Posted on 04/30/2002 7:12:45 PM PDT by foreverfree
The Southern Accent: We're Losing It
By Rob Marus
The Moose Is Loose
Have you ever noticed that people in our generation seem to be losing their Southern accents? "Hold on," most of y'all are now thinking, "I haven't noticed any lack of Delta drawls or backwoods twangs here at Rhodes."
But stop for a second and listen very closely to the inflections of your peers. Now compare their accents with, say, your father's (or, if you're from the North, your roommate's father's). See the difference? And his accent is even a little milder than your grandmother's, isn't it? She probably still drops her "R"s.
Linguists tell us that, more rapidly than ever before, English-speaking Americans are losing their distinctive regional accents and dialects.
You're much less likely today to find an Atlantan using the word "supper" in reference to the evening meal than you were 30 years ago. By the same token, you're less likely to find a Bostonian pronouncing the word "can't" like a Kennedy would.
But this phenomenon is most widespread and insidious in the South, the linguists and sociologists tell us, and particularly on college campuses. Each generation has gotten a little bit farther away from the previous generations' adherence to a Southern accent; in the 60's people stopped dropping their "R"s (a la Scarlett O'Hara); in the 70's, they stopped using "that-a-way" and "over yonder" as directional aids; in the 80's they stopped saying "fixin' to" and replaced it with "about to."
And now, here we are in the 90's, and our generation in particular is dropping the last vestiges of our accents-a lot of us won't even drawl out our long "I"s or use "y'all" anymore.
But why are we doing this? What's the point? People used to relish, even nurture their Southern accents. Why has our generation chosen to do the very opposite - eradicate the very last vestiges of it? I'll tell you the main reason: classic Yankee imperialism.
Hollywood, Wall Street, and Madison Avenue have pelted us, in this "Information Age" (which, if you ask me, is a misnomer that could be more accurately replaced with "Misinformation Age"), with a barrage of images and sound bytes that not only set up a nondescript, sterilized accent as the normative pattern of American speech (think about the way most TV journalists talk), but also create stereotypes that completely disdain Southern accents as purely the domain of hillbillys, rednecks, and racists.
Think about it; recall what you've watched on television or in the movies in the past week. Almost invariably the character with the thickest Southern accent in any movie, television show is one of two things. In drama, he (rarely are women portrayed in these roles) is the "bad guy": the KKK leader, the escaped convict, the philandering preacher, the corrupt government agent trying to cover up a UFO landing. In comedy, he (once again, women are rarely presented in these roles) is invariably the ignorant yokel: the trailer-park trash, the bumbling small-town sherriff, the provincial good-ol'-boy politician.
If a woman is ever portrayed with a Southern accent, she is either the passive, abused, blue-collar wife or the manipulative Southern belle. And, for the most part (with the major exceptions of shows set in New York City), that sterilized TV-news-anchorperson non-accent is the standard pattern of speaking for the "serious" characters and "good" characters that Hollywood gives us.
But in English there is no such thing as a "non-accent." The pattern of speech that Hollywood has set up as normative is no more than a Midwestern dialect. Any Englishman or Englishwoman would not hesitate to say that Tom Brokaw and Diane Sawyer have definite accents.
To be any sort of famous actor or actress the first thing you must do is learn how to sound like someone from Iowa. Nowadays, if you maintain your Southern accent, you're not very likely to find a job in Hollywood. You'll probably be surprised to know that Andie MacDowell, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, Kim Basinger, and even the guy who plays the mailman on Seinfeld are all native Southerners. To be a TV journalist you have to do the same thing (unless you're a complete bad-ass, like Bill Moyers).
Therefore, it's understandable that we, as open-minded, free-thinking young people who are trying to be urbane, sophisticated, and worldly-wise, should have difficulty accepting our inherited accents as something we shouldn't hide. After all, our generation is the one most shaped by the Northern media.
You see it all the time at Rhodes; think about all the people who come here from a small town and then begin to lose their drawl over the months beause they hang out with accentless folks from places like Dallas and Atlanta (two cities absolutely overrun by Northern immigrants in recent years).
So don't conform, dammit! Don't let the Northern establishment grind you beneath its heel; stand up to the attacks of Yankee capitalism and commercialism upon who you are as a person. Just because you speak differently than the mass-media norm does not mean that you are inherently inferior. If the South would just give up its inferiority complex, I think we could come a long way in solving some of our social problems.
Young Southerners, take the first step towards respecting yourselves as a people and don't assume that your accent means you are a redneck. And do it now, before it's too late. God forbid we end up a nation of people who all sound like Roseanne Barr.
Williamsburg should get hit with a daisy cutter.
http://web.ku.edu/idea/northamerica/usa/texas/texas.htm
That website is cool! Listening to the guy from Houston talk on the tape was really funny. In the passage they made him read he got to the word ether and at first he pronounced it eh-ther and then he got all flustered and reread the word pronouncing it ee-ther. It made me chuckle because in the past I have automatically pronounced that same word eh-ther, but then realized it was the wrong pronunciation and corrected myself.
I also liked that they pointed out that in words like huge and human, when Houstonians pronounce it, the “h” is silent.
I’ve had a couple of yo-yos who weren’t from Houston try to tell ME that I was pronouncing HOUSTON wrong! When a native Houstonian pronounces it there is NO H sound at the beginning. It sounds kind of like yous-tun.
I had an uncle was from suthun Jawja. And he really used to have the most awesome and stereotypical southern accent I can imagine. He’d say things to my mom like “I do declayah Miss Mahhhgret”. Sounded like he was right out of Gone With the Wind.
I last remember seeing him in the late 70’s and I do admit I rarely hear accents quite like that anymore.
Y’all is a contraction for “you all”, therefore is most certainly plural.
If you have ever a situation where it seemed that a single person was being addressed as “y’all”, it is far more likely that the speaker as addressing the person as a representative of a business, organization or specific group of people, therefore, it is still a plural usage.
“Y’all come back now, y’hear?” seemingly addressed to a single person is actually an expression that means that person and his or her family is welcome for a return visit.
I live in New England now, but I’m a 14th generation Virginian. I don’t use my Tidewater accent outside of family situations as it is likely to be misinterpreted that I am unintelligent or worse.
Don't be ashamed of your Tidewater accent -- that is very upper crust, along the lines of a Charleston accent. You want to CULTIVATE that!
Northeast Alabama accent, not so much . . . . fortunately I can 'do' both a rural and an upper crust Southern accent, depending on my situation. My sainted white-gloves-and-pearls grandmother from Augusta GA made sure of that!
Since I'm that rare bird, a second-generation Atlanta native, I have very little audible Southern accent. Real Atlantans don't - that's how we know each other in the crowd of offcomes in the ATL Metro, that and the pronunciation of "Ponce de Leon" (although if you want to identify an Atlantan of my mother's generation, ask them to say "Piedmont".)
I love regional accents, especially southern accents. I love hearing old interviews with Elvis because he had a real, old school southern accent.
Real accents aren’t totally gone. Listen to the little kid in the movie Talladega Nights. But I think the strong, almost incomprehensible accent may be gone— e.g. Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
It means that you and yours are accepted and welcome. Family ties are just automatically assumed. It's the veritable 'n em in mama'nem. Literally, mama and them.
I've heard that all my life, mama'nem, but it never fails to amuse me. Thoughts of sainted mama with her entourage, perhaps in procession with attendants, maybe a long cape, lol.
Oh, y’all are just too funny!!
It's a peculiar form of insecurity, combined with passive-aggressive tendencies, that compels northeastern descendants of recent immigrants to mock the speech patterns of people who define the place, having been there for centuries. A place, by the way, to which these northeasterners fled, to escape the morass of socialism created by people just like them.
Look on the bright side ... maybe they'll fall flat on their faces and run squealling back to some feminized, blue womb of a northeastern state. Enough of them have lost their backsides on real estate down here. Suckers. P. T. Barnum knew the sort well.
The most grating accent I've ever encountered in the United States, and I've traveled most of it, is to be found in north Jersey. It makes the broad, flat nasal intonations of the Dakotas and Minnesota sound lyrical by comparison. It's catching, too. A week up there has me saying "coooa-fey" instead of coffee, much to my chagrin.
Perhaps it's the quality of the people, in rural Minnesota and the Dakotas, plain and honest and independent, that makes the difference. There's just something dishonest and oily about people who cling to Noo Yoowak, but aren't quite up to the task of hacking it in the city itself, or even in a desireable suburb.
I grew up right on the Virginia/Tennessee line. I went to school in Virginia. I didn’t realize how strong an accent that I had until I heard myself on television. There are people that live just over the Tennessee line from where I grew up that have a much stronger accent and use words that I have never heard of before. Sometimes I just have to guess what they are saying to me.
My mama grew up in Queens, NY and when she would get tired her old yankee accent would come through. I always like to get her to say “dinosaur”, she would pronounce it di-no-saw, it was kind of cute. My brother moved to Montana a few years ago and was made fun of because of his southern accent. When he calls me now, I detect a slight Montana accent.
I can talk proper English whenever I want or need to, but, it is more fun to talk like a hick. My Mama and Daddy used to argue about whether or not I was half Yankee. I always sided with Daddy on that one.
If you listen to the old Amos & Andy radio shows you will hear Kingfish speak in a dialect almost identical to the way my grandfather talked. The grammar is the same as well. Hanover County. Down the country. Sometimes at night I will listen to my Ipod as I go to sleep. It is almost the same as hearing my grandfather’s voice. Quite comforting when I really miss him.
I don’t notice the accents in VA, but my youngest son does. (He was born in Syracuse) My cousin’s husband is from Culpeper. “Mom. I didn,t understand anything he said. So I just kept shaking my head and saying ‘Yes sir’”.
BTW, why is it that Southern Blacks are never stigmatized for Southern accents or dialects? I suppose silly liberals think their accents come from West Africa.
If you want to actually hear West Africa, going back more than three centuries on this continent, get down to the Carolina and Georgia coast, to the very few remaining Barrier Islands that are unmolested by the invading NY/NJ horde.
The Gullah. Clarence Thomas is Gullah.
Speech patterns in Atlanta aren't a very good indicator of what goes on in the rest of the South. It's very cosmopolitan. You're more likely to hear an Indian accent than a "y'all". But get away from the city and suburbs and it's different.
We used to say breakfast, dinner, and supper in our neck of the woods until the “let’s do lunch” crowd moved down South.
They called dinner “lunch”, and supper “dinner”. I guess we changed to accommodate the darlin’s so they wouldn’t stay so confused all the time, bless their hearts. ; )
I am native Californian so I know nothing about the contraction “y’all” except that I like it. I have been told by more than one person that “y’all” is singular and “all y’all” is plural. That defies my logic, but logic has nothing to do with dialect that becomes adopted.
I don’t know the truth, but due to the disparity between what you are telling me and what others have told me, perhaps “y’all” is used as plural by some and as singular by others. I have most certainly been told it is singular and plural is “all y’all”. Take that for what it is, because I would not at all be surprised if various people or areas of people from the south of USA use it differently, some singular, some plural.
I understand clearly that “you all” or “all of you” is plural. It can’t possibly singular. I know y’all is a contraction of you all. But I have been told by some southerners that y’all is used in the singular, so apparantly at least some people use it that way.
Spoken directly to an individual, it's almost like the British concept of a corporation being a plural entity... "British Petroleum are" or "Ford are." The inference is you, and yours.
Spoken in the form of all y'all to a group of unrelated people, it's a recognition of multiple, plural entities. You and yours, plus you and yours, and you and yours, and so forth.
You are subconsciously being regarded as something of a representative of more than just yourself. It's almost always family related, but can also mean your coworkers, your friends, those who share your political beliefs or any other form of recognizeable bond. You and your affinity group would be all y'all. You have something in common, and are being addressed in common.
I realize this is a sort of high-falutin' description of a very humble, dialectical term, y'all, but does this make it make more sense, lol?
Thomas Sowell has pointed out that the so-called "authentic African-American culture" actually comes from the British Isles and the whites the early slaves encountered. This includes the use of the infinitive "be" as a finite, the Chaucerian Middle English "ax," the Anglo-Saxon obscenities, the superstitions, the religion, and even the laziness, violence, and criminality that is attributed by outsiders to both cultures (gang wars/mountain feuds, crack houses/moonshine stills, etc.). The more "African" Black nationalists try to be, the more "cracker" they act and speak.
What is really sad is that stupid liberals wind up loving in Blacks the very same things they hate and ridicule in poor Southern whites and they don't even seem to realize it. You know, the ignorance of poor Southern whites is a subject of ridicule while the ignorance of poor Blacks is an act of revolutionary "otherness;" the poverty of poor Southern whites is a joke while the poverty of poor Blacks is a revolutionary indictment of the American economic system; etc.). It isn't the behavior that is approved or disapproved but who exhibits it--classic bigotry. I suppose these liberals and Black militants have to tell themselves that all these characteristics (when found among Blacks) come from Africa in order to excuse them.
Forty years ago white racists insisted that an unbridgeable gulf separated "white culture" and "Black culture." Now the liberals say the very same thing, though they reverse the roles. And foolish me, I always thought rural Southern whites and Blacks were all just "rednecks."
If you want to actually hear West Africa, going back more than three centuries on this continent, get down to the Carolina and Georgia coast, to the very few remaining Barrier Islands that are unmolested by the invading NY/NJ horde.
The Gullah. Clarence Thomas is Gullah.
Though I've heard practically none of it spoken, I've read and loved the Gullah dialect for years in old B.A. Botkin folklire anthologies and in the "Daddy Jack" stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Is there any place online I can actually hear Gullah spoken?
I realize that the New Testament is no longer of great interest to you from a religious perspective, but it has been translated into Gullah:
So A da write ta all ob oona een Rome, oona wa God lob an wa e call fa be e own people. A da pray dat God we Fada an de Lawd Jedus Christ bless oona an gii oona peace een oona haat. - Romans 1:7
There are contemporary readings of this Gullah New Testament floating around the web somewhere, but not by native speakers.
As far as taking such a completely dismal view of Celtic-descended southerners and the obviously related culture of black America, I'll point out that there are some positive aspects. And, what you perceive as laziness might just be an unwillingness to work too hard for those who subjugated them in the past.
There's a legacy of bondage among both groups, one indentured and one enslaved. They're both quite capable of industriousness outside the confines of "normal" society as well. There's honor. There's God. It could be worse. They fight our wars, in large part.
At times, it appears that poor white southerners are all that stands between us and totalitarianism. For that alone, I'm much obliged, and am glad to have them.
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