If you ever find yourself in a group of Southerners and want to find the Texan in the bunch, listen for the y'alls. Most surely will use the expression — a contraction of "you all" — to refer to a group of people ("Are y'all goin' to the store?"), but the Texan is more likely to employ it to refer to a single individual as well. That's only one of the unusual discoveries made by two linguistics professors at the University of Texas, San Antonio, who are studying Texas Twang, the distinctive dialect of English proudly spoken by natives of the Lone Star State — and sometimes ridiculed by the rest of the country.

The husband-wife team, Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery, are fixin' to complete their research. When they're done with their work, underwritten by the National Geographic Society, they might could write the definitive guide to what they lovingly call TXE, or Texas English. "Texas is different — it's the only state that was its own country at one time and has its own creation story," said Bailey, an Alabama native and the university's provost and executive vice president. "Out of that has come a sense of braggadocio and a strong desire to hold on to a unique way of speaking." Y'all is a case in point. Use of the term is spreading beyond the South, Tillery noted, largely because it fills a linguistic need: It's a clearer way to denote the second-person plural than the existing — and confusing — "you."

But Texans, in a kind of defiant counter-reaction to the mass appropriation of their beloved term, now also use it to refer to one person ("Y'all are my beautiful wife"), Tillery said. That, of course, is precisely the kind of confusion that y'all evolved to clear up. "If the rest of the country says you can't use y'all except for more than one person, then of course we're going to take it and say, no, you can use it for one person," said Tillery, whose drawling speech bears the marked twang of her childhood home in Lubbock, Texas.

"For me it's a conscious effort, because I was treated as such a backward pea-brain because of how I talked that I decided I would just be very upfront and even more pronounced," she said. "I'll tell you something — it's a good way to hide an intellect." For their research, Bailey and Tillery have divided the state into 116 geographic grids and have sought to interview four representative Texans in each one. Ideally, they try to find four generations of a single family, to chart linguistic changes over time. Interviewees are asked 250 questions to check unique Texas pronunciations and determine whether they use certain words and phrases, such as "polecat" for skunk or "snake feeder" for dragonfly. Some terms are used elsewhere in the South, but many combinations are distinctively Texan.

Interview subjects then read aloud a brief story, "My Friend Hugo," carefully designed by Tillery to contain every vowel sound and phonetic variation in the English language. Most native Texans use a flat "i," saying "naht" for night and "rahd" for ride, and they don't make any audible distinction when pronouncing such words as "pool" and "pull" or "fool" and "full." Midwesterners, by contrast, exhibit characteristic linguistic quirks, such as something experts call a fronted "o" in words like "about."

The researchers have found that some distinctive Texas speech patterns, such as saying "warsh" instead of "wash" and "lard" instead of "lord," are beginning to disappear as younger generations abandon them. Also vanishing is much of the traditional regional vocabulary, such as "light bread" for white bread and "snap beans" for green beans. In other ways, Texas English is expanding. Newcomers to the state soon begin sounding like Texans, Bailey noted, tossing around y'alls and saying "Ahma fixin' to" (generally defined as "I will do it if I get around to it").

The infamous double modal ("might could," "may can," "might would"), a hedging construction denoting less certainty than "might" alone, remains more elusive. "It's very easy for people who move into Texas to pick up 'y'all,' " Bailey said. "It's a little bit harder to pick up 'fixin' to.' But 'might could' is another matter. We have found that unless you're born and raised in Texas, you don't pick up the double modals." When all is said and done, do Texans sound funny?

"Not to Texans," Bailey said, "and not really to other people in the South. You know, there's a lot of comment about President Bush's speech, but Bush has a fairly typical Texas accent. The person who had the more distinctive accent was President Clinton. In his vowel system, Clinton was far more distinctive than Bush is, but it was almost never commented on." Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company