),

(2) when it functioned as a stressed syllabic (as in first and fur),

(3) when it functioned as an unstressed syllabic (as in father), and

(4) occasionally when it occurred in intersyllabic position (as in MARY and MERRY).

Present-day urban SAmE, however, generally has constricted r in all of these environments. The expansion of constricted r began first in intersyllabic and stressed syllabic environments before World War II. Since that time constricted variants have become the norm in Southern metropolises not only in intersyllabic and stressed syllabic environments, but increasingly in postvocalic environments (after front vowels initially and then after back vowels) and in unstressed syllabic contexts as well. In fact, over the last quarter century, the expansion of rhotic variants has been so extensive among white Southerners that non-rhotic forms are now associated primarily with African Americans.

Three other features of traditional SAmE, however, have been preserved in urban SAmE to a greater extent. First, as in rural varieties, post-vocalic l is frequently vocalized; the vocalized l is often transcribed as [ɤ] in linguistic atlas records, but there is usually some lip rounding with vocalized l. Second, again as in rural varieties, medial z often undergoes assibilation before n so that isn’t is pronounced [Idn] and wasn’t pronounced [wΛdn] . (Note, however, that urban SAmE differs from rural varieties in that v is rarely assibilated in words like seven.) Finally, especially in rapid speech, final nasals are still sometimes realized only as vowel nasality; this accounts for the fact that don’t can be pronounced as [dõʊ​]. Other consonant features of traditional SAmE phonology, such as intrusive t in words like once and the unusually high rate of consonant cluster simplification, have largely disappeared from urban SAmE.