"She had a Southern Drawl that was just dripping with Dixie."
Drawls run the gamut of the light drawls from Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, getting progressively heavier as one heads South through Virginia and the Carolinas into Georgia and Florida and West through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, down to the deep drawls of the Deep South in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and over to Texas.
Wikipedia also has an entry for drawl, which points to articles on Southern American English and Australian English.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.
drawl
PRONUNCIATION: drôl
VERB: Inflected forms: drawled, drawl·ing, drawls
INTRANSITIVE VERB: To speak with lengthened or drawn-out vowels.
TRANSITIVE VERB: To utter with lengthened or drawn-out vowels: “We-e-ell,” the clerk drawled.
NOUN: The speech or manner of speaking of one who drawls: a Southern drawl.
ETYMOLOGY: Probably from Low German drauelen, to loiter, delay.
OTHER FORMS: drawl'er —NOUN
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
