southern accent

[Syrinx]

I don't really understand the phenomenon.

Both of my Republican senators, for example, have very pronounced "southern accents." And sometimes I run into very "country" type people that sound like that too. But most of the people I meet day to day sound nothing like that. Most of the people I meet around Alabama either have a "dignified" accent like Gregory Peck in "To Kill A Mockingbird," or no discernable accent at all.

I don't have much of a Southern accent myself, probably because I'm an only child, and picked up my speech patterns mostly from television.

[JitterbugPerfume]

1. I have been told I have a southern accent

but I really don't think I have a very pronounced one

I do speak kinda S....L.....O.....w

[supernova]

2. Well, I do think there is a

certain affectation involved with some folks. Sometimes people like to lay it on a bit thick. :shrug:

I don't have much of one either. My mother was from western PA. I sound more like Andy Griffith if anything. And that's more a matter of cadence and pacing rather than pronounciation.

[Syrinx]

3. Andy Griffith

Yeah, like Sessions and Shelby sound like Andy Taylor from the first season of the show, whereas most people I meet sound much closer to the Andy Taylor of the color episodes. :)

ON EDIT: While the later shows were more realistic regarding Andy's accent, the early ones were still much FUNNIER!

[TacticalPeek]

16. Thick? You should hear the ads Haley Barbour is running

for the MS gov race.

His accent, through a slight speech impediment like his tongue is drowning in saliva,
is so bad in turns my quiche to corn pone before my eyes.


He's got to "re-acquire" his Southern persona,
since he's spent all his time in DC after returning from Red Commie Chinese fund-raising in Hong Kong for RNC
a few years back.

[supernova]

30. Oh don't get me started on Haley Barbour!

x( He sounds like even Selsnick rejected him from GWTW for being too over the top!

[gyopsy]

4. I'm from Florida...

which you would think would be very southern but I have no accent. I think there's so many people who moved here from NY now that all of the accents have morphed into one.

Maybe the same thing has happened in Alabama. It's strange that some people have such strong accents while their neighbors have none and some of these people have lived in the same town for years.

[madfloridian]

5. I have one of sorts.

It is not the same as a Georgia accent or SC or Alabama. It is a slower way of talking, but not the same as from the deep south. Florida is not the deep south, really.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

13. My Southern grandparents had accents...

Every summer we visited them in Florida, and I'd come home with a slight drawl. It wasn't something I was conscious of until I'd return home.

I have a couple of cousins who moved to New Zealand when they were young girls. They quickly picked up an accent as well.

[Aristus]

6. I've lived up north since 1979, but

I'll be saying "y'all" 'til I'm dead.

[Syrinx]

7. It annoys me when "yankees" use y'all when talking to *one* person

It's just a contraction for "you all," for heaven's sake, what's so complicated about that.

[Aristus]

8. That's how you can tell who's faking it. True Southerners don't say

'y'all' to one person.

[supernova]

9. Actually had one Yankee friend

try to argue this very point of grammar with me! He really tried to say y'all is singular as well as plural. :crazy:

We don't spend time together anymore. :eyes:

[Syrinx]

12. You shouldn't hold that against the Northerners

That's just ignorance, not stupidity.

:)

[supernova]

31. We didn't part company over that

:-) The club to which we both belonged went belly up, so we just don't cross paths anymore.

[Bake]

20. Nobody outside the South can properly use or pronounce y'all

It just can't be done. The best impressionist on the planet can't do it. I keep telling my Yankee friends that "y'all" is always plural. Always. They can't get the syntax, much less the inflection.

Bake

[dbt]

22. I dunno, Bake. The Irish seem to understand ''y'all'' very well

and it's such a hoot to hear them say it! Of course, Ireland is one of the prime ancestral homes of the genus hillbilly.

(Let's see. Have I offended enough groups for one post? Guess I can get to the Brits later...)

:evilgrin:
dbt

[GoddessOfGuinness]

10. I wonder...

I read several years ago (I don't recall the source) that accents began fading away with the advent of national television and radio broadcasts.

But I wonder if they aren't simply in the process of changing from a geographical phenomenon to a cultural one. Consider the "Country Music" culture, for example. At one time, it was predominantly an element of the "Southern" culture. Now most cities have at least one Country radio station, Country videos are available on TV, and many of the tunes cross over to mainstream Pop...their only distinction from the mainstream genre being the presence of a "Southern" accent.

I've noticed that friends and acquaintances of mine who listen almost exclusively to Country music tend to speak with varying degrees of Southern accent, regardless of their geographic location. It's pretty interesting, especially since many of the artists they enjoy shed their accents when they speak.

[Syrinx]

11. That is an interesting observation. n/t

[MattNC]

14. i have one

but it seems to be more pronounced on the phone than in person for some reason.

[pfitz59]

15. Why do Yankee men love southern women?

Because it takes them so long to say "Quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!"

[OrdinaryTa]

17. Regional Accents

Regional accents are often broken down into smaller areas, and natives can hear the difference. For instance, there's more than one New York accent. Brooklyn accents are quite distinctive, but each of the other boroughs has its own way of speaking. I am not making this up. Queens people don't sound like they're from Brooklyn, and neither of them sounds like people from the Bronx. Staten Islanders know their own inside of a couple of sentences.

Texas accents are different from each other, too - there's a Dallas accent and a Houston accent. Northern Californians don't sound like Southern Californians.

[Aristus]

18. I've made a study of regional accents.

Brooklyn is throaty. Bronx is nasal. Things like that.

It's a fascinating subject.

[inthecorneroverhere]

19. Regional differences

There are lots of these differences in the South. Some New Orleanians speak with a kind of brogue that has some of its roots in Acadian French. Some New Orleanians speak with practically no accent e.g. generic Midwestern 'TV' way of speaking. The most noticeable Southern drawls seem to be in Georgia and South Carolina. I can easily tell a person from Texas vs. the Atlantic South, and can also tell someone from Kentucky or West Virginia vs. the Carolinas-Georgia.

I remember when I was still a child hearing Jimmy Cah-tuh speak. At first, I thought his accent was sooooo strong. Then I got used to it.

"Y'all" is said all over the South and is spoken to more than one person. Someone who says 'y'all' while speaking to only one person is faking it!

[carolinayellowdog]

21. Ethnocentric misconceptions

Hey,

Having made a study of this subject, and being able to mimic a few dialects well, I'm always aghast at the notion that it's possible to speak with "no accent." Dialect is the proper term, and if you could speak English without one, no one could tell if you were from England, Australia, Alabama, or Chicago. We all have an "accent" (dialect) but mass media have diluted *regional* dialects and promoted the rise of a generic American dialect which is taught to broadcasters. In New England, the South, and the Midwest, higher education levels and population densities coincide with loss of regional dialects and the high frequency of general American.

Another misconception is that general American is essentially midwestern. In fact, the Great Lakes states have an instantly recognizable and sometimes very intense regional dialect, characterized by extreme denasalization, very hard r's, short a's and o's that sound like nothing else you'll hear anywhere in the world including Ontario right across the lake. And the Great Plains end of the midwest also has a dialect, less readily distinguishable.

Although California has some elements of dialect, especially among Hispanics, it's probably the stronghold of general American and the state whose natives are least identifiable to the rest of us regionally.

BTW the difference between coastal and highland Southern dialects is mainly between drawl and twang.

Cheers,

CYD

[yankeeinlouisiana]

23. Strong southern accents I

really do not like. My daughter was 3 when we moved down here and I was concerned she would pick up an accent. One day she said "C-ment" instead of cement. I quickly corrected her. She told me her teacher would always say C-ment and that's where she picked it up. (She's 6 now.)

The problem with "y'all", is that it is grammatically incorrect. If it's a contraction for "you all", it really should be all of you. Another phrase, and my husband uses this one, is "come see". This drives me nuts. "Come see"? Come see what? Come see what I am doing? Come see this on TV? Come see this silly bird outside? "Come see" is not a sentence.

It just not the sound, words are simply not correctly pronounced down here.

But I'll always say "you guys" til I die!! :evilgrin:

[supernova]

32. Ah yes, ignorance is alive and well

;-)

"All of you" and "you all" are the same thing, you're just moving words around. One is not preferrable to the other. And yes, "y'all" is grammatically correct. It takes care of a flaw in the English language. There is no plural from of "you".

BTW, if you ever hear "all of you" it will most likely be in the form of a question. "Do all of you want to go see The Pirates of the Carribean?"

[trof]

33. All of me...

why not take all of meee....
Sorry, couldn't resist.
;-)

[supernova]

34. LOL!

Cute.

[trof]

24. I tried to lose mine

when I left Alabama for Chicago about 35 years ago. Coming out of Birmingham in the bad ol' 60s I wasn't too anxious for anybody to know where I was from. I quit saying "y'all" and started saying "you guys". I paid attention to my diction, and think I passed for mid-western there and through the New York and New Hampshire years.

Now that I've been back for 10 years the accent has come back in spades. The last time I was visiting my daughter in Boston I made some remark and she said "Whoa! You sound SO southern.". I've finally outgrown the shame of the 60s and I'm comfortable with it now.

There are a lot of regional dialects in the south. During a stint as a summer life guard in South Carolina I noticed the locals said "dem, dese, and dose". I also hear a touch of Brooklynese in the New Orleans accent. I find the Cajun (married to one) accent to be very musical.

I have noticed that Sen. Shelby sounds pretty much the same on TV as in person. Sessions sounds like two different people. He definitely has a "national TV" voice.

[Lars39]

25. I have 2 accents.

I lived near Chicago until I was almost 10. Moved south. By my teens I had a southern accent, sorta. Depends on who I'm around, but for the most part I speak northern except for some words, like "ya'll", but I am just as liable to say "you guys". :crazy:

[UrbScotty]

26. I'm one o' dem nahthunerz who kin do a purd-darn good accent.

Do y'all have a problem with dat?

[Lars39]

27. Yessir, I do. Never heard anyone in my life say purd-darn.

The word you're looking for is *dang*. :)

[JohnKleeb]

28. I dont know really

I am a Virginian like my parents but my grandparents were Pennsylvanians all across the board. I know for fact I say you guys. Then again I really dont consider myself a southerner because I got a lot of yankee roots and the fact I identify with the north more than the south.

[ACK]

29. I have been told I talk like a Yankee

Really there is no worse insult for Southerner to inflict on another Southerner.

[CBHagman]

35. There are too many accents to name!

I lived in a small town in South Carolina at one point, and I could have easily rounded up 10 people who spoke somewhat differently from each other. There are so many variations on the accents.

Then there are Louisiana accents, which I won't even get into, since they has so many distinctions...