I’ve heard it used in a sentence like “When I was a boy, my daddy done learnt me a thing or two about fishin’”. Which is why it’s associated with southern slang, I think. That’s my hypothesis anyway.
Folks in west verginnie use words and phrases carried over from the old days when talkin like brits and Frenchmen was considered fancy, and it’s devolved into hill folk lingo. Yes, it’s technically a dialect but it’s not proper grammar in American English just because some hillfolk and southern drawl says it.
Right, I get that it’s not grammatically correct in that context, but the word itself is valid. I had always thought “learnt” was akin to “ain’t”, but that’s not the case. Both “learned” and “learnt” are correct, but the latter is less commonly used in the US.
