"The young'uns call it country/The Yankees call it dumb"
September 11, 2023 11:38 AM Subscribe
I Killed My Southern Accent and a Piece of Myself With It (slJezebel)
As someone who has done exactly this since childhood, this essay hits at all the complicated feelings Southerners have about accents and where you're from.
As someone who has done exactly this since childhood, this essay hits at all the complicated feelings Southerners have about accents and where you're from.
Siri, play Outfit by the Drive-By Truckers
Isbell at his finest, on these complicated feelings:
Don't call what you're wearing an outfit
Don't ever say your car is broke
Don't worry about losing your accent
A Southern man tells better jokes
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:55 AM on September 11, 2023 [22 favorites]
Isbell at his finest, on these complicated feelings:
Don't call what you're wearing an outfit
Don't ever say your car is broke
Don't worry about losing your accent
A Southern man tells better jokes
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:55 AM on September 11, 2023 [22 favorites]
I kept mine. I did not feel shame or any sense that I should until 2016. After Trump was elected, I was loath to sound like a dangerous person -- and I could not blame anyone for believing that a white Southerner was a dangerous person.
Even so, I still have it; I just have the ability to flatten it out in order to be better understood. The funny thing is, people in the South don't think I still have it; they think I have an Eastern accent now. What can I say? The word "oil" with the diphthong swallowed, maybe; that's a tell.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:00 PM on September 11, 2023 [12 favorites]
Even so, I still have it; I just have the ability to flatten it out in order to be better understood. The funny thing is, people in the South don't think I still have it; they think I have an Eastern accent now. What can I say? The word "oil" with the diphthong swallowed, maybe; that's a tell.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:00 PM on September 11, 2023 [12 favorites]
Who was it that said a southern accent makes everyone else discount your IQ by 20 points, and the opposite with a British accent?
posted by gottabefunky at 12:04 PM on September 11, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by gottabefunky at 12:04 PM on September 11, 2023 [11 favorites]
I will confess that I once had a pretty deep disdain for Southern accents and a few others. Not entirely sure why, but it was ingrained.
Had a moment of clarity (of my own stupidity) when I was talking to a co-worker shortly after moving to Colorado from Missouri. I grew up nearish St. Louis in a small town, but I wanted to be in the city. We got on the topic of regionalisms and accents somehow and my co-worker guessed that I had a "southern" accent.
I was annoyed, pissed actually. (For the record, I really did not have an accent most folks would think of as Southern, but apparently I had some kind of accent that wasn't Native Coloradan...) And then I thought about it and felt ashamed and stupid when I realized how I was judging other people.
Since then I've worked with people from all over the world with all kinds of accents. I may struggle to understand sometimes, but I will make the effort and I've pushed back on a lot of comments from other Americans about "thick accents" since then.
Gonna share this around. Everybody needs to read it.
posted by jzb at 12:09 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Had a moment of clarity (of my own stupidity) when I was talking to a co-worker shortly after moving to Colorado from Missouri. I grew up nearish St. Louis in a small town, but I wanted to be in the city. We got on the topic of regionalisms and accents somehow and my co-worker guessed that I had a "southern" accent.
I was annoyed, pissed actually. (For the record, I really did not have an accent most folks would think of as Southern, but apparently I had some kind of accent that wasn't Native Coloradan...) And then I thought about it and felt ashamed and stupid when I realized how I was judging other people.
Since then I've worked with people from all over the world with all kinds of accents. I may struggle to understand sometimes, but I will make the effort and I've pushed back on a lot of comments from other Americans about "thick accents" since then.
Gonna share this around. Everybody needs to read it.
posted by jzb at 12:09 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
I really thought I had mostly killed off my Southern accent, until I had a child and he constantly asked his mother "Why does Daddy talk funny?" Friends, my wife speaks English as a third language. I don't know how to put a number on how pervasive my Southern accent is, but if a child, with no malice, looks at a person from Transylvania and asks why my English sounds funny, I'm gonna guess it isn't zero.
It has now become a game to my kid, who is older now, to identify the words that exist as dead giveaways to where I come from, scattered amongst the rest of my otherwise inconspicuous, carefully Midwestern speech: isn't/wasn't=idden, dudden; pen=pin; write=rot; oil=ole.
He's particularly interested of late in my mother's accent, which has so many Appalachian flourishes my European wife wishes she came with subtitles. She warshes clothes. Things do not get ruined, they get rurnt. Sweaty after mowing the lawn? Getchee shire.
I have started to cherish and appreciate these bits of accent that will not die.
Also, it has delighted me to realize that while people may form certain preconceptions based on a Southern accent, they are only more delighted when they hear you drawl, "Okay, that is racist as fuck, y'all" or "Terry's pronouns're they n' them."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:10 PM on September 11, 2023 [71 favorites]
It has now become a game to my kid, who is older now, to identify the words that exist as dead giveaways to where I come from, scattered amongst the rest of my otherwise inconspicuous, carefully Midwestern speech: isn't/wasn't=idden, dudden; pen=pin; write=rot; oil=ole.
He's particularly interested of late in my mother's accent, which has so many Appalachian flourishes my European wife wishes she came with subtitles. She warshes clothes. Things do not get ruined, they get rurnt. Sweaty after mowing the lawn? Getchee shire.
I have started to cherish and appreciate these bits of accent that will not die.
Also, it has delighted me to realize that while people may form certain preconceptions based on a Southern accent, they are only more delighted when they hear you drawl, "Okay, that is racist as fuck, y'all" or "Terry's pronouns're they n' them."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:10 PM on September 11, 2023 [71 favorites]
A Southern man tells better jokes
There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
I grew up in an unusual circumstance. My maternal grandparents were from rural Tennessee and definitely had lifelong accents, but because my grandfather worked for GE he was transferred to Massachusetts for many years so my mom and uncle both grew up and went to college in New England and neither of them have even a trace of a drawl.
I grew up on the east coast of Florida, which is very much not "the south", so my sister and I didn't develop one either. Then mom moved to Tallahassee (which might as well be southern Georgia for all practical purposes), and my younger sister went to high school there. She felt like she had to develop a southern accent just to fit in, and has kept it ever since.
As an adult I moved to western North Carolina. My best friend there was a native (born in Boone NC) with a pronounced accent. I got into a bit of a habit of putting on a southern accent for certain things, but it was voluntary and I could use it or drop it at will, mostly for humorous effect.
Now I live in the Pacific Northwest, and have wryly observed that when I lived in the south people often commented, "Y'ain't from around here, are ya?"; yet now that I live elsewhere multiple people have said to me "You're from the south, aren't you?"
Ya cain't win.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:14 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
I grew up in an unusual circumstance. My maternal grandparents were from rural Tennessee and definitely had lifelong accents, but because my grandfather worked for GE he was transferred to Massachusetts for many years so my mom and uncle both grew up and went to college in New England and neither of them have even a trace of a drawl.
I grew up on the east coast of Florida, which is very much not "the south", so my sister and I didn't develop one either. Then mom moved to Tallahassee (which might as well be southern Georgia for all practical purposes), and my younger sister went to high school there. She felt like she had to develop a southern accent just to fit in, and has kept it ever since.
As an adult I moved to western North Carolina. My best friend there was a native (born in Boone NC) with a pronounced accent. I got into a bit of a habit of putting on a southern accent for certain things, but it was voluntary and I could use it or drop it at will, mostly for humorous effect.
Now I live in the Pacific Northwest, and have wryly observed that when I lived in the south people often commented, "Y'ain't from around here, are ya?"; yet now that I live elsewhere multiple people have said to me "You're from the south, aren't you?"
Ya cain't win.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:14 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
As a native Southerner, being from the South is longest love/hate relationship of my life. My dad's side of the family is pure country--descendants of North Florida sharecroppers--and that came with all the bullshit attendant with that: backasswards beliefs, casual racism, Church of Christ services (if you think Baptists are no fun, CoC says "hold my grape juice"*). But I didn't live with my dad except for Shared Custody Summers. I lived with my mom (a Mexican woman from central Texas) and my stepdad (a Midwesterner) throughout the South as a child: Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina. We lived briefly in Denver when I was 8 and it was so different and I remember loving it.
But I got tired of the jokes. The fun poked at where I was from. So I invested time in getting rid of any trace of an accent. I joined in the jokes. I made fun. Oh boy, did I.
At 46, I have lived in Canada for nearly 15 years. All of my family still lives in the South. When I visit, I sound weird to them (one of my maternal aunts told my mom, "Rissa's accent is so strange"), and when I am here, I still have a lilt I can't always hear to Canadians. I am like the author in that I am tired of policing my voice, the cadence of my words, the drawl that can occasionally creep in. But I can't really get it back. I can't remember what young Kitteh used to sound like. I can only do an approximation of it. Any Southern accent I might have now is a ghost of one.
*Church of Christ are teetotallers
posted by Kitteh at 12:15 PM on September 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
But I got tired of the jokes. The fun poked at where I was from. So I invested time in getting rid of any trace of an accent. I joined in the jokes. I made fun. Oh boy, did I.
At 46, I have lived in Canada for nearly 15 years. All of my family still lives in the South. When I visit, I sound weird to them (one of my maternal aunts told my mom, "Rissa's accent is so strange"), and when I am here, I still have a lilt I can't always hear to Canadians. I am like the author in that I am tired of policing my voice, the cadence of my words, the drawl that can occasionally creep in. But I can't really get it back. I can't remember what young Kitteh used to sound like. I can only do an approximation of it. Any Southern accent I might have now is a ghost of one.
*Church of Christ are teetotallers
posted by Kitteh at 12:15 PM on September 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
In principle, we could make "y'all" the formal form of "you", like all European languages do, so then it'd become improper to say "you" when addressing a person you know poorly.
Instead, we should make "y'all" merely the official plural for of "you", and advocate for the formal "you" words to be downgraded to merely a plural "you" in other languages. We're forced to encode the plural v formal anyways, ala "vous êtes arrivé" vs "vous êtes arrivés", which becomes silly.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:16 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
Instead, we should make "y'all" merely the official plural for of "you", and advocate for the formal "you" words to be downgraded to merely a plural "you" in other languages. We're forced to encode the plural v formal anyways, ala "vous êtes arrivé" vs "vous êtes arrivés", which becomes silly.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:16 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
When I was little, my own mother would laugh at me for saying "fahnger" for finger. (She spent time up north when she was little.)
DirtyOldTown: one of the things I regret doing as a child was correcting my Mamaw for saying "warsh" or "dinner" for lunch. She held firm. I hope I didn't hurt her feelings.
There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
Why were the Three Wise Men covered in soot and ashes? Because they come from afar! ... Okay, yes, you have to hear me tell it, or someone else from one of several rhotic regions of the South.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [23 favorites]
DirtyOldTown: one of the things I regret doing as a child was correcting my Mamaw for saying "warsh" or "dinner" for lunch. She held firm. I hope I didn't hurt her feelings.
There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
Why were the Three Wise Men covered in soot and ashes? Because they come from afar! ... Okay, yes, you have to hear me tell it, or someone else from one of several rhotic regions of the South.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [23 favorites]
I deliberately shaved the edges off my southern accent when i started working in tech out of college; it was clear it would be a blocker. I don't regret it, because I've never identified with the South that much.
But I've brought back y'all with a vengeance in the past 5 years. It's gender-neutral and solves a major english 3rd person plural ambiguity in English. Cue the arm wrestler meme where Corporate America locks arms with a classic Southern colloquialism.
posted by carlodio at 12:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
But I've brought back y'all with a vengeance in the past 5 years. It's gender-neutral and solves a major english 3rd person plural ambiguity in English. Cue the arm wrestler meme where Corporate America locks arms with a classic Southern colloquialism.
posted by carlodio at 12:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
I was born in NYC and grew up in NJ but never really had an accent (really! people in the NYC/NJ area comment on my lack of obvious regional accent)
but I went to summer camp in NC as a tween, (near Ashville) and I COULD NOT understand the local people!!! and they dared to say I had an accent???
my innate NY snobbishness was not helped by enough of the local kids being flagrantly racist in a way we just didn't do up north. (not that northerners are not racist but I knew very well by age 11 that you might think it but you don't say it. those kids were n-word this n-word that.)
that said, I know perfectly well that no accent informs intelligence or socio-political perspective. I strive to avoid judgement.
posted by supermedusa at 12:19 PM on September 11, 2023
but I went to summer camp in NC as a tween, (near Ashville) and I COULD NOT understand the local people!!! and they dared to say I had an accent???
my innate NY snobbishness was not helped by enough of the local kids being flagrantly racist in a way we just didn't do up north. (not that northerners are not racist but I knew very well by age 11 that you might think it but you don't say it. those kids were n-word this n-word that.)
that said, I know perfectly well that no accent informs intelligence or socio-political perspective. I strive to avoid judgement.
posted by supermedusa at 12:19 PM on September 11, 2023
I grew up in, and once again live in, a place with a very strong regional accent. It's an unappealing accent. Nobody is writing about how sad they are about their lost Long Island accent.
I never really developed it because I was raised largely by television and my midwestern grandmother, whose accent was as flat as the Nebraska plains of her youth. I can turn on bits and pieces of it when I want to, which is mostly when I'm trying to butch it up a little bit, but it's acting. It never feels natural to me and I wonder if I'm fooling anybody.
I work sometimes as a voice actor, and most of the narration I do wants that perfectly flat newscaster accent I practiced in my youth. But commercials are a different beast, and I find myself softening my Rs and loosening my speech in order to sound, ironically, more "real" by putting on a voice I never really had.
My cousins moved, funnily enough, to Manchester, Tennessee when they were 5 and 8 years old. Their mother has a New York accent turned up to 11 and was always disdainful of their "redneck" neighbors, so neither of the kids really developed much local flavor beyond a pretty slight twang and a little extra music in the ups and downs. I spent the summer there a couple of times, though, and the neighbor kids we played with actually were the feral, shoeless children ignorant yankees joke about, complete with accents that would have been practically unintelligible to many northerners.
In any case, I think accents are neat, and I want to know them all.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:21 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
I never really developed it because I was raised largely by television and my midwestern grandmother, whose accent was as flat as the Nebraska plains of her youth. I can turn on bits and pieces of it when I want to, which is mostly when I'm trying to butch it up a little bit, but it's acting. It never feels natural to me and I wonder if I'm fooling anybody.
I work sometimes as a voice actor, and most of the narration I do wants that perfectly flat newscaster accent I practiced in my youth. But commercials are a different beast, and I find myself softening my Rs and loosening my speech in order to sound, ironically, more "real" by putting on a voice I never really had.
My cousins moved, funnily enough, to Manchester, Tennessee when they were 5 and 8 years old. Their mother has a New York accent turned up to 11 and was always disdainful of their "redneck" neighbors, so neither of the kids really developed much local flavor beyond a pretty slight twang and a little extra music in the ups and downs. I spent the summer there a couple of times, though, and the neighbor kids we played with actually were the feral, shoeless children ignorant yankees joke about, complete with accents that would have been practically unintelligible to many northerners.
In any case, I think accents are neat, and I want to know them all.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:21 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
I think accents are neat, and I want to know them all.
Right? It's also important to remember accents are relative. My Eastern European in-laws have no idea what a Southern Accent is. And when my sister-in-law from Western Kentucky met my friend with a thick Brummie accent, she gushed about how "classy" she sounded, which... well, I'm not gonna turn on the kind of same accent bias people use against my family, but uh, that is not how it's generally sorted in the UK.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:26 PM on September 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
Right? It's also important to remember accents are relative. My Eastern European in-laws have no idea what a Southern Accent is. And when my sister-in-law from Western Kentucky met my friend with a thick Brummie accent, she gushed about how "classy" she sounded, which... well, I'm not gonna turn on the kind of same accent bias people use against my family, but uh, that is not how it's generally sorted in the UK.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:26 PM on September 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
I did this but then moved back to TX and now it's much harder to suppress. Or maybe I care less? The boyfriend thinks my accent is cute, who am I to argue. It's not as thick as when I was a tiny child, because I have recordings of tiny me that are adorably twangy.
I never angsted about it like the writer does, or felt that changing it was some kind of betrayal. It's an accent, not my soul.
posted by emjaybee at 12:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I never angsted about it like the writer does, or felt that changing it was some kind of betrayal. It's an accent, not my soul.
posted by emjaybee at 12:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
> There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
I got pulled over the other day.
Patrolman: You got any I.D.?
Me: 'Bout what?
posted by smcdow at 12:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [37 favorites]
I got pulled over the other day.
Patrolman: You got any I.D.?
Me: 'Bout what?
posted by smcdow at 12:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [37 favorites]
Grew up in a small town outside of Orlando that was still very much the South when I grew up there (including a mayor "formerly" of the KKK and them suing to be in the 4th of July Parade).
Family is all from New England, but I grew up with some piece of that weird whippy gulf coast accent (think Tom Petty/Jimmy Buffett). Its Southern, but not Savannah Southern.
When I left Florida and moved to Boston, I did my best to squash my accent, but I'd break it out when I wanted people to think I was stupid. Over the years, parts of it has come back, but now with Northeast speed. So I mumble, talk weird and talk fast. Good times!
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:35 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Family is all from New England, but I grew up with some piece of that weird whippy gulf coast accent (think Tom Petty/Jimmy Buffett). Its Southern, but not Savannah Southern.
When I left Florida and moved to Boston, I did my best to squash my accent, but I'd break it out when I wanted people to think I was stupid. Over the years, parts of it has come back, but now with Northeast speed. So I mumble, talk weird and talk fast. Good times!
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:35 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
My older brother's most impressive Southernism is his personal version of "Beats me" which is based on the words "I don't even know" but is pronounced with a single consonant, like this: "eye-oh-ee-uh-no."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:38 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:38 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
DirtyOldTown: one of the things I regret doing as a child was correcting my Mamaw for saying "warsh" or "dinner" for lunch. She held firm. I hope I didn't hurt her feelings.
My mother shed her accent soon after leaving Tennessee but still always said rurn, one syllable, for ruin, as in, Careful, you'll rurn it. I corrected her when I was very young and now every single time she says it she'll make a point to overemphasize: roo-in. ROO-EEEN. ROOOO-EEEEEEEEEEN.
I feel bad, y'all.
posted by mochapickle at 12:40 PM on September 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
My mother shed her accent soon after leaving Tennessee but still always said rurn, one syllable, for ruin, as in, Careful, you'll rurn it. I corrected her when I was very young and now every single time she says it she'll make a point to overemphasize: roo-in. ROO-EEEN. ROOOO-EEEEEEEEEEN.
I feel bad, y'all.
posted by mochapickle at 12:40 PM on September 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
Growing up on Long Island I never thought I had an accent but coming to Rochester for school changed that. I decided that I would adopt the local accent so people in places not on campus wouldn't look at me funny (yes, it's all New York state but it's big enough to have regional accents). Now I have no trace of the LI accent and sound like a Rochester native. Yet, when I visit family back home it comes back after a day or two.
posted by tommasz at 12:41 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by tommasz at 12:41 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm from West Virginia...but the Northern Panhandle which culturally and accent wise, is closer to Western Pennsylvania/Pittsburgh than "The South" i.e. our "y'all" is "yinz".
Two accent stories: First: as a teenager, our nextdoor neighbors moved to Charleston, WV for the father's job. It is about 3 and half hours south of where I am from. A year later we visited them and the son who was a year younger than me and the daughter who was 2 years later had already picked up extremely thick southern accents while the adults didn't seem to change at all.
Second: I went to college in Dayton, Ohio...roughly three and half hours west of where I grew up. As people were getting to know people on the dorm floor freshmen year there was someone that was from Ohio but was from North of where I was. I forget his hometown but it was somewhere in rural NE Ohio. People marveled at how people were confused because he had the "Southern" accent and I didn't.
posted by mmascolino at 12:45 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Two accent stories: First: as a teenager, our nextdoor neighbors moved to Charleston, WV for the father's job. It is about 3 and half hours south of where I am from. A year later we visited them and the son who was a year younger than me and the daughter who was 2 years later had already picked up extremely thick southern accents while the adults didn't seem to change at all.
Second: I went to college in Dayton, Ohio...roughly three and half hours west of where I grew up. As people were getting to know people on the dorm floor freshmen year there was someone that was from Ohio but was from North of where I was. I forget his hometown but it was somewhere in rural NE Ohio. People marveled at how people were confused because he had the "Southern" accent and I didn't.
posted by mmascolino at 12:45 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
My maternal grandmother was the one who introduced me to public libraries, taught me how to cook and bake, and understood my need to be a solitary kid who liked to play by myself and read. And yet when I was a shitty teenager, I had disdain for her and my grandfather (who shared my love of cats and long walks) precisely because of their Southernness. It was forgetting where I was from. Because while I have absolutely disgusting relatives (we don't talk and that ain't gonna change), I am of them but not them. Often I feel like I am proof that you can be a Southerner and not be a cliche.
Heck, even now, claiming to be a Southerner is something I have only been comfortable saying recently.
posted by Kitteh at 12:46 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Heck, even now, claiming to be a Southerner is something I have only been comfortable saying recently.
posted by Kitteh at 12:46 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I keep meaning to make a FPP about the Celebrating Appalachia YouTube channel, which is low key delightful. That lady sounds just like my mom, who is the outlier in our family, as everyone else has some version of Mid-South accent on a scale between "Jackson Purchase small-towner" to "lives in the 'burbs outside a Southern city," the latter being pretty much where I'm at.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:48 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:48 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
I kept mine. I did not feel shame or any sense that I should until 2016.
2000 for me, and not out of shame. I grew up in Texas and became incredibly tired during the Bush years having to defend or explain myself, despite having voted against him twice and worked for Democrat campaigns, when traveling in the northern US (or, far worse, in Europe where every "enlightened" European felt free to lecture me). You learn to lie about where you're from (or at least evade the question) and suppress the accent because you just don't want to deal with the bullshit, and that's on top of all the "Southern = stupid" stereotyping.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:58 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
2000 for me, and not out of shame. I grew up in Texas and became incredibly tired during the Bush years having to defend or explain myself, despite having voted against him twice and worked for Democrat campaigns, when traveling in the northern US (or, far worse, in Europe where every "enlightened" European felt free to lecture me). You learn to lie about where you're from (or at least evade the question) and suppress the accent because you just don't want to deal with the bullshit, and that's on top of all the "Southern = stupid" stereotyping.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:58 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
^ THIS ^
It is exhausting having to explain that Southerners are not a monolith. But it rarely matters. We will always be a monolith, no matter how diverse and amazing and weird the South really is.
posted by Kitteh at 1:03 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
It is exhausting having to explain that Southerners are not a monolith. But it rarely matters. We will always be a monolith, no matter how diverse and amazing and weird the South really is.
posted by Kitteh at 1:03 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
Who was it that said a southern accent makes everyone else discount your IQ by 20 points, and the opposite with a British accent?
I think that the accent is part of Knives Out's Benoit Blanc's arsenal, to make suspects discount his intelligence.
posted by Ber at 1:07 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
I think that the accent is part of Knives Out's Benoit Blanc's arsenal, to make suspects discount his intelligence.
posted by Ber at 1:07 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
When I moved to Texas, I got a bunch of “Are you from Canada?” to which I would reply “Oh, no, that’s Minnesota you’re hearing.” One person got really mad that I gave them a Canadian nickel. “We don’t take foreign currency.” “It’s barely foreign in MN.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:09 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:09 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
My New England-raised parents moved with me and my sister to Raleigh NC when I was five -- my sister was a baby.
I started picking up a Southern accent from school. My parents made fun of me for it, and would turn me into a sort of circus performer for them and their friends ("oh, won't you talk like you do in school, humbug?"). So yeah, I learned dialect code-switching young. I bade mostly-farewell to my Southern during college (Indiana) and grad school (Wisconsin). Today I sound fairly bog-standard Midwest most of the time, though when I take one of those where's-your-dialect tests some of my vocabulary reveals where I grew up.
I'm a bit strategic about Southernisms in my speech, especially in the classroom. I use "y'all" pretty liberally (because it's useful!), and not-uncommonly use my remaining drawl as a form of emphasis.
I'm just gonna point out, though, that there's a heaping helping of anti-Black racism in a lot of white disdain for Southern accents. Various (there ARE various) dialects of African-American Vernacular English share some fairly noticeable features with various (there ARE various) Southern accents.
posted by humbug at 1:09 PM on September 11, 2023 [16 favorites]
I started picking up a Southern accent from school. My parents made fun of me for it, and would turn me into a sort of circus performer for them and their friends ("oh, won't you talk like you do in school, humbug?"). So yeah, I learned dialect code-switching young. I bade mostly-farewell to my Southern during college (Indiana) and grad school (Wisconsin). Today I sound fairly bog-standard Midwest most of the time, though when I take one of those where's-your-dialect tests some of my vocabulary reveals where I grew up.
I'm a bit strategic about Southernisms in my speech, especially in the classroom. I use "y'all" pretty liberally (because it's useful!), and not-uncommonly use my remaining drawl as a form of emphasis.
I'm just gonna point out, though, that there's a heaping helping of anti-Black racism in a lot of white disdain for Southern accents. Various (there ARE various) dialects of African-American Vernacular English share some fairly noticeable features with various (there ARE various) Southern accents.
posted by humbug at 1:09 PM on September 11, 2023 [16 favorites]
Even if you've moved away from the South and tried to minimize your accent, the following factors will impact how strong your accent sounds in a given moment:
- Have you been drinking?
- Have you spoken to your mama and/or daddy in the last 48 hours?
- Are you now, or were you, immediately prior to this, calling bullshit on someone?
- Are you currently in the process of trying to flirt?
- Were you just now listening to country or Americana music?
DOT, the use of "fixin" came into strong play last week when I found out my sister's employer was being a dick. "I am fixin' come out there and burn that damn place to ground" "it's fixin to make me real damn mad right now."
posted by Kitteh at 1:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 1:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
We moved from England to Texas when I was 9 and my brother was 6.
I say, "I don't know."
He says, "Ahh-o-nohh," all together in one glorious glissando.
Amazing the difference our ages of arrival made to the degree to which we absorbed the flat East Texas drawl.
posted by bassomatic at 1:28 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
I say, "I don't know."
He says, "Ahh-o-nohh," all together in one glorious glissando.
Amazing the difference our ages of arrival made to the degree to which we absorbed the flat East Texas drawl.
posted by bassomatic at 1:28 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Patrolman: You got any I.D.?
Me: 'Bout what?
Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes?
No eye-deer.
Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes and no legs?
Still no eye-deer.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Me: 'Bout what?
Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes?
No eye-deer.
Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes and no legs?
Still no eye-deer.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
rurn, one syllable, for ruin
I knew a southern gal who said arster for oyster, which is pretty common. It came up in conversation one time (since I pronounce oyster as it's spelled), and she literally could not pronounce it that way. When she tried she used exaggerated mouth movements and it ended up being 3 syllables - oh-ee-ster.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:33 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I knew a southern gal who said arster for oyster, which is pretty common. It came up in conversation one time (since I pronounce oyster as it's spelled), and she literally could not pronounce it that way. When she tried she used exaggerated mouth movements and it ended up being 3 syllables - oh-ee-ster.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:33 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
"Bless your heart" not only sounds different, it means something different when spoken in Alabama vs. Massachusetts.
posted by COD at 1:37 PM on September 11, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by COD at 1:37 PM on September 11, 2023 [9 favorites]
she literally could not pronounce it that way. When she tried she used exaggerated mouth movements
When describing a writing implement that uses ink, I have to, like, press on my temples or close my eyes and concentrate to say "pen" instead of "pin" or "pee-yun." It is legit difficult to do.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:39 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
When describing a writing implement that uses ink, I have to, like, press on my temples or close my eyes and concentrate to say "pen" instead of "pin" or "pee-yun." It is legit difficult to do.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:39 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
"Bless your heart" not only sounds different, it means something different when spoken in Alabama vs. Massachusetts.
Damn straight!
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:40 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Damn straight!
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:40 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
May I recommend: "Bless My Heart" by Angaleena Presley.
You're a beauty mark on the human raceposted by DirtyOldTown at 1:43 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
And if you bless my heart, I'll slap your face
"Bless your heart" = you poor idiot
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
posted by Kitteh at 1:46 PM on September 11, 2023 [19 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
posted by Kitteh at 1:46 PM on September 11, 2023 [19 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = you poor idiot
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
Interestingly, if you're from another place and generation, "Dude" works in every quoted example.
It's all in the delivery.
posted by The Bellman at 1:57 PM on September 11, 2023 [28 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
Interestingly, if you're from another place and generation, "Dude" works in every quoted example.
It's all in the delivery.
posted by The Bellman at 1:57 PM on September 11, 2023 [28 favorites]
Funny, I eradicated my Boston-area accent for similar reasons. But I have never gotten the letter "r" quite right.
posted by rednikki at 2:02 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by rednikki at 2:02 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
DOT, the use of "fixin" came into strong play last week when I found out my sister's employer was being a dick. "I am fixin' come out there and burn that damn place to ground" "it's fixin to make me real damn mad right now."It took me a while to figure out that this is where the African-American slang "finna" comes from.
posted by whuppy at 2:02 PM on September 11, 2023 [11 favorites]
One person got really mad that I gave them a Canadian nickel. “We don’t take foreign currency.”
I was working box office at a summer stock theater in Iowa where the actors (who had to put in time selling tickets) came from all over the US and one actor got very upset and had to call the manager over due to a customer paying with a Canadian quarter. They didn't believe me that it was fine.
As far as southern accents: hopefully not a derail, but has country music leaned into very cartoony, artificial southern accents, or is it just me? I mean, I'm sure people sound like that sometimes but it feels like musicians are really putting it on thick these days.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:05 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I was working box office at a summer stock theater in Iowa where the actors (who had to put in time selling tickets) came from all over the US and one actor got very upset and had to call the manager over due to a customer paying with a Canadian quarter. They didn't believe me that it was fine.
As far as southern accents: hopefully not a derail, but has country music leaned into very cartoony, artificial southern accents, or is it just me? I mean, I'm sure people sound like that sometimes but it feels like musicians are really putting it on thick these days.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:05 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Found out about my Southern accent on a phone call to my Grandparents in East Tennessee when I was in my early 20s and in the Military. I was stationed in Memphis and was going there for the Christmas break.
Any way, on the phone it surprised me how my voice shifted over the call/conversation back to the patterns of my youth to match their voices.
posted by aleph at 2:11 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Any way, on the phone it surprised me how my voice shifted over the call/conversation back to the patterns of my youth to match their voices.
posted by aleph at 2:11 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = you poor idiot
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
Yup. Folks who joke about "Bless Your Heart" being code for "Eff You" are way oversimplifying it. Our words have more nuance to them.
Basically: that's what you think "bless your heart" means? Well bless your heart!
posted by pianoblack at 2:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
Yup. Folks who joke about "Bless Your Heart" being code for "Eff You" are way oversimplifying it. Our words have more nuance to them.
Basically: that's what you think "bless your heart" means? Well bless your heart!
posted by pianoblack at 2:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
I grew up in the south, so with a southern accent more or less, but my parents grew up in the midwest, so theirs was much more flat. So at home I wasn't getting a lot of reinforcement with the southern accent, only outside the home. But by the time I was graduating high school, I had more or less lost my southern accent, and perhaps ironically, after so many decades in the south their accents are much more southern.
I don't think it was embarrassment that caused me to lose it, not really. From a young age I've always been obsessed with movies and tv, and I watched a lot of it as a kid. I think that's why/how I have a flat accent now: the sheer volume of input gave me plenty of models to copy from, even if done unconsciously.
I don't miss my southern accent, though. It's more of a curiosity that it's gone, but it's kind of obnoxious when I'm told--yet again--"You're from the south? But you don't have a southern accent!" If I had a nickel, etc etc. My niece is in high school in my hometown and she has a completely flat, midwestern accent and told me her friends are largely the same, so I think the accent is at least shrinking in number of speakers.
(I will never stop saying "y'all" because it's a very useful word; English lacks a 2nd person plural pronoun, so "y'all" is objectively better than just "you," which is imprecise.)
posted by zardoz at 2:19 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
I don't think it was embarrassment that caused me to lose it, not really. From a young age I've always been obsessed with movies and tv, and I watched a lot of it as a kid. I think that's why/how I have a flat accent now: the sheer volume of input gave me plenty of models to copy from, even if done unconsciously.
I don't miss my southern accent, though. It's more of a curiosity that it's gone, but it's kind of obnoxious when I'm told--yet again--"You're from the south? But you don't have a southern accent!" If I had a nickel, etc etc. My niece is in high school in my hometown and she has a completely flat, midwestern accent and told me her friends are largely the same, so I think the accent is at least shrinking in number of speakers.
(I will never stop saying "y'all" because it's a very useful word; English lacks a 2nd person plural pronoun, so "y'all" is objectively better than just "you," which is imprecise.)
posted by zardoz at 2:19 PM on September 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
Shit you not. Like freshman or sophomore year of high school some substitute teacher grilled me for like five minute about where I was from or where my family was from and didn't know that I had been born and grown up there.... Because I sounded like a damn Yankee. I blame this on learning from Hooked on Phonics and/or watching a lot of Public television... I never really picked up my south end of the Appalachian mountains South speak. I'm more like William F. Buckley or McNeil Lehrer news hour. Ended up moving to California for a while and then back and forth across the U.S. for a while... Accent now is weird a bit. I've had roommates tell me that an answering machine message must be for me because they can't fucking understand a single word. Takes me a couple of tries, go home and have to ask people to repeat themselves and fight the urge to tell them "that's not the word you think it is....", come back and spend a week with nobody understanding me. My whole family sounds weird and has since childhood. I can slip in and out, seems to just piss people off like I'm mocking or something.
Yep, some southern jokes are just funnier if you do them right.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:23 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Yep, some southern jokes are just funnier if you do them right.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:23 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I had to shed my thick cracker accent when I joined the Air Force - I was training to be a linguist and, well, Arabic simply cannot be spoken intelligibly in cracker.
Now, I'm an unintentional accent chameleon. If I don't pay careful attention, my accent will shift into a mimicry of the folks I'm speaking with. Which is sometimes funny, but I worry about people thinking I am mocking them, so I sometimes warn folks (especially if I won't be sober the whole time - it's much worse when I'm high).
But no matter what accents are around me, get me taking about where I grew up and that old cracker accent just trickles in.
I have noted that I am often treated differently depending on which accent I lead with. People not from the South treat me better when i use a more neutral American accent, and southern folks like me more when I drawl, on the averages. I can't blame anybody for being as careful with accents as with any other part of one's demeanor, especially in professional settings.
posted by Vigilant at 2:24 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
Now, I'm an unintentional accent chameleon. If I don't pay careful attention, my accent will shift into a mimicry of the folks I'm speaking with. Which is sometimes funny, but I worry about people thinking I am mocking them, so I sometimes warn folks (especially if I won't be sober the whole time - it's much worse when I'm high).
But no matter what accents are around me, get me taking about where I grew up and that old cracker accent just trickles in.
I have noted that I am often treated differently depending on which accent I lead with. People not from the South treat me better when i use a more neutral American accent, and southern folks like me more when I drawl, on the averages. I can't blame anybody for being as careful with accents as with any other part of one's demeanor, especially in professional settings.
posted by Vigilant at 2:24 PM on September 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
I still have a half-southern accent, but I've never been into southern-isms, like 'bless your heart' or if you want a full repertoire, go watch the Netflix show "Sweet Magnolias" where everyone speaks in southern-isms. It's like a form of poetry.
So mine is southern mixed with mid-western. After 20 years of working with English speakers from around the entire world, a southern accent is neither difficult to understand nor particularly unique.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:27 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
So mine is southern mixed with mid-western. After 20 years of working with English speakers from around the entire world, a southern accent is neither difficult to understand nor particularly unique.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:27 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I heard an interview of Paul Winfield, who was the first actor to play Martin Luther King on TV in King in 1978, and is beloved of Star Trek fans for his role of Dathon in the "Darmok" episode, in which he talked about being invited to a small private meeting in LA of prominent members of the local Black community with a young, relatively unknown preacher on a national tour in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, and being singularly unimpressed by MLK because of his Southern accent.
posted by jamjam at 2:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by jamjam at 2:30 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
—-
(I will never stop saying "y'all" because it's a very useful word; English lacks a 2nd person plural pronoun, so "y'all" is objectively better than just "you," which is imprecise.)
I was not long ago talking with a friend about the lack of clear distinction in English between the singular and plural “you.” My friend was born and raised in Birmingham AL, and informed me that this is exactly what “y’all” is for. I thanked him but begged off its use: it sounds fine in his accent but comically out of place, if not patronizing, in my southern Ontario one.
Incidentally, he is a part of an online (originally tabletop) RPG I run. When he first arrived, only I and one of the other players had ever spoken with him before; his character is sort of an easygoing laid-back smooth operator type, and I think my players — all Canadians — initially may have thought the accent was affected as part of the character. No, that’s just him.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:34 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
—-
(I will never stop saying "y'all" because it's a very useful word; English lacks a 2nd person plural pronoun, so "y'all" is objectively better than just "you," which is imprecise.)
I was not long ago talking with a friend about the lack of clear distinction in English between the singular and plural “you.” My friend was born and raised in Birmingham AL, and informed me that this is exactly what “y’all” is for. I thanked him but begged off its use: it sounds fine in his accent but comically out of place, if not patronizing, in my southern Ontario one.
Incidentally, he is a part of an online (originally tabletop) RPG I run. When he first arrived, only I and one of the other players had ever spoken with him before; his character is sort of an easygoing laid-back smooth operator type, and I think my players — all Canadians — initially may have thought the accent was affected as part of the character. No, that’s just him.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:34 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Don't get started on the difference between "y'all" and "all y'all".
posted by zengargoyle at 2:37 PM on September 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
posted by zengargoyle at 2:37 PM on September 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
I can relate. I grew up in small-town North Carolina but moved to Canada in my teens. I wanted more than anything to not stand out so I worked to neutralize my accent.
I've got zero intention of moving back down south, but I'd love to have my accent back
posted by thecjm at 2:41 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've got zero intention of moving back down south, but I'd love to have my accent back
posted by thecjm at 2:41 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I left my sojourn in Texas with y’all sort of jammed in my brain, but before fixin’ worked it’s way in there. Although a colleague who worked in North Texas related helping a student with some research and asked her if she needed anything else, and the student replied “No, ma’am, I’m just fixin’ to write me a paper up,” which, you must admit, totes adorbs.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:43 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:43 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
I was born in East Tennessee, but moved to Ohio as a teen when my mom remarried. She got a job at a linens and housewares place, and was amused that when she wanted to get rid of a rich lady who needed to tell mom all about their redecorating scheme, she'd just let her southern accent creep into her voice so that the tedious person would assume she was too stupid to get their decorating genius and would go bother somebody else. I mostly dropped my accent at this time because I tend to begin speaking like people I'm around without really thinking about it, but it would come roaring back when I went to visit relatives in the summer. But one friend poked fun because I still pronounced days of the week with -dee instead of -day.
And speaking of y'all, when we're watching Jeopardy! and the contestants miss a clue that Dr. indexy feels should be basic to one's cultural literacy, she'll yell "Y'all!" at the television.
posted by indexy at 2:46 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
And speaking of y'all, when we're watching Jeopardy! and the contestants miss a clue that Dr. indexy feels should be basic to one's cultural literacy, she'll yell "Y'all!" at the television.
posted by indexy at 2:46 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City. I bet I pronounce that differently than most of you. See also: Missouri.
But I am also sort of a mimic. So when I went back to Tennessee where the company that had bought our company was located, after a few days. it was hard to not start copying their accents. And Tennessee has it's own accent. Southern, but different. I love accents! So fun. Accents seem to be pretty racist these days, but, so fun. I really enjoy trying to do Indian-English accents, but some folks think it is racist. They do English so much more interestingly than we do...
posted by Windopaene at 3:23 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
But I am also sort of a mimic. So when I went back to Tennessee where the company that had bought our company was located, after a few days. it was hard to not start copying their accents. And Tennessee has it's own accent. Southern, but different. I love accents! So fun. Accents seem to be pretty racist these days, but, so fun. I really enjoy trying to do Indian-English accents, but some folks think it is racist. They do English so much more interestingly than we do...
posted by Windopaene at 3:23 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I had to shed my thick cracker accent when I joined the Air Force - I was training to be a linguist and, well, Arabic simply cannot be spoken intelligibly in cracker.
Hahaha you are entirely wrong, my sibling in Christ. I speak classical Arabic quite fluently, as in, can crack jokes in it, and every year at a conference I meet up with a colleague, also a non-native speaker, and we immediately launch in to catching up with thick phony Southern accents in Arabic. The native speakers at the conference are baffled, though they can understand us, unless they live in the South, in which case they fall over laughing.
I'm from Michigan but have lived in the South for 30 years, and my wife was born and raised in country Georgia. She sounds like a TV newscaster unless she's had more than two drinks, in which case that country comes OUT. My friends who still live in Michigan say I sound very southern now, not by accent but by diction: I love "might could" and "fixin' to". My very elderly and infirm mother moved down here to Atlanta from Michigan earlier this year so she could live in our building and I could keep an eye on her, and everyone in the building looooves her cartoony Fargo Michigan accent.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:44 PM on September 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
Hahaha you are entirely wrong, my sibling in Christ. I speak classical Arabic quite fluently, as in, can crack jokes in it, and every year at a conference I meet up with a colleague, also a non-native speaker, and we immediately launch in to catching up with thick phony Southern accents in Arabic. The native speakers at the conference are baffled, though they can understand us, unless they live in the South, in which case they fall over laughing.
I'm from Michigan but have lived in the South for 30 years, and my wife was born and raised in country Georgia. She sounds like a TV newscaster unless she's had more than two drinks, in which case that country comes OUT. My friends who still live in Michigan say I sound very southern now, not by accent but by diction: I love "might could" and "fixin' to". My very elderly and infirm mother moved down here to Atlanta from Michigan earlier this year so she could live in our building and I could keep an eye on her, and everyone in the building looooves her cartoony Fargo Michigan accent.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:44 PM on September 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
My grandpa was from Tennessee and my grandma from Texas, both with the chewiest of accents, but my mom and her siblings were all born and brought up in the Middle East on account of grandpa's job. My mom didn't really learn English until she was about five, and they went to international schools and played with local kids, so they ended up with kind of vaguely transatlantic accents. When they moved back to Texas when my mom was about twelve, their accents were Extremely Well Received by their somewhat aspirational school. My mom's teacher once stopped my grandma outside the classroom and gushed, "Oh, Mrs Brown, your children are so beautifully spoken, you must set them such a wonderful example!" To which my slightly baffled grandma replied, "Well, thaink yew, honey, Ah trah."
"Ah trah" is still what my family all say to a slightly suspect or confusing compliment.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:47 PM on September 11, 2023 [12 favorites]
"Ah trah" is still what my family all say to a slightly suspect or confusing compliment.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:47 PM on September 11, 2023 [12 favorites]
I trained away my accent after I did a play and everyone said how adorable it was that a Cajun was trying to be an actor.
But I shuddered when she says she trained herself on the Gilmore Girls. I couldn't get into that show because of their speech patterns.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
But I shuddered when she says she trained herself on the Gilmore Girls. I couldn't get into that show because of their speech patterns.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:17 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
on account of grandpa's job
I can't not hear that in a southern accent.
Customer: "Can you put that on account - on account'a I ain't got no money?"
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:21 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
I can't not hear that in a southern accent.
Customer: "Can you put that on account - on account'a I ain't got no money?"
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:21 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
(I will never stop saying "y'all" because it's a very useful word; English lacks a 2nd person plural pronoun, so "y'all" is objectively better than just "you," which is imprecise.)
I remember having to make an effort to use "you" in its proper plural form, since growing up in Newfoundland I was more likely to use "ye" (pronounced yee) or more likely, "alla ye." And these days I'll sometimes notice myself saying "y'all" since it's a perfectly cromulent way of expressing the same thing.
And I've now been out west for almost four decades and fortunately it's been a long while since someone's said to me, "You're from Newfoundland? But you don't SOUND like a Newfie!" and them meaning it as a compliment. Which is one reason I dislike the term, since "Newfies" (rhymes with goofy! Goofy Newfie! HA!) are assumed to be simple and ignorant, with our quaint barely-intelligible manner of speech. What fun. My sympathies, y'all.
posted by hangashore at 4:37 PM on September 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
I remember having to make an effort to use "you" in its proper plural form, since growing up in Newfoundland I was more likely to use "ye" (pronounced yee) or more likely, "alla ye." And these days I'll sometimes notice myself saying "y'all" since it's a perfectly cromulent way of expressing the same thing.
And I've now been out west for almost four decades and fortunately it's been a long while since someone's said to me, "You're from Newfoundland? But you don't SOUND like a Newfie!" and them meaning it as a compliment. Which is one reason I dislike the term, since "Newfies" (rhymes with goofy! Goofy Newfie! HA!) are assumed to be simple and ignorant, with our quaint barely-intelligible manner of speech. What fun. My sympathies, y'all.
posted by hangashore at 4:37 PM on September 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
I can't not hear that in a southern accent.
It's funny, I grew up mostly in England and my default accent is Generic Southern English, but I spent a lot of time in Texas and around my Texan family as a kid, and I'm kind of...bilingual? Like, it's not so much that I can do a Texas accent as that I have two accents and can switch back and forth if I feel like it, and it happens unconsciously if I'm around people with that accent. Even at my most English, I do have some Southern inflections and verbal mannerisms. My very English English does have the faintest Southern flavour, and I think this thread brought it out!
posted by BlueNorther at 4:42 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's funny, I grew up mostly in England and my default accent is Generic Southern English, but I spent a lot of time in Texas and around my Texan family as a kid, and I'm kind of...bilingual? Like, it's not so much that I can do a Texas accent as that I have two accents and can switch back and forth if I feel like it, and it happens unconsciously if I'm around people with that accent. Even at my most English, I do have some Southern inflections and verbal mannerisms. My very English English does have the faintest Southern flavour, and I think this thread brought it out!
posted by BlueNorther at 4:42 PM on September 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
That sounds hilarious, outgrown_hobnail. Reckon it's just me then - when in cracker mode, I can't make the distinctions between the s sounds or d sounds properly. I do do a whole bit, when talking about this in person, where I do some Arabic in the cracker accent, and it generally meets with much laughter.
posted by Vigilant at 4:47 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Vigilant at 4:47 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I am on team y'all as well. Very useful.
posted by Windopaene at 4:58 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Windopaene at 4:58 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
My Texas accent has never been particularly strong, and it's almost completely gone now since I've lived the last twenty-something years in NY and DC after getting out of high school, but I still say "y'all" (a word with no comfortable, acceptable replacement in my mind) and when I'm talking to my family, it comes back in force.
One of the many things I love about Justified is how many intimidatingly smart characters in it proudly sport thick southern drawls. I hope that's made a dent of some sort in this stereotype.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:03 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
One of the many things I love about Justified is how many intimidatingly smart characters in it proudly sport thick southern drawls. I hope that's made a dent of some sort in this stereotype.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:03 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
A tech company I worked for had a campus in the South and my experience was that the thicker the accent the more formidable the engineer.
And of course saying "Southern Accent" is like saying "English Accent". It covers a lot of ground. It's really the Hillbilly and Redneck variants that trigger my prejudice.
There's a fellow who is functionally mute (throat cancer I think) who is a regular patron at my work. I was helping him the other day and we got interrupted by one of my coworkers who speaks harsh Brooklynese. After she left I looked at him and said "Sorry man, better not to speak than to have a Brooklyn accent". He looked at me sympathetically and wrote "I have a deep Southern accent." I am looking forward to hearing it one day if possible.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:12 PM on September 11, 2023 [10 favorites]
And of course saying "Southern Accent" is like saying "English Accent". It covers a lot of ground. It's really the Hillbilly and Redneck variants that trigger my prejudice.
There's a fellow who is functionally mute (throat cancer I think) who is a regular patron at my work. I was helping him the other day and we got interrupted by one of my coworkers who speaks harsh Brooklynese. After she left I looked at him and said "Sorry man, better not to speak than to have a Brooklyn accent". He looked at me sympathetically and wrote "I have a deep Southern accent." I am looking forward to hearing it one day if possible.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:12 PM on September 11, 2023 [10 favorites]
If you have the accent, and should someone ever bring up the Monty Python Summarize Proust bit, quote Andy Griffith from the old Ritz crackers commercials: "Mmmmm, good cracker!"
posted by indexy at 5:15 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by indexy at 5:15 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
As a graduate of UT-Austin, I have to have an Aggie (graduate of Texas A&M) joke. My favorite:
An Aggie goes up north to visit a friend, who takes him to a mixer full of Ivy Leaguers. He feels a little out of place, but he’s a friendly guy, so he goes up to a group of women and says “Where’d you ladies go to school at?” One of them rolls her eyes and says “Yale.” He shrugs and repeats “OK, WHERE’D YOU LADIES GO TO SCHOOL AT!?!”
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:18 PM on September 11, 2023 [34 favorites]
An Aggie goes up north to visit a friend, who takes him to a mixer full of Ivy Leaguers. He feels a little out of place, but he’s a friendly guy, so he goes up to a group of women and says “Where’d you ladies go to school at?” One of them rolls her eyes and says “Yale.” He shrugs and repeats “OK, WHERE’D YOU LADIES GO TO SCHOOL AT!?!”
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:18 PM on September 11, 2023 [34 favorites]
I noticed in my twenties that I tended to unintentionally pick up and use whatever accent was being used in conversation in front of me in the moment. I was raised in Iowa, and of course to my own ears, that is unaccented. A few years back, I was traveling in the UK on business for a couple of weeks, and I was making a concerted effort to NOT mimic the accents I was hearing. I stopped at a Tesco to pick up some toiletries, and I returned the cashiers greeting as I was checking out. She asked where I was from, because I had "...such a lurvely accent!"
Between my time in the U.S. Army and my time in Oklahoma (decades, now). I find it comfortable to use a southern accent in general conversation. I tend to drop it or dial it back if the topic is highly technical.
Funnily enough, both Russian and Japanese can be spoken with a west Texas accent.
posted by coppertop at 5:32 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Between my time in the U.S. Army and my time in Oklahoma (decades, now). I find it comfortable to use a southern accent in general conversation. I tend to drop it or dial it back if the topic is highly technical.
Funnily enough, both Russian and Japanese can be spoken with a west Texas accent.
posted by coppertop at 5:32 PM on September 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
“OK, WHERE’D YOU LADIES GO TO SCHOOL AT!?!”
Reminds me of a similar joke where a southerner gets a scholarship to attend Harvard. On his first day there, being a freshman and unfamiliar with the campus, he gets lost trying to find his first class. He spies an upperclassman walking between buildings and calls to him, "'Scuse me, can you tell me where the Science building's at?"
The upperclassman sneers, "At Harvard we don't end sentences in prepositions."
The freshman replies, "Okay, can you tell me where the Science building's at, asshole?"
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:43 PM on September 11, 2023 [24 favorites]
Reminds me of a similar joke where a southerner gets a scholarship to attend Harvard. On his first day there, being a freshman and unfamiliar with the campus, he gets lost trying to find his first class. He spies an upperclassman walking between buildings and calls to him, "'Scuse me, can you tell me where the Science building's at?"
The upperclassman sneers, "At Harvard we don't end sentences in prepositions."
The freshman replies, "Okay, can you tell me where the Science building's at, asshole?"
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:43 PM on September 11, 2023 [24 favorites]
I mostly grew up in Richmond, Va. (from about age 8 on). Richmond is Mid-Atlantic, with a lot of Piedmont, but still vaguely Southern.
I knew people who said I definitely sounded more Southern when I moved to the DC area. And then I slowly lost that accent.
I am planning on moving back to Richmond in the next year or so. I was there visiting friends recently. They've lived there for 30 years but they're from Mechanicsburg, I believe (so more western Virginia and more southern). They still sound a bit more Southern than most Richmonders.
But in less than 24 hours, I was reverting to my Richmond accent and I loved it. It just felt like who I was.
I do think we all begin to mimic the accents of the people we're around. I knew someone who knew a lot of Danes and Norwegians and he'd definitely start adapting his accent to theirs. It just happens.
My favorite thing I learned in the one linguistics class I took is that all accents/dialects are neutral at least when it comes to the science of speech. It's just society that decides if an accent is good or bad. Learning that really changed my perspective, honestly.
(I think linguistics -- even just to a minor extent -- should be taught to everyone. I think we'd all understand each other better.)
posted by edencosmic at 6:56 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I knew people who said I definitely sounded more Southern when I moved to the DC area. And then I slowly lost that accent.
I am planning on moving back to Richmond in the next year or so. I was there visiting friends recently. They've lived there for 30 years but they're from Mechanicsburg, I believe (so more western Virginia and more southern). They still sound a bit more Southern than most Richmonders.
But in less than 24 hours, I was reverting to my Richmond accent and I loved it. It just felt like who I was.
I do think we all begin to mimic the accents of the people we're around. I knew someone who knew a lot of Danes and Norwegians and he'd definitely start adapting his accent to theirs. It just happens.
My favorite thing I learned in the one linguistics class I took is that all accents/dialects are neutral at least when it comes to the science of speech. It's just society that decides if an accent is good or bad. Learning that really changed my perspective, honestly.
(I think linguistics -- even just to a minor extent -- should be taught to everyone. I think we'd all understand each other better.)
posted by edencosmic at 6:56 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Here in Canada, I think a Southern Accent is quite charming.
posted by ovvl at 7:13 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by ovvl at 7:13 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I grew up in south central Pennsylvania, four miles north of the Mason Dixon line, and there were a variety of reasons why I, as a kid, would associate negative connotations with a southern drawl. When I was 19, I got hit with a pretty strong antidote in my film history class, taught by a Texan. He'd tell us about how he knew it was pronounced Vienna Boys Choir, but those little hot dogs in a can are called VY-enna Sausages. My still evolving brain did that unfortunate thing where I think I had kind of mentally written him off because of his accent, and I distinctly remember reading a chapter in his book about music, where he started name-dropping acts like Scanner. "I'm such an idiot," I thought, continuing to read this book of his, "this guy is way cooler than me and I totally judged him on his accent." Twenty-plus years later I still think of that moment whenever I'm grappling to parse someone else's accent.
And since Newfoundland was brought up - my grandfather on my father's side was from Dunville. He passed away when I was young, so I only have fits and snatches of memories of how he talked. He'd say "Tirty-tree" and "Bae" and I often described it as being a bit Irish, because the family was very Irish. So it caught me off guard when, on a business trip into Kanata last week, we met with the owner of a company that we're pitching, and in ways I couldn't quite pin down - I could hear my papa's accent. This was a totally different region, the guy had an Italian heritage, and I didn't think it was the right path to take the conversation down, but something about the cadence really threw me back. And even though I knew he'd move to Malden, outside of Boston, from Dunville, I'd never thought of him as Canadian.
Me, I live in Philadelphia, married to an Australian, and my European colleagues tell me I don't have an accent, even though I argue about it. I think it's just that I grew up watching a lot of news and documentaries. And outside of some very subtle vowel muck-ups that pop up now and then, the thing I wasn't able to escape was the way people in York and Lancaster drop the infinitive when they talk. This is something my aforementioned Australian better half brought to my attention, incredulously, when I suggested that the dishes needed done. I'd been in honors English classes, I minored in English, I took a grammar class for funsies when I went back to college to wrap up my degree, but the car needs washed, the cat litter needs cleaned, and oh my god I mean the car needs to be washed (or needs washing), the dishes need to be done, and the cat litter needs to be cleaned.
I later read that this speech pattern may be due to the influence of German, e.g. the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the region. And of course, as I look this up while typing, there's a related Wikipedia article.
More recently, I was at a recital at UPenn, and was talking to an older woman who was from one region or another that has a fairly recognizable accent associated with it - let's say Boston. I commented that I couldn't hear the accent at all, and she replied something to the effect of "No, thank god for that." I think that was probably the moment that added another dimension to my understanding of how people interpret accents whether they realize it or not. As a kid, a 'southern' accent was 'stupid' - as an adult moving up in the world, I discovered that people thought retaining an accent was bad because it was an indicator of a working class background, something they did not want any association with, for one reason or another. It's a lot to unpack, and I appreciate that there's more dialogue and conversation about it now, even as regional accents and dialects continue to dwindle in the face of mass media consumption, and efforts to preserve endangered ways of speaking push back against that.
Great post!
posted by Leviathant at 7:35 PM on September 11, 2023 [9 favorites]
And since Newfoundland was brought up - my grandfather on my father's side was from Dunville. He passed away when I was young, so I only have fits and snatches of memories of how he talked. He'd say "Tirty-tree" and "Bae" and I often described it as being a bit Irish, because the family was very Irish. So it caught me off guard when, on a business trip into Kanata last week, we met with the owner of a company that we're pitching, and in ways I couldn't quite pin down - I could hear my papa's accent. This was a totally different region, the guy had an Italian heritage, and I didn't think it was the right path to take the conversation down, but something about the cadence really threw me back. And even though I knew he'd move to Malden, outside of Boston, from Dunville, I'd never thought of him as Canadian.
Me, I live in Philadelphia, married to an Australian, and my European colleagues tell me I don't have an accent, even though I argue about it. I think it's just that I grew up watching a lot of news and documentaries. And outside of some very subtle vowel muck-ups that pop up now and then, the thing I wasn't able to escape was the way people in York and Lancaster drop the infinitive when they talk. This is something my aforementioned Australian better half brought to my attention, incredulously, when I suggested that the dishes needed done. I'd been in honors English classes, I minored in English, I took a grammar class for funsies when I went back to college to wrap up my degree, but the car needs washed, the cat litter needs cleaned, and oh my god I mean the car needs to be washed (or needs washing), the dishes need to be done, and the cat litter needs to be cleaned.
I later read that this speech pattern may be due to the influence of German, e.g. the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the region. And of course, as I look this up while typing, there's a related Wikipedia article.
More recently, I was at a recital at UPenn, and was talking to an older woman who was from one region or another that has a fairly recognizable accent associated with it - let's say Boston. I commented that I couldn't hear the accent at all, and she replied something to the effect of "No, thank god for that." I think that was probably the moment that added another dimension to my understanding of how people interpret accents whether they realize it or not. As a kid, a 'southern' accent was 'stupid' - as an adult moving up in the world, I discovered that people thought retaining an accent was bad because it was an indicator of a working class background, something they did not want any association with, for one reason or another. It's a lot to unpack, and I appreciate that there's more dialogue and conversation about it now, even as regional accents and dialects continue to dwindle in the face of mass media consumption, and efforts to preserve endangered ways of speaking push back against that.
Great post!
posted by Leviathant at 7:35 PM on September 11, 2023 [9 favorites]
We moved from England to Texas when I was 9 and my brother was 6.
I say, "I don't know."
He says, "Ahh-o-nohh," all together in one glorious glissando.
Amazing the difference our ages of arrival made to the degree to which we absorbed the flat East Texas drawl.
My family moved from the Bay Area to just outside metro Atlanta when I was 8 and my sister was 5; I never acquired a Southern accent, and would regularly get "not from around here, are you?" after having lived there for 20+ years. And then I spent a decade in the UK, which resulted in my accent going a bit mid-Atlantic (I had to make more linguistic accomodations to make myself understood in the UK than I did in the South; mostly vowel sounds and sharpening up my "T"s).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:10 PM on September 11, 2023
I’m (slowly) learning Spanish right now. I live in Yucatán but I’ve chosen a language instructor in Bogotá specifically because the Colombian accent/dialect is respected across all of Latin America. Yucatán Spanish is, to be polite, too regional for some.
Many years ago I ran into a woman with a thick Texas drawl teaching English in Bavaria. I’ve always that from a cultural equivalency standpoint that might have worked out for everyone.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:11 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Many years ago I ran into a woman with a thick Texas drawl teaching English in Bavaria. I’ve always that from a cultural equivalency standpoint that might have worked out for everyone.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:11 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I grew up in southeast Alabama. When I moved to Boston for college, people asked me more than a few times what country I was from. The only person to place my accent correctly there was a long distance operator who told me "you sound just like the president" (which was Jimmy Carter at the time). She had a good ear -- Plains Ga is just a couple of hours drive from my home town.
posted by TwoToneRow at 9:44 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by TwoToneRow at 9:44 PM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Here in Canada, I think a Southern Accent is quite charming.
No offense to you in particular, ovvl, but this thread jogged a memory of a time when I was in university in Toronto, a friend of a friend flat out told me I sounded smarter on paper than I do in person. I speak American English with a slight Southern drawl because I spent a good chunk of my childhood near Biloxi, MS where I went to public school. I'm not a native Southerner so I hesitated commenting, but this thread has been a fascinating read, thanks everyone for posting.
posted by misozaki at 11:01 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
No offense to you in particular, ovvl, but this thread jogged a memory of a time when I was in university in Toronto, a friend of a friend flat out told me I sounded smarter on paper than I do in person. I speak American English with a slight Southern drawl because I spent a good chunk of my childhood near Biloxi, MS where I went to public school. I'm not a native Southerner so I hesitated commenting, but this thread has been a fascinating read, thanks everyone for posting.
posted by misozaki at 11:01 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Oh, and about what Kitteh posted in-thread about Southerners not being a monolith, I'd like to think I get it somewhat because I had the opportunity to grow up there. It's been so long and only for several years but it was still my childhood and part of who I am today.
posted by misozaki at 11:20 PM on September 11, 2023
posted by misozaki at 11:20 PM on September 11, 2023
jeffburdges: > In principle, we could make "y'all" the formal form of "you", like all European languages do so then it'd become improper to say "you" when addressing a person you know poorly.
If you mean that most European languages have a formal form of 'you', then you are correct. Not all, but most.
> Instead, we should make "y'all" merely the official plural for of "you", and advocate for the formal "you" words to be downgraded to merely a plural "you" in other languages.
But those other languages often already have a plural 'you'. Dutch, for example, has
- an informal singular you : je / jij
- a formal singular you (which can also be used for plural): u
- and also a separate word for the informal plural you: jullie
German, similarly, has du (informal singular), Sie (formal singular), ihr (informal plural).
I do agree with those who think that English sorely lacks a widely accepted word for plural you. It's just so practical.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:57 AM on September 12, 2023
If you mean that most European languages have a formal form of 'you', then you are correct. Not all, but most.
> Instead, we should make "y'all" merely the official plural for of "you", and advocate for the formal "you" words to be downgraded to merely a plural "you" in other languages.
But those other languages often already have a plural 'you'. Dutch, for example, has
- an informal singular you : je / jij
- a formal singular you (which can also be used for plural): u
- and also a separate word for the informal plural you: jullie
German, similarly, has du (informal singular), Sie (formal singular), ihr (informal plural).
I do agree with those who think that English sorely lacks a widely accepted word for plural you. It's just so practical.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:57 AM on September 12, 2023
English lacks a 2nd person plural pronoun
It used to have one! Several, in fact, to go with the various cases in Old English. Like, if you were talking to a group of people who were the subject of your sentence, you'd use "ġē" (pronounced more or less "ye"). It used to have a dual person, too--i.e., "I/you and exactly one other person". All that got eroded away in the transition to Middle English, though.
Back to accents: I grew up in Arkansas. My parents were from West Virginia and Kentucky. Their accents were pretty much what you think they'd might be, and I was surrounded by southeastern Arkansas accents...and yet I somehow grew up with a kind of Midwestern newscaster-y "generic American" accent with a couple of very occasional Southern ornaments here and there.
To this day, I have no idea how it happened. My two working theories are that either it was a.) too much isolation and way too much TV as a kid (I was a weird child), or b.) I somehow picked up on the prejudice some people have against southern accents and consciously trained myself not to have one. I'm not sure which is more likely and/or odd.
I live in the UK now, and despite having been here for over fifteen years, my accent is still largely the same. There are small differences--I hit the Ts in the middle of words a little harder than I used to, I've mostly forgotten how to pronounce "herb", and I've had to change some vowel sounds so the people around me will understand what I'm saying. (I pronounce "borough" as closer to "burra" than "burrow", for instance.)
My accent has softened a bit though, apparently, and softens even more when I perform Shakespeare...to the point where some audience members have tried to place my accent afterwards and more often than not I'll get "Irish" as a guess. However, according to my coworkers, apparently when I get on the phone to Mrs. Example, I suddenly get way more American. They can't really quantify it, but they say it's there. One of these days I'll have to record myself.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:30 AM on September 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
It used to have one! Several, in fact, to go with the various cases in Old English. Like, if you were talking to a group of people who were the subject of your sentence, you'd use "ġē" (pronounced more or less "ye"). It used to have a dual person, too--i.e., "I/you and exactly one other person". All that got eroded away in the transition to Middle English, though.
Back to accents: I grew up in Arkansas. My parents were from West Virginia and Kentucky. Their accents were pretty much what you think they'd might be, and I was surrounded by southeastern Arkansas accents...and yet I somehow grew up with a kind of Midwestern newscaster-y "generic American" accent with a couple of very occasional Southern ornaments here and there.
To this day, I have no idea how it happened. My two working theories are that either it was a.) too much isolation and way too much TV as a kid (I was a weird child), or b.) I somehow picked up on the prejudice some people have against southern accents and consciously trained myself not to have one. I'm not sure which is more likely and/or odd.
I live in the UK now, and despite having been here for over fifteen years, my accent is still largely the same. There are small differences--I hit the Ts in the middle of words a little harder than I used to, I've mostly forgotten how to pronounce "herb", and I've had to change some vowel sounds so the people around me will understand what I'm saying. (I pronounce "borough" as closer to "burra" than "burrow", for instance.)
My accent has softened a bit though, apparently, and softens even more when I perform Shakespeare...to the point where some audience members have tried to place my accent afterwards and more often than not I'll get "Irish" as a guess. However, according to my coworkers, apparently when I get on the phone to Mrs. Example, I suddenly get way more American. They can't really quantify it, but they say it's there. One of these days I'll have to record myself.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:30 AM on September 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
Back to Arabic, which has five forms for "you" in the formal dialect: singular you for male and female people, a dual you that's not gender-inflected, and two y'all's, one for masculine or mixed groups and the other for all women. English, because England got invaded and conquered by two different groups of people speaking different Indo-European languages, and then its language exported all over the colonial world, has had nearly all of its inflections stripped out of it; standard Arabic, because the holy scriptures are right there written in it, has retained all of its grammatical hypercomplexity. The colloquial dialects are much simpler: imagine if everyone in the English-speaking world, from Scots to South Atlanta hip-hoppers, only read literature and other formal modes of discourse in Chaucerian English, and you've got the right idea.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:23 AM on September 12, 2023
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:23 AM on September 12, 2023
Thanks to TV, I never really had a southern accent despite growing up in the south where all of my family had some degree of southern accent, some pretty darn thick. Despite never really speaking that way, I can very easily put one on if I want to and oddly I do get pretty drawly when I'm angry.
What I do have is a whole lot of southernisms in my vocabulary that I just don't notice. And a really bad tendency to drift toward whatever accent someone I'm speaking with is using. Thankfully not enough to make people think I'm making fun of them or doing it intentionally, usually just a little twinge. It's actually kinda helpful when I'm trying to speak non-English words. I can't learn languages for shit, but I can somehow make the right mouth shapes to say words surprisingly accurately if I can remember them. I only wish I knew how to turn this ability into an actually useful skill.
posted by wierdo at 6:09 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
What I do have is a whole lot of southernisms in my vocabulary that I just don't notice. And a really bad tendency to drift toward whatever accent someone I'm speaking with is using. Thankfully not enough to make people think I'm making fun of them or doing it intentionally, usually just a little twinge. It's actually kinda helpful when I'm trying to speak non-English words. I can't learn languages for shit, but I can somehow make the right mouth shapes to say words surprisingly accurately if I can remember them. I only wish I knew how to turn this ability into an actually useful skill.
posted by wierdo at 6:09 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
on account of grandpa's job
I can't not hear that in a southern accent.
One of my best friends from Richmond VA, with whom I mostly have a long-distance, texting relationship these days, and I came up with some dumb text/IM shorthand that were really all inside jokes. one that we still use to this day is "oao". for "on account of"
posted by gorbichov at 6:11 AM on September 12, 2023
I can't not hear that in a southern accent.
One of my best friends from Richmond VA, with whom I mostly have a long-distance, texting relationship these days, and I came up with some dumb text/IM shorthand that were really all inside jokes. one that we still use to this day is "oao". for "on account of"
posted by gorbichov at 6:11 AM on September 12, 2023
I know a guy who moved from New Orleans to Binghamton NY in the mid 1960s when he was about 7. His school sent him to SPEECH THERAPY CLASSES to get rid of his southern accent. As the owner of a Northwest Florida/Virginia drawl, I was enraged to hear this.
posted by JanetLand at 6:11 AM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by JanetLand at 6:11 AM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
My sister has two kids: a 15 year old daughter, and a 13 year old who was born female but is working out their gender identity (wherever they land, their mom, grandma, and me will love them regardless). They both have that upstate SC drawl. I very nearly counseled them to get rid of it because I was like, "No one will take them seriously outside of this region," and then said nothing because why give your hang-ups to younger folks? They'll figure out their own way.
posted by Kitteh at 6:27 AM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 6:27 AM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
And of course saying "Southern Accent" is like saying "English Accent". It covers a lot of ground. It's really the Hillbilly and Redneck variants that trigger my prejudice.
Ding ding ding--southern accents have a whole lot of class inflection, some of which are way more likely to get you in for trouble than others. This is not necessarily a good thing. (There are also northern accents with similar labels of 'hick' appended: that's why my mother has spent massive amounts of anxiety and time trying to bury her native upstate NY accent on account of internalized classism. One of my earliest memories is being scolded for my diction and the use of 'ain't' I'd picked up in daycare.) Minnesotan is another northern regional accent strongly associated with being poor and rural.
I actually found myself leaning into my accent and strengthening it after 2016, in part because I was using it as a bludgeon when I was calling up state officials and harassing them. It felt very much like a "well, fuck y'all, I live here too, and I'm claiming that in my speech: you ain't got any more of a right to speak like this than I do." (My accent is... mixed, because I've lived mostly around the edges of the southeast in places that have a lot of people moving in and out.) Now I find it leaking out when I least expect it. I'm not especially bothered by it, though.
It actually seems quite strange to me to think that a southern accent marks you as an inherent threat, even as a white person: there's plenty of people with all kinds of accents going around and saying all kinds of things, and it's not like the increased formal register in most Southern dialects is inherently geared towards the insulting. In Georgia especially I found you can communicate a lot by layering on the respectful until you've been invited to drop it and not until then. As with everything, it matters a hell of a lot more what you say than it does how you say it.
Unless, of course, y'all are automatically assuming that all the racism lives down south and you ain't got any up north to worry about. Which: whoooooo-eeeeee, darling.
posted by sciatrix at 8:02 AM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
Ding ding ding--southern accents have a whole lot of class inflection, some of which are way more likely to get you in for trouble than others. This is not necessarily a good thing. (There are also northern accents with similar labels of 'hick' appended: that's why my mother has spent massive amounts of anxiety and time trying to bury her native upstate NY accent on account of internalized classism. One of my earliest memories is being scolded for my diction and the use of 'ain't' I'd picked up in daycare.) Minnesotan is another northern regional accent strongly associated with being poor and rural.
I actually found myself leaning into my accent and strengthening it after 2016, in part because I was using it as a bludgeon when I was calling up state officials and harassing them. It felt very much like a "well, fuck y'all, I live here too, and I'm claiming that in my speech: you ain't got any more of a right to speak like this than I do." (My accent is... mixed, because I've lived mostly around the edges of the southeast in places that have a lot of people moving in and out.) Now I find it leaking out when I least expect it. I'm not especially bothered by it, though.
It actually seems quite strange to me to think that a southern accent marks you as an inherent threat, even as a white person: there's plenty of people with all kinds of accents going around and saying all kinds of things, and it's not like the increased formal register in most Southern dialects is inherently geared towards the insulting. In Georgia especially I found you can communicate a lot by layering on the respectful until you've been invited to drop it and not until then. As with everything, it matters a hell of a lot more what you say than it does how you say it.
Unless, of course, y'all are automatically assuming that all the racism lives down south and you ain't got any up north to worry about. Which: whoooooo-eeeeee, darling.
posted by sciatrix at 8:02 AM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
It actually seems quite strange to me to think that a southern accent marks you as an inherent threat
To be fair it's not entirely unfounded.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:42 AM on September 12, 2023
To be fair it's not entirely unfounded.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:42 AM on September 12, 2023
Unless, of course, y'all are automatically assuming that all the racism lives down south and you ain't got any up north to worry about. Which: whoooooo-eeeeee, darling.
Bless their hearts.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:20 AM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
Bless their hearts.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:20 AM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = you poor idiot
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
There are three things non-Southern people often get wrong about Southern speaking: 1) thinking "bless your heart" is only ever insulting; 2) thinking "y'all" is sometimes used in the singular; and 3) either thinking "all y'all" is extra pluralized because of 2) or thinking that the distinction between "y'all" and "all y'all" is just how many people are being addressed.
I grew up on the MS Gulf Coast (I see you, misozaki!), and my accent was empirically undefinable - no one local ever accused me of not being from there, to my recollection, but when I traveled out of state, people's guesses about my accent were all over the place (weirdly, people seemed to guess Boston more than any other one place). Then I went to college, moving north to the Deep South, because the Coast is a world apart, and there I picked up more of a classic Southern drawl. Now that I've moved far away, it's faded again, but it will kick back up when I've been talking to family/friends from the area, or sometimes if I'm particularly frustrated.
posted by solotoro at 9:26 AM on September 12, 2023 [10 favorites]
"Bless your heart" = oh my gosh, that's awful, are you okay?
"Bless your heart" = that's so nice of you!
It's all in the delivery. :)
There are three things non-Southern people often get wrong about Southern speaking: 1) thinking "bless your heart" is only ever insulting; 2) thinking "y'all" is sometimes used in the singular; and 3) either thinking "all y'all" is extra pluralized because of 2) or thinking that the distinction between "y'all" and "all y'all" is just how many people are being addressed.
I grew up on the MS Gulf Coast (I see you, misozaki!), and my accent was empirically undefinable - no one local ever accused me of not being from there, to my recollection, but when I traveled out of state, people's guesses about my accent were all over the place (weirdly, people seemed to guess Boston more than any other one place). Then I went to college, moving north to the Deep South, because the Coast is a world apart, and there I picked up more of a classic Southern drawl. Now that I've moved far away, it's faded again, but it will kick back up when I've been talking to family/friends from the area, or sometimes if I'm particularly frustrated.
posted by solotoro at 9:26 AM on September 12, 2023 [10 favorites]
I went to college with a guy from Boston who went to a very exclusive prep school in the Northeast. They made him take speech therapy classes to get rid of his Boston accent.
posted by slogger at 9:28 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by slogger at 9:28 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
(So as not to abuse the edit window, an asterisk I meant to add to my 2) above: I lived the first 30 years of my life in the South. Once, ONCE, I actually encountered a singular "y'all" in the wild. Every single other time I heard it, it was someone making fun of a Southern accent.)
(Though to be fair, sometimes it might seem to an outsider like it's happening because the speaker is referring to others included in the group who aren't actually present, in a "you and yours" kind of sense.)
posted by solotoro at 9:29 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
(Though to be fair, sometimes it might seem to an outsider like it's happening because the speaker is referring to others included in the group who aren't actually present, in a "you and yours" kind of sense.)
posted by solotoro at 9:29 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
In Honolulu when locals, especially people with strong pidgin inflection, assumed I was a local I would be delighted (Honolulu was the first place where people thought I was from there, e.g. being an English speaker with an Asian face was the norm) but I would also ask, bemusedly, "but the way I talk...?" The response was usually "Ah, figured you went to Iolani [or Punahou] or something." There is a pretty definitive town-country divide in pidgin speakers in the Hawaiian archipelago (with neighbor island residents much more likely to be speaking pidgin), but also a very very clear private school vs public school divide.
Pidgin is spoken — to one degree or another — by roughly 500,000 people in the state. It was counted for the first time in 2015 by the U.S. Census Bureau as an official language in Hawaii.posted by spamandkimchi at 9:42 AM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
With its roots as a shared language among workers in Hawaii’s sugar plantations, Pidgin also reflects a blend of cultures that began calling Hawaii home in the late 1800s and early 1900s, through the arrivals of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Portuguese immigrants.
Known also as Hawaiian Creole English, Pidgin’s use in the classroom has been hotly debated. It has carried a negative perception due to its syntax and unique grammatical structure....
Among the misconceptions about Pidgin, said Darrell H.Y. Lum, a panel speaker and the co-founder of Bamboo Ridge Press, is that it is “broken English” or a “language of the stupid.”
“I wrestle a bit when people say there’s a time and place for Pidgin,” said the retired editor and author. “Pidgin is (a language) that is useful, functional, that we can have fun with. It acknowledges a culture that is so built on relationships, negotiation and acceptance
There are about a bajillion different flavors of southern accent. And they can read very differently, certainly within the south and to some degree outside of the region. I live in North Carolina, where we have a pretty great collection of dialects, and I've spent enough of my life here that I can still kind of tell where people are from depending how they pronounce certain words. I will say that a lot of the subregional regional dialects are dying out, even as there is an increasingly generic variation of suburban sunbelt southern that seems to have spread basically from Texas (maybe even from, like, eastern California) to Raleigh that sometimes feels like it is becoming what people think about when they think "southern accent."
I am a southerner by birth, heritage and culture, no matter how little I wanted that for myself and how much of my young life I spent agonizing over the fact that I wasn't from New York or London, or really anywhere that wasn't the south. My dad and his family are from the rural Mississipi Delta, Athens-ish Georgia, and the East Tennessee tri-city area My mother's family is from Southwest Virginia (mostly Roanoke-ish). All of my grandparents had gorgeous accents (my Nana-- Mom's mother--sounded quite a bit like Dolly Parton, but both of her husbands had the whole only occasionally rhotic Virginia Piedmont "noah=th" for "north," "foad" for "Ford," "own "for "on" accent. Dad's dad was a failed novelist, an alcoholic and a newspaper editor and talked like a he wore and white linen suit and wandered in from Central Casting to play "Pontificating Mississippi Lawyer." Dad's mother was a debutante,who spent much of her youth in Palm Beach and New England. Her accent was strongest when she drank, but she was an every day cocktail party alcoholic . . .so ). My mother's accent is/was quite pronounced; my dad's quite a bit less so. I tend to think this has something to do with how they grew up(Dad's family was wealthy, Episcopalian, college educated and political; Mom's family was bog-standard middle class, evangelical, barely one generation removed from coal mines and proud to be there), even though I believe it is easier to get away with being a person with a thick southern accent (and specifically the "right" kind of southern accet) if you are rich.
The south, at least the south as I knew it, is, was and always has been extremely class obsessed (as well as, obviously, race obsessed) , and the accent thing slots into that as well. I mean, When I was a kid in the 1980s, a friend's mother (from the deep WNC mountains) took elocution lessons so she would sound more like she was from Charleston, SC because she believed she was being shunned by the other ladies at the country club for sounding "trashy" because her accent read as Appalachian.
I'm not sure how much that (at least explicitly) played into my decision, at around eight years old, to try as hard as possible to not have a southern accent. I even managed to successfully swap out "y'all" for "you guys" until a few years ago when the whole "you guys" thing started causing me problems for gender-related reasons. I was born in East Tennessee. I grew up in Asheville, in a neighborhood largely populated by Northeast transplants. Most of my childhood friends did not have southern accents, and I am (unintentionally) a bit of a mimic, so the losing mine thing wasn't so tough ( pro-tip: you 'll want to watch your long I's, especially if you've been drinking). And by the time I finished high school, most strangers pegged me as non-specifically Mid-Atlantic (that old NYT dialect quiz always put me squarely in New Jersey).
Regrets? I have a few. I can't do what might have been my own accent without "doing" an accent. But the bigger thing is knowing how much of my young life I hated myself for where I was from and I was so very ashamed and horrified of everything related to that. I hate how much shame I felt. It wasn't fair. I can get defensive, talking my region, my family, my home state, etc whenever someone else picks on it, but let me be clear: no one has ever been harder on this place or me being from this place than myself.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about my childhood and a person I used to know blasted me publicly, all over social media for being a desperate ugly hillbilly wannabe. It was pretty funny because there was a time in my life when that would have been thing I was mostly terrified of being called. And instead, it was kind of hilarious and almost like stolen valor because I don't think I've ever been cool enough to embrace it.
What a mouthful. But you know how we do go on down here.
posted by thivaia at 9:59 AM on September 12, 2023 [15 favorites]
I am a southerner by birth, heritage and culture, no matter how little I wanted that for myself and how much of my young life I spent agonizing over the fact that I wasn't from New York or London, or really anywhere that wasn't the south. My dad and his family are from the rural Mississipi Delta, Athens-ish Georgia, and the East Tennessee tri-city area My mother's family is from Southwest Virginia (mostly Roanoke-ish). All of my grandparents had gorgeous accents (my Nana-- Mom's mother--sounded quite a bit like Dolly Parton, but both of her husbands had the whole only occasionally rhotic Virginia Piedmont "noah=th" for "north," "foad" for "Ford," "own "for "on" accent. Dad's dad was a failed novelist, an alcoholic and a newspaper editor and talked like a he wore and white linen suit and wandered in from Central Casting to play "Pontificating Mississippi Lawyer." Dad's mother was a debutante,who spent much of her youth in Palm Beach and New England. Her accent was strongest when she drank, but she was an every day cocktail party alcoholic . . .so ). My mother's accent is/was quite pronounced; my dad's quite a bit less so. I tend to think this has something to do with how they grew up(Dad's family was wealthy, Episcopalian, college educated and political; Mom's family was bog-standard middle class, evangelical, barely one generation removed from coal mines and proud to be there), even though I believe it is easier to get away with being a person with a thick southern accent (and specifically the "right" kind of southern accet) if you are rich.
The south, at least the south as I knew it, is, was and always has been extremely class obsessed (as well as, obviously, race obsessed) , and the accent thing slots into that as well. I mean, When I was a kid in the 1980s, a friend's mother (from the deep WNC mountains) took elocution lessons so she would sound more like she was from Charleston, SC because she believed she was being shunned by the other ladies at the country club for sounding "trashy" because her accent read as Appalachian.
I'm not sure how much that (at least explicitly) played into my decision, at around eight years old, to try as hard as possible to not have a southern accent. I even managed to successfully swap out "y'all" for "you guys" until a few years ago when the whole "you guys" thing started causing me problems for gender-related reasons. I was born in East Tennessee. I grew up in Asheville, in a neighborhood largely populated by Northeast transplants. Most of my childhood friends did not have southern accents, and I am (unintentionally) a bit of a mimic, so the losing mine thing wasn't so tough ( pro-tip: you 'll want to watch your long I's, especially if you've been drinking). And by the time I finished high school, most strangers pegged me as non-specifically Mid-Atlantic (that old NYT dialect quiz always put me squarely in New Jersey).
Regrets? I have a few. I can't do what might have been my own accent without "doing" an accent. But the bigger thing is knowing how much of my young life I hated myself for where I was from and I was so very ashamed and horrified of everything related to that. I hate how much shame I felt. It wasn't fair. I can get defensive, talking my region, my family, my home state, etc whenever someone else picks on it, but let me be clear: no one has ever been harder on this place or me being from this place than myself.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about my childhood and a person I used to know blasted me publicly, all over social media for being a desperate ugly hillbilly wannabe. It was pretty funny because there was a time in my life when that would have been thing I was mostly terrified of being called. And instead, it was kind of hilarious and almost like stolen valor because I don't think I've ever been cool enough to embrace it.
What a mouthful. But you know how we do go on down here.
posted by thivaia at 9:59 AM on September 12, 2023 [15 favorites]
All these stories are reminding me of two accent related incidents.
When I was roughnecking in the oil patch in Wyoming, my brother in law used to call my extremely heavily accented sister in law back in Tennessee and put her on speaker phone to our boss, Newfie Dave, just to listen to the show. Each would swear the other wasn’t speaking English.
I was an eikaiwa teacher in Kyoto when a young Japanese lady came in with a beautiful southern belle accent she had picked up living in Savannah as a teenager. The Americans at the school were horrified at the prospect of ruining her with further lessons.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 10:48 AM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
When I was roughnecking in the oil patch in Wyoming, my brother in law used to call my extremely heavily accented sister in law back in Tennessee and put her on speaker phone to our boss, Newfie Dave, just to listen to the show. Each would swear the other wasn’t speaking English.
I was an eikaiwa teacher in Kyoto when a young Japanese lady came in with a beautiful southern belle accent she had picked up living in Savannah as a teenager. The Americans at the school were horrified at the prospect of ruining her with further lessons.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 10:48 AM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
There are certain jokes, sayings, etc. that just sound better in a southern accent.
That dog don't hunt.
Oh, wait, I guess it does.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:12 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
That dog don't hunt.
Oh, wait, I guess it does.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:12 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
It took me a while to figure out that this is where the African-American slang "finna" comes from.
I believe I've even heard "fin," which I suppose would be "fi''n.'"
posted by kirkaracha at 11:13 AM on September 12, 2023
I believe I've even heard "fin," which I suppose would be "fi''n.'"
posted by kirkaracha at 11:13 AM on September 12, 2023
Who was it that said a southern accent makes everyone else discount your IQ by 20 points, and the opposite with a British accent?
I think that the accent is part of Knives Out's Benoit Blanc's arsenal, to make suspects discount his intelligence
So he's coming in at a perceived net -40 points?
posted by kirkaracha at 11:17 AM on September 12, 2023
I think that the accent is part of Knives Out's Benoit Blanc's arsenal, to make suspects discount his intelligence
So he's coming in at a perceived net -40 points?
posted by kirkaracha at 11:17 AM on September 12, 2023
There are about a bajillion different flavors of southern accent. And they can read very differently, certainly within the south and to some degree outside of the region. I live in North Carolina, where we have a pretty great collection of dialects, and I've spent enough of my life here that I can still kind of tell where people are from depending how they pronounce certain words.
So much this. For NC, I can easily pinpoint mountains, Western Piedmont, Eastern Piedmont, and the high-tiders (which extend up into coastal VA as well), as well as the Lumbee. Upstate SC sounds like Western Piedmont NC, and SC coastal plain sounds like someone has been watching too many 80s movies supposedly set in the south. Eastern TN and Northern AL are pretty similar. Georgia definitely used to have a mountains, Middle Georgia, coastal Georgia thing going on, but the metro Atlanta area largely has lost its accent.
My maternal grandparents were both native Middle Georgians born at the very beginning of the 20th century, and I wish we had recordings of them talking--that accent is harder and harder to find now. A recent study showed white Georgians are losing their accents, and in particular, that Gen X started it. The portion of the study focusing on the accents of Black Georgians will be published separately because the forces affecting their accent changes turn out to be different.
In college, I really did work hard to sound less Southern because in fucking MD of all places, my classmates definitely assumed we were just dumb because of our accents. Then I moved back to NC and GA, and it has largely come back. The lingering eccentricities of Western Piedmont NC are best shown by how I say 'orange' and 'ruin', both of which baffle everyone not from the Charlotte area.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:57 AM on September 13, 2023 [5 favorites]
So much this. For NC, I can easily pinpoint mountains, Western Piedmont, Eastern Piedmont, and the high-tiders (which extend up into coastal VA as well), as well as the Lumbee. Upstate SC sounds like Western Piedmont NC, and SC coastal plain sounds like someone has been watching too many 80s movies supposedly set in the south. Eastern TN and Northern AL are pretty similar. Georgia definitely used to have a mountains, Middle Georgia, coastal Georgia thing going on, but the metro Atlanta area largely has lost its accent.
My maternal grandparents were both native Middle Georgians born at the very beginning of the 20th century, and I wish we had recordings of them talking--that accent is harder and harder to find now. A recent study showed white Georgians are losing their accents, and in particular, that Gen X started it. The portion of the study focusing on the accents of Black Georgians will be published separately because the forces affecting their accent changes turn out to be different.
In college, I really did work hard to sound less Southern because in fucking MD of all places, my classmates definitely assumed we were just dumb because of our accents. Then I moved back to NC and GA, and it has largely come back. The lingering eccentricities of Western Piedmont NC are best shown by how I say 'orange' and 'ruin', both of which baffle everyone not from the Charlotte area.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:57 AM on September 13, 2023 [5 favorites]
And as for “bless your heart,” I grew up in the south and only ever heard that phrase completely free of any irony. Not sure why people think it's only used sarcastically. My mom used it—and still does—and to her it means the same thing as “you poor thing.”
posted by zardoz at 4:10 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by zardoz at 4:10 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
Georgia definitely used to have a mountains, Middle Georgia, coastal Georgia thing going on, but the metro Atlanta area largely has lost its accent.
Just chiming in to say that I recently interviewed a bunch of elderly folks in Gainesville, GA for work and it was absolutely dreamy on the dialect front.
posted by thivaia at 5:23 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
Just chiming in to say that I recently interviewed a bunch of elderly folks in Gainesville, GA for work and it was absolutely dreamy on the dialect front.
posted by thivaia at 5:23 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
And when my sister-in-law from Western Kentucky met my friend with a thick Brummie accent, she gushed about how "classy" she sounded, which... well, I'm not gonna turn on the kind of same accent bias people use against my family, but uh, that is not how it's generally sorted in the UK.
There are definitely some Americans who have imprinted on "British" = "posh". It's only Received Pronunciation that's really posh, but it's a nuance that gets lost in translation. Brummie? Posh because it's British. Cockney? Posh because it's British. Irish? Posh because it's, uh, from in/near the UK.
(Apropos, apparently the Yorkshire accent is regarded as the most trustworthy one in Britain? I assume that's the case because whenever someone with a thick traditional Yorkshire accent starts talking, their interlocutor nods vigorously throughout, terrified to betray any indication that they have not understood a single word being spoken)
One thing about cross-cultural accent implications that throws me is that for a while it was regarded as standard practice, in anime dubbing*, to interpret the Kansai/Osaka accent as "Southern US". So you'll be watching Love Hina and wondering, "wait, is Mitsune auditioning to be in a remake of Gone with the Wind, or what?"
*Yeah, yeah, I know. Let's not have a fight.
posted by jackbishop at 5:31 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
There are definitely some Americans who have imprinted on "British" = "posh". It's only Received Pronunciation that's really posh, but it's a nuance that gets lost in translation. Brummie? Posh because it's British. Cockney? Posh because it's British. Irish? Posh because it's, uh, from in/near the UK.
(Apropos, apparently the Yorkshire accent is regarded as the most trustworthy one in Britain? I assume that's the case because whenever someone with a thick traditional Yorkshire accent starts talking, their interlocutor nods vigorously throughout, terrified to betray any indication that they have not understood a single word being spoken)
One thing about cross-cultural accent implications that throws me is that for a while it was regarded as standard practice, in anime dubbing*, to interpret the Kansai/Osaka accent as "Southern US". So you'll be watching Love Hina and wondering, "wait, is Mitsune auditioning to be in a remake of Gone with the Wind, or what?"
*Yeah, yeah, I know. Let's not have a fight.
posted by jackbishop at 5:31 AM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
i was born in NYC and grew up on Long Island, but never had the accent. I was a shy kid and watched a lot of tv, so ended up with a bland, midwestern style.
My aunt, ah, she had one of the thickest Lawn Guylant accents I ever heard. *And she was a speech teacher*.
posted by doctornemo at 2:10 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
My aunt, ah, she had one of the thickest Lawn Guylant accents I ever heard. *And she was a speech teacher*.
posted by doctornemo at 2:10 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
Here in Canada, I think a Southern Accent is quite charming.
For awhile in the 80s there was a series of popular commercials for a Quebec chain of rotisserie chicken restaurants in which a Texan, inexplicably, falls in love with the chicken and wants to buy the company - all the while speaking Quebec French with a thick [fake] Texan accent. It was nearly incomprehensible but very funny.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:35 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
For awhile in the 80s there was a series of popular commercials for a Quebec chain of rotisserie chicken restaurants in which a Texan, inexplicably, falls in love with the chicken and wants to buy the company - all the while speaking Quebec French with a thick [fake] Texan accent. It was nearly incomprehensible but very funny.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:35 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
Like many in this tread, mine is gone forever. I think it died off slowly in parts - first when I was assigned to lower level classes after my teachers thought I didn't speak well enough. Then when I went to university in the Midwest. It died a final death after I moved to England (but comes out in certain words).
Now I have some weird mixture of a lot of different dialects but mostly sound Bland Midwestern with a hint of Brummie (Birmingham, England).
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 5:18 AM on September 14, 2023
Now I have some weird mixture of a lot of different dialects but mostly sound Bland Midwestern with a hint of Brummie (Birmingham, England).
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 5:18 AM on September 14, 2023
Accents can be weird. I grew up in a city pretty much in the south watching a lot of TV and I have a very general American flat accent. But I have cousins who grew up less than five miles away that have very strong southern accents. My mom mostly speaks with a flat accent but get her talking to some friends or family and the Southern accent comes out.
posted by downtohisturtles at 6:58 AM on September 14, 2023
posted by downtohisturtles at 6:58 AM on September 14, 2023
I would just like an explanation for why nobody understands me when I say "iron". Parents from the anglo part of Montreal, grew up in Mississauga. Somehow I came to pronounce it 'arn'.
posted by srboisvert at 3:52 AM on September 16, 2023
posted by srboisvert at 3:52 AM on September 16, 2023
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the childhood classic, "Don't say ain't"
Don't say 'ain't'.
Your mother will faint.
Your father will fall
In a bucket of paint.
Your sister will cry.
Your brother will die.
Your dog will call the FBI.
As little kids with thick coastal Mississippi accents, we told each other that one all the time. I lost most of my accent because I lived on an overseas military base for a couple of years, and after that point, it was a long time until I was comfortable even using ya'll again.
It hangs on in weird ways. Apparently, I still say the word insurance with a Mississippi accent.
posted by betaray at 9:41 AM on September 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
Don't say 'ain't'.
Your mother will faint.
Your father will fall
In a bucket of paint.
Your sister will cry.
Your brother will die.
Your dog will call the FBI.
As little kids with thick coastal Mississippi accents, we told each other that one all the time. I lost most of my accent because I lived on an overseas military base for a couple of years, and after that point, it was a long time until I was comfortable even using ya'll again.
It hangs on in weird ways. Apparently, I still say the word insurance with a Mississippi accent.
posted by betaray at 9:41 AM on September 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
Are Southern accents disappearing? Linguists say yes
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:47 AM on September 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:47 AM on September 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
« Older How Not To Decom A Server Farm | I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
After four years in Japan working with mostly Brits and Aussies I had a decently mid-Atlantic accent, but after ten years back in the south it’s gone.
I always dreamed I’d someday have something so worth saying I wouldn’t have to worry about what people thought of how it was said, but here I am.
About the best I can do these is keep an eye on my diphthongs, never flap a T, and fight the good fight against creeping rhoticity.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 11:53 AM on September 11, 2023 [3 favorites]