@momofthree1999 - Maybe not in your part of the South, but comments on the web and here would certainly suggest it's centred on Georgia and Louisiana. Book evidence would add Maryland and South Carolina, and at least one writer who uses it grew up in French Town, Houston, which was originally populated by creoles from Louisiana.

Most of the examples I found at Google Books were by writers strongly expressing their Christian faith. I don't know if that's just normal for (black) people from the South, but it does seem a very high proportion. Which makes me wonder if this an expression that has been picked up at church, church seeming to have been a common factor in a few of the earlier comments.

'Cooked' was perhaps a bad example - 'a cooked omelette' and 'badly cooked omelette' would have been better.

@jayles - Not so strange really, because 'a made mistake' adds nothing to 'mistake' - make is what you do with mistakes. On the other hand 'an easily-made mistake' adds information.

Compare 'a told story' and 'a well-told story', 'a cooked dish' and 'a badly cooked dish', 'a driven car' and 'a carelessly driven car', 'a written letter' and a 'hastily written letter'. Ad infinitum (and no doubt nauseam).

I'm not sure why it should be thought ungrammatical, just unusual. Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary simply says: "The forms littler and littlest are rare. It is more common to use smaller and smallest" (Or, I would add, younger and youngest)

As for 'facilitating understanding', would anyone really have comprehension problems with - "I don't want to hear anymore of this crap! I don't care who started it! Now stop picking on your sister. She's littler than you." (College and Eighth, by Herbert Hyde)?

Children commonly use 'littler' and adults talk of 'your little sister' etc, so there's no real problem in understanding. And with children, younger usually does mean smaller, so that's a bit of a pedantic red herring, I would say.

William Faulkner seems to use it quite a bit, for example in The Unvanquished - "and the shawl drawn tight over her shoulders where she had her arms folded in it so that she looked littler than anybody I could remember" - but here the narrator is a young boy. As is the narrator in J.M.Barrie's Sentimental Tommy:

'Tommy would have blubbered. "It's—it's littler than I thought," he said desperately, "but—the minister, oh, what a wonderful big man he is!" '

And talking of young boys, here's William of 'Just William' fame (for older Brits, at least), but I'm not sure I'd want to sound like him:

'Well, that's a silly thing to do!' said William sternly, 'tellin' 'em it's littler than Wembley before they've come to it. Even if it is littler than Wembley we needn't tellem so.' 'Let's call it just Wembley,' suggested Douglas. 'No,' said William, 'it would be muddlin' havin' 'em both called by the same name. Folks wouldn't know which they was talkin' about' (Still William - Rachel Compton) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_William

That's really the main problem with 'littler' - it is rather associated with children, or adults talking to children.

On the other hand there's Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's attack on Chamberlain - "Littler than Hitler" - but that has more to do with word-play.

@jayles - I think there are two separate things here:

1. standard contractions, which are used both in speaking and writing - where I would suggest 'll is never a contraction for shall - "We'll just have to see." (will) - or "We shall just have to see."

2. Natural spoken shortenings, as in your two examples - "We sh'll just have to see" (like gonna etc) - but when we want to say shall, there's always at least a sh', not just a 'll.

@Jasper - I started off by intending to give thou, thee etc as an example, when I realised that was a disappearance rather than a change in a word form, which is why I chose ye, the old subject form of you, which is still shown in some nineteenth century grammars. Perhaps you should go and live in Yorkshire:

"Watching the people get lairy
It's not very pretty I tell thee"

Kaiser Chiefs (Leeds)

Apparently, the OED has the first citation for snuck from as long ago as 1887.

Google Books goes slightly earlier; this is from 1881:

"Well, sir, your boy Aleck got a straw, snuck up behind a sorrel mule, tickled him on the hind leg, and ..."

http://books.google.pl/books?id=J5hMAAAAMAAJ&q=snuck&dq=snuck&hl=en&ei=oSsnTvfuNsfEsgbUw8CXCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y

repeated a bit later (1886) in slightly less standard English:

"Well, sir, yer boy Aleck got a straw, snuck up behin' a sorrel mule, tickled him on the heels, an ..."

One from 1889:

'False doctrine snuck in amongst them with a great and holy appearance'

And another from 1895:

"I have just sandbagged the messenger and got a cool ten thousand out of his safe, when a beastly opposition train robber snuck in on me, slugged me, and took and made off with all the stuff"

@Mraff - at the moment, snuck is considered 'informal' and 'chiefly North American' (Oxford), but it looks as though its use is increasing. It's even 'snuck' into British English. If enough people use it, it will become totally standard and absolutely unobjectionable. Just like saying you instead of ye is now standard but at one time would have been considered a mistake. That's how language works.

Actually, in my experience as a teacher, apart from at very low levels, non-native speakers don't have that much trouble with irregular verbs (even the most irregular English verbs have only a maximum of five morphological forms, far less than most European languages). What really gives foreign learners gyp is phrasal verbs, not irregular verbs.

@Chris B - I imagine the Netherlands has been metric for about two hundred years, but in the street markets some things are still shown in pounds (weight) (at least I think it's in the Netherlands) - basically they call a half kilo a pound, which seems to me to be the best of both worlds - keep the tradition and have the benefits of metric.

In Britain we have the strange situation of roads being shown in miles and footpaths in kilometres - there's a very good reason for the latter: the Ordnance Survey was one of the first organisations to go metric, and as 1 inch to the mile gave way to 1 cm to the km, it made sense to show the footpaths in km too. I actually rather like Britain's hybrid system.

@Jasper - it happens to us all from time to time.

@Pee Wee - well you obviously despise me then, as I used it yesterday, but not to absolve myself of guilt, rather to soften a criticism of something the person I was writing to had said. As for thinking it was funny, that had never occurred to me (but then I don't live in the States).

I would suggest that if you're going to go around despising people for using language you don't approve of, that says rather more about you than them.