way long associated with the upper or aristocratic plantation class in the Old South. Additional phonological features of this Atlantic Southern variety included: Non-rhoticity (or r-dropping). A possibility of both variants of Canadian raising: pronounced as , but as before a voiceless consonant. pronounced as something like , but possibly before a voiceless consonant. pronounced as . pronounced as in certain words, making bake sound like "beck", and afraid like "uh Fred." pronounced as or . In Virginia's Tidewater region particularly, these further features became associated with the label Tidewater accent: , , , and all potentially merge (as well as a small number of words that have in other American dialects, namely aunt, rather, and, earlier, pasture: an imitation of the British-style trap-bath split). The merged vowel is long, low-back, and rounded: or . Examples words for each traditional phoneme include more, maw, ma, and mar, respectively. , as in bird, earth, flirt, hurt, word, dirt, etc. pronounced with a weak consonant as , or a less common variant without : . Southern Louisiana Southern Louisiana, as well as some of southeast Texas (Houston to Beaumont), and coastal Mississippi, feature a number of dialects influenced by other languages beyond English. Most of southern Louisiana constitutes Acadiana, dominated for hundreds of years by monolingual speakers of Cajun French, which combines elements of Acadian French with other French and Spanish words. This French dialect is spoken by many of the older members of the Cajun ethnic group and is said to be dying out, although it is experiencing a minor resurgence among younger Franco-Louisianaise. A related language called Louisiana Creole also exists. The older English of Southern Louisiana did not participate in certain general older Southern English phenomena, for example lacking the Plantation South's trap–bath split and the fronting of . New Orleans English was likely developing in the early 20th century, in large part due to dialect influence from New York City migrants in New Orleans. Grammar and vocabulary Zero copula in third person plural and second person. This is historically a consequence of R-dropping, with e.g. you're merging with you. You [Ø] taller than Louise. They [Ø] gonna leave today (Cukor-Avila, 2003). Use of the circumfix a- . . . -in''' in progressive tenses. He was a-hootin' and a-hollerin'. The wind was a-howlin'. The use of like to to mean nearly. I like to had a heart attack. (I