My maternal grandmother was very proud of her Virginia roots, she was Tidewater VA and Charleston SC. The Tidewater accent is the one with the soft "o"s and elided "r"s and the transformation of "house" to "hoose" - almost Scots in sound.
C'ville is so far west that it's really in the Appalachian foothills. Minus all the riff raff from all over who show up because of the university, it's more conventionally "mountainy" in sound - more twang and Elizabethan vowels.
Still not the generalized Piedmont accent that you hear on TV.
Oh, I know it is! My accent is Tidewater. Relatives from the Roanoke area sound decidedly different from me and my spouse’s.
My personal peeve is the broad, deep South intonations which give Northerners the faulty impression that everyone who has a drawl is stupid.
Being a DC metro denizen, I have run into that particular prejudice many times over.
When I moved to Alabama it took me six months to finally understand “the language”.
I’m not form Virginia originally, but I’ve heard Charlottesville is sometimes referred to as “Carpetbag-ville.”
This guy fits
I’m from the East Tennessee mountains...I get a hundred miles away from there and because of my mountain accent people say, “You ain’t from around here, are you?”
I’ve heard two distinct southern dialects in the VA mountains.
In the eastern portion along the front range to the Shenandoah it has a dignified and refined nature. This extends into some of the NC counties than border around Danville and SW.
West of the Valley and down into the deep SW part of the state it becomes more hillbillish...Not a slur just a fact.
Reg, you know what I’m talking about with some of the older folks in Stokes Co.