Southern American English

Southern American English covers a band of varieties spoken across the US South — Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and beyond. Tens of millions of speakers across overlapping regional sub-varieties. The most recognisable features include the monophthongal long i (right sounds like raht), the pin-pen merger (pin and pen pronounced identically), and the famous drawl: vowels stretched into glides, giving the speech its characteristic musicality. The pace can sound slower, but speakers still drop sounds and link words just as much as elsewhere. Where learners struggle is the vowel mergers and the regional vocabulary — y'all, fixin' to, bless your heart — words that exist nowhere else in standard English. Worth listening to alongside General American to hear how much variation lives inside one country.