Georgia

The first Europeans entering what is now Georgia found it occupied almost entirely by Creek Indians of the Muskogean branch of Hokan-Siouan stock. Removed by treaty to Indian Territory after their uprising in 1813, the Creek left behind only such places-names as Chattahoochee, Chattooga, and Okefenokee. Except for the South Midland speech of the extreme northern up-country, Georgia English is typically Southern. Loss of /r/ after a vowel in the same syllable is common. The diphthong /ai/ as in right is so simplified that Northern speakers hear the word as rat. Can't rhymes with paint, and borrow, forest, foreign, and orange all have the /ah/ vowel as in father . However, a highly unusual variety of regional differences, most of them in long vowels and diphthongs, makes a strong contrast between northern up-country and southern low-country speech. In such words as care and stairs, for example, many up-country speakers have a vowel like that in cat, while many low-country speakers have a vowel like in pane .

In general, northern Georgia snake doctor contrasts with southern Georgia mosquito hawk (dragonfly), goobers with pinders (peanuts), French harp with harmonica, plum peach with press peach (both clingstone peaches), nicker with whicker for a horse's neigh, and sallet with salad . In Atlanta a big sandwich is a poorboy; in Savannah, a peach pit is a kernel .

A distinctive variety of black English, called Gullah, is spoken in the islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coast, to which Creole-speaking slaves escaped from the mainland during the 17th and 18th centuries. Characteristic grammatical features include lack of inflection in the personal pronoun, the invariant form of the be verb, and the absence of the final s in the third person singular of the present tense. Many of the private personal names stem directly from West African languages.

In 2000, 6,843,038 Georgians—90.1% of the population five years old and older—spoke only English at home, down from 95.2% in 1990.

The following table gives selected statistics from the 2000 census for language spoken at home by persons five years old and over. The category "African languages" includes Amharic, Ibo, Twi, Yoruba, Bantu, Swahili, and Somali. The category "Other Indic languages" includes Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and Romany. The category "Other Asian languages" includes Dravidian languages, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, and Turkish.