page_title: Older Southern American English
section_title: Piedmont and Tidewater Virginia
hierarchical_section_title: Older Southern American English / Phonology / Piedmont and Tidewater Virginia
caption_attribution_description: Painted relief map of the state of Virginia.
context_page_description: Older Southern American English was a set of American English dialects of the Southern United States, primarily spoken by white Southerners up until the American Civil War, moving toward a state of decline by the turn of the twentieth century, further accelerated after World War II and again, finally, by the Civil Rights Movement. These dialects have since largely given way, on a larger regional level, to a more unified and younger Southern American English, recognized today by a unique vowel shift and certain other vocabulary and accent characteristics. Some features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, like non-rhoticity, though typically in only very localized dialects or speakers.
context_section_description: The people of the major central (Piedmont) and eastern (Tidewater) regions of Virginia, excluding Virginia's Eastern Shore, once spoke in a way long associated with the upper or aristocratic plantation class in the Old South, often known as a Tidewater accent. Additional phonological features of this Atlantic Southern variety included:
  Non-rhoticity (or r-dropping).
  A possibility of both variants of Canadian raising:
  /aʊ/ pronounced as [aʊ], but as [əʉ~ɜʉ] before a voiceless consonant.
  /aɪ/ pronounced as something like [aε~aæ~aə], but possibly [ɐɪ] before a voiceless consonant.
  /ɛər/ pronounced as [æː(ə)].
  /eɪ/ pronounced as [ɛ] in certain words, making bake sound like "beck", and afraid like "uh Fred."
  /uː/ pronounced as [ʉː] or [ᵿʉ].
  In Tidewater Virginia particularly:
  The "palm" words and a select few "bath" words (namely aunt, rather, and, earlier, pasture) pronounced in the mouth and often rounded as [ɒ]. This rounding, combined with non-rhoticity, potentially merge several sets of words, like maw, more, ma, and mar, into a single phoneme.
  /ɜːr/, as in bird, earth, flirt, hurt, word, dirt, etc. pronounced with weakly rhoticity as [ɜʴ] or the less common non-rhotic variant [ɜ].
caption: The old Virginia accent was mostly spoken in the central and eastern regions of the state, excluding the Eastern Shore of Virginia on the Delmarva Peninsula.
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