Posted on 01/12/2025 7:35:46 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The last company I worked for had a receptionist that had the absolute most pleasant voice I’ve ever heard - very Virginian. I have always been partial to that region’s accent.
I dunno if it was so much “wanting to sound different”. The Tidewater accent was very much an upper class kind of thing. You didn’t hear it much from yeoman farmers or the like. As for the Coastal Carolina accent, there were always so few speakers with this accent which arose due to their relative isolation. In more recent times more contact has watered it down considerably and it will soon be blended away.
I can hear the difference between Texas, Louisiana, Appalachia and the “standard” Southern accent. Maybe you can hear an especially strong “Tennessee twang” (listen to Steve Spurrier some time) with a few people but generally the standard Southern accent prevails from Central Florida up through Mizzourah.
This is most obvious when speaking to a waterman.
Appalachian is relative.
It turns out that those "mountain people" are scattered for a thousand or so miles from the hills of north Mississippi, north Alabama, and up the rest of the Appalachian chain.
Hillbilly English flows the same along the way from little towns like Fulton, MS, Hamilton, AL, Chattanooga, TN, Bristol, TN/VA, and all along the chain.
So too, do many of the customs and folkays. Just ask JD Vance.
Yeah, who steals soap?
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When we visited TN before we moved here, we went to a church where the minister preached about the “SEE-in-ah in the CAY-um-puh”.
I used to have an upstate NY accent. I went to a Harley dealer in South Carolina and told the two fat guys with beards behind the parts counter that I needed an inner tube for the reaR tire of my hog (pronounced hahg up north). The heavier one pointed at me and said “y’all yankee!”
I quickly learned anchor man accent. While I am proficient at the hard Rs or the Maine/New Hampshire distortions I grew up with, I only use them for emphasis now. The current TV generation is moving toward either anchor man speech or inner city hip hop talk and mannerisms.
Highland Southern Dialect has a nice ring to it. :^)
When I was a child coming up in Nashville in the 50s there were a pair of old spinster ladies from back in the hills who still wore bonnets and used thee, ye and thou. My grandmother did also when she got mad.
Now do the Tahdwudder (Tidewater) accent.
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LOL thats a good question
Yes, especially Iowa. Iowa men were sought out in WWII to serve as radio officers since everyone in the country could understand them.
There may be some regional variation, too.
We live in Phoenix and probably 20 years ago, when he was about 8 or 10, our son had to do speech therapy in school to try to correct his speech because he said a few words just like my grandfather did who was born and raised in Arkansas... We told them that when they wanted to put him into it and two years later, nothing had changed and they ended his speech therapy and told us it must be just something he inherited... like we tried to tell them in the beginning.
"The closest accent to that a British gentleman would have used in the late 18th Century is what is spoken today by the elder members of any First Family of Virginia."
Reminds me of what Val Kilmer said about his portrayal of Doc Holliday in the movie 'Tombstone.' He said Holliday's dialect is believed to have been that of a Georgia aristocrat. Although no one uses that dialect today, some of Kilmer's older relatives remembered older people speaking that way.
On deployment we worked with QRF soldiers from Glasgow. I could barely understand them. One guy literally sounded like “Oy oh guh [f-bomb] uh toy uh [f-bomb] ut oy eya uh..” all I could understand were the numerous f-bombs. Great soldiers, but just couldn’t understand them.
Same with the Irish, at least the ones I met back in the ‘80s. I dated one, but I could barely understand a word he said, except for the numerous f-bombs.
LOL...a common theme.
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