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So I'm watching Palmer, and Coles, a white, middle-class US American male, just said I shoulda came and visited you (refering to Palmer, who got out of prison earlier that week). The movie plays in the town of Sylvain, which seems to be imaginary. The actor in question is Jesse C. Boys who was born in North Carolina, so it's probably a fair assumption that, in ANAE terminology, he is a speaker of Southern.

English isn't my first language, but I do watch and listen to quite a bit of American English and have never heard such a grammatical construct before. If it was simply part of the dialect, one might expect for it to be quite common, so I'm wondering whether it can be attributed to a sociolect.

To put a question mark here: where did the construction "should(a/have) came" originate and what hypotheses, if any, are there as to why it developed?

(I'm aware of Should have went vs Should have gone but it doesn't answer my question.)

Sixtyfive
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  • It's not possible to tell from the context, but it's probably a Southernism. – FeliniusRex - gone Feb 01 '21 at 22:00
  • All speakers so far have had a pronounciation that would point toward the south, and certainly more west than east. Still doesn't tell anything about the origin of the combination of the two grammatical times, though. – Sixtyfive Feb 01 '21 at 22:07
  • First off, I might have been wrong about "west". The name of the town the movie plays in is "Sylvain", which seems to be imaginary, but a street in Maine is called Sylvain Road, so who knows. As far as register, no, I don't think so. The contraction of "should have" to "shoulda", that's register. Combining two tenses like that is a much more profound change from standard grammar. – Sixtyfive Feb 01 '21 at 22:49
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    It's a mildly illiterate construction. Nothing remarkable. – Hot Licks Feb 01 '21 at 23:09
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    Nearly all irregular verbs have been repurposed in Southern English. The language spent 200 years adapting to the native cultures and their systems of communication, trade, law, etc. (which remained the dominant systems long after the USA became a country). English was at first a secondary trade language, and later the primary trade language, but it was subsumed under native culture. Irregular verbs supplied "extra" words for grammatically expressing things important to native culture, leaving a vast collection of more or less defective verbs that have been baffling Northerners for 300 years. – Phil Sweet Feb 01 '21 at 23:10
  • @PhilSweet I up-ticked your comment..but that is all I can do at this point... – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Feb 01 '21 at 23:16
  • @PhilSweet that sounds like an answer in the making. Perhaps some other people will chime in and give their thoughts. I'd like to rephrase the question to be less broad, but at the moment I don't yet know how. – Sixtyfive Feb 01 '21 at 23:32
  • I came here to ELU ages ago looking for info on how Southern English was transformed to handle the dictates of native discourse and cultural expectations, but I have yet to find anything at all. So it really amounts to just a pet theory. – Phil Sweet Feb 01 '21 at 23:54
  • South American English? I think the word "trailer" is a key. And "Shudda came" might be a closer transcription than "Should have came." – Yosef Baskin Feb 01 '21 at 23:55
  • Have you done any reading outside of SE, that is, taken a look at scholarly work / research? It'd be weird if there wasn't anything on stuff such as this. – Sixtyfive Feb 01 '21 at 23:56
  • Apologies, @YosefBaskin, that should of course have been "Southern", not "South". Fixed. The transcription was copied from the movie's subtitles, so I'll leave that for now. As for the trailer park, that's where Palmer lives. Coles doesn't. He's the son of the town's Sherrif and lives in a house which is far enough away from Palmer that it requires a car to get there. – Sixtyfive Feb 02 '21 at 00:01
  • Yes, but I probably don't have access to the better stuff found in research libraries. And the people at the center of these changes weren't big on record keeping circa 1600s. – Phil Sweet Feb 02 '21 at 00:01
  • It's interesting that you mention the 1600s. Was that just a feeling or was there a more concrete reason behind it? I've read books in Arabic Dialectology (German and British authors) from the early 1800s that made good arguments for grammatical differences between the High Language and the dialect in question which must have happened hundreds of years prior. If that level of interest was there for Arabic, then certainly English, too. – Sixtyfive Feb 02 '21 at 00:06
  • If it's a movie, it's not a mistake. It's put in the script on purpose. Whether it's authentic is a different matter. Hollywood is seldom accurate about speech details, because who cares? – John Lawler Feb 02 '21 at 00:28
  • Well, it's certainly not a mistake. Only someone who believes in "correct" and "incorrect" usage of a speaker's mother tongue would come up with that thought :-) – Sixtyfive Feb 02 '21 at 10:47

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