Ciarán12 wrote:linguoboy wrote:But that's the only usage of passel I know of in contemporary American English (and it's striking to me that it's not familiar to vijayjohn because I strongly associate it with a friend of mine from Oklahoma).
Isn't Vijay from Texas? Or are you just referring to Southern dialects in general?
Oklahoma and Texas share a border of more than 800 km. Most of Texas and about half of Oklahoma lie within the Southern American English dialect area, but only southeast Texas is core Southern. Slightly more than half of Oklahoma is Southern Midland, which is something of a transitional dialect with heavily Southern characteristics. (Northern Midland is the dialect closest to General American.)
vijayjohn wrote:I also think isoglosses/the distribution of features in the US is just really weird, so you can't necessarily be sure whether someone from a particular area will share a feature that everyone has just a short distance away.
I find this is mostly true (a) further east and (b) near large population centres. The West outside of the big cities (Seattle, SF, LA) is pretty homogeneous.