The Southern Accent: We're Losing It

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.

And, what you perceive as laziness might just be an unwillingness to work too hard for those who subjugated them in the past.

This perception is not mine, but that of critics of the two groups.

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.

If it weren't for the disparate voting patterns the two couldn't be told apart. It breaks my heart that Blacks have become so alienated from their country of four hundred years as to morph into the angry, alienated intellectuals who currently represent them.

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.

Thank you. Though so far as I can tell, I'm strictly Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic (perhaps an oddity here in the Upper South).

I have an unfortunate habit of stepping outside of myself to write or speak about things, sorry to have misled. Paternally, I'm about as Anglo-Saxon southern as it comes, genteel poor to prominent, none that would be desribed as Sowell and others have.

Maternally, it's a different picture. Celtic from Scotland and Ireland, Palatines from the Rhineland, Alsace and Switzerland, native Cherokee and Creek going all the way back to James Cittie, French Huguenot and other fleeing outcasts to wild, nearly ungoverned NC from old Virginny, just your usual southern mutt heritage and all that comes with it, good and not so good.

I do perceive "redneck" as being more Celt. Looking back to even England, the "crackers" were from Celt lands, Cornwall and such.

There are those, especially in Ireland, who view our Civil War as the inevitable, repeated clash between Celts and Anglo-Saxons, that has played out throughout the history of the British Isles... past as prologue.

Ironically, while Celtic Southern nationalists insist on being identified with a particularly "reactionary" form of rightism, Celtic nationalists in the British Isles (and Brittany and Galicia as well) have adopted left wing nationalism as their ideology, leaving English nationalism with the "onus" of being "right wing."

If our Southern nationalists had any sense they'd adopt left wing nationalism as well. I mean, at the very least, they'd tie the Left up in knots. But know, they have to stick with the stereotype (and reinforce it here and there).

Gullah and Geechee are the real thing.

You can still hear it around (my parents live on the GA coast).