Phonetic, grammatical and lexical features of Southern American English on the example of "to kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Abstract

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 extralinguistic 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 work "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. We study phonetic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities of the southern dialect. The examples from the book enable 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 see 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 tense forms of verbs and the absence of auxiliary verbs in the sentences.