The distinctive Southern drawl we know today is the unintended consequence of southern Planter’s children imitating the broken English of their enslaved African caretakers who few English words they could pronounce, they did so with heavy African intonation.
Our children catch the very dialect of our servants, and lisp all their perversion of the English tongue, long before they learn to speak it correctly..The Charleston Southern Evangelical Messenger“Our children catch the very dialect of our servants, and lisp all their perversion of the English tongue, long before they learn to speak it correctly.”
Initially Planters were so bothered by this “drawl” that for a brief, and I do mean very brief moment, Planters considered making it mandatory that slaves be properly educated before being able to care for their children. Then calmer heads prevailed, and they conceded that a properly educated slave was far more of a threat to their “peculiar institution” and their “way of life” than any “drawl” could EVER be and no mention of providing slaves a formal education was ever made again.