My people are “slow of thought”
I found this linguistic description of a person from the county where I grew up, in a book called the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). This person’s mother is from King’s Ferry, the rural community where my family is from.
“About average intelligence; slow of thought. Dialect shows mixture of coastal and Midland (“wiregrass”) types; any white folk speaker in Nassau Co. would have some of latter…slow speech; drawl. Nasality very strong. Often a querulous rising intonation at end of statement…”
From the LAMSAS bookjacket:
LAMSAS is “the largest single survey of regional and social differences in spoken American English….Through interviews with nearly twelve hundred people conducted during the 1930s and 1940s, the LAMSAS mapped regional variations in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation at a time when population movements were more limited than they are today, thus providing important information about early settlement patterns.
