southernism

English edit

southernism (countable and uncountable, plural southernisms)

Anything characteristic of the southern part of a region, especially the southern United States.
- 1954, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): House of Commons official report:
  It is one of the national peccadilloes that anyone who lives north of St. Albans has some kind of prejudice against Londoners — perhaps "prejudice" is the wrong word — or rather not against Londoners but against southernism.
A word or phrase (a dialectism) from Southern American English.
- 1988 April 23, Cindy Patton, “Bob Andrews: A Life Celebration”, in Gay Community News, page 8:
  I loved his languid, Southern speech and little southernisms, like "you can't put a sequin on a rat's ass."
- 2015, Michael D. Picone, Catherine Evans Davies, New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches, University of Alabama Press, →ISBN, page 169:
  Many are known southernisms in the sense that they are also cited in sources such as Dictionary of American Regional English (henceforth, DARE) or Carver (1987).