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In Southern US English, adverb forms are almost always replaced by their adjective forms. For example:

The journey was awful long.
He's running real fast.
He ran to the store quick.
He plays tennis good.

This seems something unique to Southern US English. What dynamic is there in that region that has resulted in this loss of a distinct adverb and adjective?

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    I think you'll find that some of these, anyway, are much more widespread than Southern US; and that many of them go back a long time, to before there were prescriptive grammarians telling people that an adverb and an adjective had to be different in English.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 9:49
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    If you want to speak well of a footballer in the UK, you don’t say ‘My goodness, he played with such skill and panache.’ No, what you say is, ‘The boy done good.’
    – Barrie England
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 11:13
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    "Awfu'" as an intensifier is well-known in Scotland
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 11:56
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    'Why' questions are so hard...it sounds like you're looking for a cause/effect and usually language change is all about fashion (except for maybe phonology). But it still sounds like you're trying to get the answer "they do it cuz them suth'ners er dumb".
    – Mitch
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 13:39
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    Do you really need the adverb forms? It seems that the language has evolved to be more efficient! Interesting that evolution should happen in the southern US though ;-)
    – mgb
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 19:48

3 Answers 3

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"Real" and "awful" as intensifiers go back a real long time, and are much further widespread than the U.S. South. See this ngram. With respect to these particular terms, I imagine people in the South speak English just as good as anywhere else.

real/really fast, awful/awfully bad

For "ran quick", you might actually have a valid complaint, since Ngrams shows "quickly" is much more common. But one example isn't good evidence of a general trend towards adverb loss.

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  • In another example, Google search shows that wicked, as an intensifier, seems to be used just around as often as wickedly, and I associate neither of these with the South. And the British say bloody rather than bloodily (except when talking about actual blood). I don't think you can argue the the South is unique in using adjectives as intensifiers, and I don't even know whether this should be considered bad grammar.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Oct 19, 2011 at 13:06
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    To my New England ear, wicked as an intensifier is an adverb. When someone says that was wicked, I can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop. Though it’s not universal: wicked old man is an old man who is wicked (cruel), but wicked old dude is probably a dude who is wicked (very) old. Wickedly isn’t used in the same way at all.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented Jan 9, 2012 at 16:47
  • @Jon: Looking at Ngrams, "wickedly cold," for example, is used nearly as often as "wicked cold". But I totally agree that those people using "wickedly" as an intensifier can't be from New England. After having lived here nearly a decade, it sounds wrong to me, too.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jan 10, 2012 at 5:01
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For whatever reason, Southern speech has kept many old forms. The use of flat adverbs was once more common than it is now. So it's not a case of Southerners (and others as well) abandoning the -ly but rather a case of preserving the non-ly form!

"Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick, my lord" — King Richard II, Act I, Sc. IV.

"the weather was so violent hot ... the weather being excessive hot ... extreme hot ... the sea went dreadful high. - Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Common uses of flat adverbs:
Stay close to me.
Drive slow.
Think different.
Hang tough.
Do right.
pitch black
mighty fine
I sure hope ...
Drive safe.
The batter drove the ball the deep.
He tried to go deep with that pass.
Quick, take the shot!

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    This is interesting - do you have further references on this?
    – Marcin
    Commented Jan 9, 2012 at 16:45
  • +1: But I don't think "pitch black" counts. Pitch is a noun, not an adjective, so this is an expression with a noun followed by a color, just like "coal black", "blood red", "sky blue" or "sea green".
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jan 10, 2012 at 12:11
  • @Marcin It's all from memory over the years. I'v read many times that some grammar and speech patterns are still in use in the South. For byspel, it's common to hear the l in walk, talk, palm, psalm, almond pronounced. Yu'r more likely to hear the aspirated h like hit or 'it for it. The old dativ pronoun usage for reflexiv instead of the reflexiv pronoun ... I bought me a hamburger rather than I bought myself a hamburger. The a- forefast (prefix) is heard more. Reckon is a well used verb in the South. As we talked about here, flat adverbs. I'v even heard ye up in the mountains.
    – AnWulf
    Commented Jan 17, 2012 at 6:11
  • It seems to me that 'do right' isn't valid in your list of examples of flat adverbs, because right isn't how you should do, but what you should do. To elaborate: I assume the meaning of 'do right' is 'do what is right', and not 'do correctly'.
    – klaar
    Commented Apr 13, 2016 at 11:49
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"Good" as adverb is widespread even if it is seen as an error in many places. I've come across it countless times and I'm not in the South. Also, it's arguable that the "-ly" suffix is redundant since the word order usually lets you infer that these words are adverbs and not adjectives. So just as my daughter, who is still learning to talk, naturally decides to use adjective words as adverbs, it seems natural that this sort of thing would be common. My intuition tells me that this sort of speech is associated with people/regions who are or were historically less educated, such as farmers (who spent more time farming than reading, for example). I have certainly heard this kind of speech in rural Ontario but don't hear it as much in urban Ontario. I don't have any hard evidence to back this up.

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  • I see much potential for ambiguity without separate adverbs, actually, so I totally disagree about the redundancy. One of the most (sadly) widespread ones, "he did good", is a thoroughly ambiguous phrase which can be closer to "he did well", or to "he did good deeds".
    – Jez
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 13:09
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    It can be ambiguous but often the context is enough. "Did you see how fast Jez ran?" "Yeah, he did good." Soooo many sentences are ambiguous without context.
    – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 13:23
  • Ah, but did Jez do well in his endeavours by running fast, or was his running fast in itself a good deed, because he was being sponsored to run fast for charity (or something)?
    – Jez
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 13:55
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    I don't think that your second interpretation is likely or common without further context. And in either case it could mean BOTH meanings simultaneously, which might make this usage MORE useful rather than less.
    – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 14:20
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    @klaar Just because there may be a better word choice doesn't make every other word choice wrong. Just because adding a rule to language allows new distinctions to be made doesn't mean that the rule is beneficial overall. Languages are not based on reasoned rules. As other answers have pointed out, good as an adverb has a long history. Is it always objectively better to use well? I doubt it.
    – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
    Commented Apr 13, 2016 at 14:24

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