Yves here. This article focuses on Southern accents as presumed class markers, but examples in the US and abroad abound. I have observed, from Virginia to Alabama, upper class Southerners who seem unconsciously able to dial the intensity of their accent up or down as is advantageous; there are also pockets such as in New Orleans and Chattanooga, where natives do not possess what Northerns would read as a Southern.
Similarly, heavy Queens accents are negative attributed IQ points (see Janet Yellen as one of many examples) which is also true of the Valley Girl and the Yooper (Upper Peninsula) accents. There is a very chewy Chicago manner of speaking (best described as over-articulated) which grates on me.
Of course, US speech discrimination pales compared to that found in the UK. In France, non-Parisian pronunciation and inflection pattern are disfavored (think French Canadians as the extreme case). And is it weird how easy it is to detect local prejudice. I don’t speak Thai, yet I recognize the harsh Issan (near Laos) accent and recognize it as deemed to be low class. On the other end of the spectrum, I know an Australian from a very poor family who grew up in the back-of-beyond in northern Queensland. A teacher took interest in her and gave her elocution lessons. Her resulting plummy accent was of great help in her professional life in Sydney.
By Madeline VanArsdale, a linguist, writer, and editor with experience in content development, project management, and language studies, is a contributing editor and author at the Observatory and previously served as fashion and makeup director for TREND Magazine. Produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute
For as long as humans have existed, we have defined ourselves in contrast to an “other”—a person or group who possesses a characteristic that is perceived as different. This impulse has shaped our communities since the moment we began to form them. Across the ancient world, warring tribes treated differences as a threat. The Roman Empire labeled states throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as enemies to be conquered, enslaved, or absorbed. When colonizers arrived in the Americas, they cast Indigenous peoples as savage and primitive, and placed themselves in the opposing position as the embodiment of sophistication and civility.
When othering those of foreign backgrounds became too conventional, societies began turning that impulse inward. Regency-era English nobility labeled themselves “the Ton,” using wealth to distinguish themselves from the lower class. India’s strict caste system has divided people of different class statuses for thousands of years. To this day, some Northern Italians turn their noses up at Southern Italians, while those in southern China extend similar treatment to their northern counterparts.
The seed of “othering” is also deeply rooted in religion. Catholics and Protestants in 16th- and 17th-century Europe warred for hundreds of years, with lasting effects evident in England and Northern Ireland even today. In Middle Eastern countries, tension between Sunni and Shia Muslims has resulted in regional rifts.
Tribes, empires, countries, and cities alike have upheld humanity’s tradition of othering like a torch in the night. The concept of “us versus them” has persisted throughout history and across the globe. As psychosocial rehabilitation specialist Kendra Cherry explains,
“Othering is a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined and labeled as not fitting in within the norms of a social group… [it] is a way of negating another person’s humanity. Consequently, people who are othered are seen as less worthy of dignity and respect.”
Othering stems from a variety of attributes, such as skin color, gender, nationality, occupation, religion, class status, political affiliation, language, and more—characteristics by which we classify ourselves as belonging to a specific group and, therefore, place others into a different one. This phenomenon bleeds into every aspect of culture and community, and language communities are certainly not exempt. The subtlety of linguistic discrimination has allowed it to persist where other, more brazen forms of bias have been denounced, expelled, and unlearned. As one form of language bias, accent discrimination flies dangerously under the radar in conversations about implicit bias and creeps into even the most well-meaning and inclusive minds.
Labov’s Landmark Study
In 1962, American linguist William Labov conducted a landmark study on social class, employment, and dialect. His simple yet effective method involved visiting New York City department stores and speaking with employees across different job levels, from managers to clerks to janitors. By prompting them to say a specific word containing the /ɹ/ sound (as in “floor”), he tested—and proved—his theory: the higher an employee’s social class, the more likely they were to pronounce the /ɹ/ and adopt speech patterns associated with Standard American English.
Manual laborers, such as janitors, were more likely to drop the rhotic /ɹ/ from their speech, a common trait of metropolitan New York English. A classic example of this dialect is the popular phrase, “Hey, I’m walking here!” Or, spelled out in phonetic symbolization, with regard to the New York dialect: /eɪ aɪm wɑkɪn ijə/. The point of this study is to show that different occupations, even within a single company, develop unique cultures and can create distinct divides among roles.
Due to these cultural self-selections, people may perceive particular dialects and ways of speaking as good or bad, wise or stupid, friendly or unapproachable, and so on. Assumptions are made, prejudices form, and eventually, distinct “high” and “low” dialects are established, giving rise to linguistic societal discrimination.
American Southern Accent
In the same stroke, this kind of widespread language prejudice can occur nationally and globally. A prime example is the American Southern accent. The rest of the United States and the world have long slighted the Southern accent. People often mimic it to portray someone or something as unintelligent.
Movies, television, books, and media have reinforced this negative stereotype of the Southern accent. For example, the beloved titular character from the 1994 film Forrest Gump perfectly encapsulates the essence of a stereotypical Southerner: unintellectual, oblivious, undereducated, happy-go-lucky, and overtly friendly. Despite several other characters in the movie having Southern accents, Gump’s is dramatized and highly drawn out to emphasize his Southern roots.
If you pay attention, the portrayal (and lack thereof) of Southern accents across various media forms tells the story of the American South through the eyes (and ears) of those unfamiliar with it.
The popular sitcom “Young Sheldon” features a family from East Texas, particularly an erudite young boy. You may notice that Sheldon is the only person in his family who speaks Standard American English. This dialect is considered articulate, with a superfluous vocabulary that occasionally creates a communication barrier with his family, all of whom speak a general Southern dialect. Perhaps it’s purely a coincidence that Sheldon starts college at the age of 11, while the rest of his family shows little to no interest in higher education and sometimes struggles to understand his scholarly jargon.
Even more insidious than the stigmatization of the Southern accent is its erasure entirely. The popular Netflix series “Outer Banks” is set on a chain of islands off the coast of North Carolina. In this area, geographical isolation has given rise to a unique dialect known as “High Tider,” spoken by the locals. The people of this area claim ancestry from Scottish, Irish, and English settlers who rarely interacted with those on the mainland, thereby creating a language community independent of the rest of the continent. The characters on the show itself, however, have no trace of the High Tider dialect in their speech; instead, they use Standard American English.
Erasing the region’s local speech patterns reinforces stereotypes and deepens subconscious linguistic othering. Characters who defy the typical Southern stereotype are almost always written and performed without the accent—traits like intelligence, attractiveness, and wit are rarely associated with a Southern drawl because it doesn’t align with the audience’s expectations.
Southern Vowel Shift
In 2021, researchers Jon Forrest, Steve McDonald, and Robin Dodsworth published a paper in the journal Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World that examined variation in dialects of the American South across employment sectors. The researchers used data from the Raleigh Corpus, which comprises interviews with residents of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were born and raised in the area. By talking to people of various ages, genders, races, ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and employment paths, several features emerged regarding the intersection of accent and occupation.
The most notable observation was that, as demand and popularity for technology jobs increased, the use of pronunciation features that were characteristic of the Southern vowel shift declined dramatically. This pattern is the relaxation of vowels in the Southern accent; vowels can stray from their standard tenseness and laxness, and can also be “fronted” or pronounced further forward in the mouth. For example, a person from the South might pronounce the word “rice” as “rass” (/ɹæs/) and say the word “pen” as “pin” (/pɪn/). The Southern vowel shift is a staple feature of the Southern accent and is (or was) especially prominent in Raleigh. Following Raleigh’s emergence as a technology hub in the 1960s, the advent of modern technology, and the growing job market for employees in those fields, the Southern vowel shift began to diminish within that particular workforce.
One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the language associated with technology leaves less room for individuality and personality. Therefore, those working in that industry would begin adopting a more standardized accent. Another reason is that the realm of technology is vastly more globally connected in terms of the types of people who work within that sphere. This means those speaking with a Southern accent are exposed to many other national and global accents. This melting pot of dialects can affect the way someone speaks and, as a result, may reduce the Southern accent they were raised with.
According to Dodsworth, the influx of workers and their families led to a “dialect contact situation” in Raleigh and its neighboring cities.
“Through her analysis of K-12 networks in Raleigh, Dodsworth found correlations between the increasing social diversity of the city and the slow ‘leveling’ of its traditional accents. It also helped to explain why rural areas—or even the parts of Raleigh that saw the least inward migration—remain the most Southern-sounding,” according to a National Science Foundation report on the study.
Several other observations from Forrest et al.’s 2021 study further explored the ties between employment and accent in Raleigh. As previously discussed, those in the technical field were less likely to maintain a Southern accent. Law and government workers experienced a similar decrease, but to a lesser extent. Service workers, also known as “blue-collar” workers, were the most likely to retain Southern accent features. Additionally, across all industries, research showed that the older an employee was, the more likely they were to have a Southern accent.
This is partially because, in simple terms, old habits die hard. Older people, those who established careers before the advent of the digital age, are more likely to retain their Southern accents because of the culture and heritage associated with it. Although young people may be connected to Southern culture, they have not lived as long as their predecessors and are more susceptible to subconscious linguistic adaptation. Additionally, with the increase in immigration and ease of movement, many people in Raleigh likely come from places outside the South and have brought different accents, dialects, and languages with them.
Globalization has transformed homogeneous language communities into more diverse places, both linguistically and in other respects. The increased ease of travel, trade, and the spread of ideas and knowledge have brought people and their accents from all over the world into communities that were previously relatively isolated, such as North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Tracing the Roots: How History, Class, and Media Shaped Biases Against the Southern Accent
There are several reasons why a person might hear a Southern accent and subject the speaker to the typical stereotypes associated with it. As with many linguistic theories, there is rarely a single, straightforward answer to this question. The nature of this kind of research requires a deep understanding of psychology, history, sociology, linguistics (of course), and many other complex subjects to fully comprehend the scope of the topic.
One popular theory dates back to the American Civil War. Before the Civil War, the South did not have nearly as much linguistic variation as it does today. Back then, the Southern accent was heavily influenced by the “prestigious” accents of the English colonizers. Today’s Southern accent shares few similarities with the “original” dialect.
Walt Wolfram, co-author of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina and professor at North Carolina State University, makes several points on the evolution of the American Southern accent. According to Wolfram, the South’s loss at the end of the Civil War, along with the prospect of a new life in the North, drove many Southerners to abandon the South. Many who remained did so because they did not have the means to leave or because of the institution of “Southern pride.” Additionally, the racial divide in the South (especially after the Civil War) drove the white and Black populations apart culturally and linguistically, causing both groups to develop certain aspects of speech that would further distinguish one from the other.
As we have seen before in many cases, ways of speaking associated with lower social classes are often vilified and disparaged. And in the case of the post-slavery South, that meant primarily newly freed slaves, who had little to no money or land, and had no other choice but to stay. The specificities of the Black Southern dialect, combined with the white dialect and the various creoles and dialects from the African and South American slave trades, began to merge.
Several factors were in play simultaneously, like the impending stress and uncertainty during the South’s Reconstruction era, the lack of people migrating to the South, and the millions of recently freed former slaves, many of whom used speech that was influenced by other languages. These social elements now had a significant influence on the formation of new dialects, and the Southern dialect underwent a complete transformation. Due to cultural and geographical differences, numerous variations of the “standard” Southern dialect emerged, resulting in the modern Southern accents we know today. Though no clear explanation exists for how these accents are discriminated against, several possibilities arise from this Civil War-based theory.
One possibility is that the war’s effects on the relationship between the North and the South caused non-Southerners to disdain the Southern accent due to the political divide. Another possibility is that the accent became embroiled in Northern classism against the poor in the South. A final possibility, with similar roots, is that with the large population of African Americans in the South, along with their use of the Southern accent, non-Southerners correlated their racism with the Southern accent. These possible explanations have been perpetuated across generations and are still successfully maintained today, demonstrating just how implicit and invalid language biases can be.
Another, more modern explanation for this bias exists. A 2012 study by Katherine D. Kinzler and Jasmine M. DeJesus presents two perspectives on Southerners: Children from non-Southern states generally held a bias against Southern accents and associated the “standard” dialect with greater education, intelligence, and so on, while children from the South did not prefer one accent over the other. As Southern children grew older and became more exposed to media, they, too, began to develop prejudices against their own dialect. While local news reporters and other adults in a child’s life sound like them, few national voices carry the same Southern accent; news reporters, television show hosts, celebrities, and political figures mostly have non-Southern accents.
Over time, these children were conditioned to think that, since they don’t hear many Southern voices in these spaces, individuals with a Northern accent must be smarter, more authoritative, and generally better. Non-Southern children, seeing the same national media, are rarely exposed to Southern accents and are used to people who sound like them being the ones in charge. Children naturally learn from observing the adults in their lives, which continues the cycle of self-deprecation regarding dialect.
Despite the lack of statistical correlation between Southern accents and intelligence or capability, the stereotype persists across the U.S. and beyond. Its roots are complex, shaped by centuries of historical prejudice, regional divisions, and systemic classism, and continually reinforced by media portrayals that favor standardized speech. These biases ripple outward, affecting not only workplace dynamics but also education, social interactions, and even self-perception among Southerners themselves. Recognizing and challenging accent discrimination is more than a matter of politeness—it is a step toward dismantling deep-seated assumptions about worth, ability, and identity. By listening carefully and valuing linguistic diversity, we can begin to unlearn these prejudices and create a society where a voice’s sound reflects individuality rather than judgment.
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Yves – with all due respect, I suspect your comment about the “harsh” issan accent may reflect Thai prejudice rather than reality.
To my untutored ears, the lao/issan accent is softer and more mellifluous than Bangkok Thai.
Chacun a son gout.
Best, Norman (sitting in a Bangkok coffee shop after arriving last night from Laos – I lived in both countries 50 years ago).
I DID say it reflects prejudice. However, I have been listening to Thai language videos, which are understandably by pretty hi so Bangkok teachers. The Bangkok accent is MUCH softer, as in less nasal and sharp-edged, and perhaps as important, much easier for English speakers to approximate. As a former choral singer and light opera-opera producer (as in I sat in on auditions of lead singers and discussed with the music director the plusses and minuses of various vocalists), I strongly disagree with your contention that the Issan accent can remotely be called “mellifluous”.
I am told the royal family speaks a very “soft” accent.
There is a very chewy Chicago manner of speaking (best described as over-articulated) which grates on me.
The accent that gives Yves Smith gooseflesh is from a kind of vowel shift in the Great Lakes States that the authors describe in the South as well. Chicago vowels aren’t chewy so much as flabby and messy. One hears “pin” for “pen.” I was once in a yoga class and my teacher kept going on about “hep” and “heps” — that’s the vowel-shifted form of “hip” in much of Chicago. And one can hear the local shrill short A, as in cat, from twenty meters away.
The U S of A doesn’t have true dialects, if it ever did. The structure of English doesn’t vary much from region to region. Nevertheless, as the authors write about Southern accents, the older Chicago accent and general messy grammar have been wiped out. Every once in while, I use the old-style Chicago pronoun “youse” here in writing a comment. It is the Chicago plural of you. I like it more than “you all” or “y’all,” because “youse” is simpler. Add an S.
A few vestiges of Chicago vocabulary still exist: gangway, parkway, bismarck (that’ll mark you as a native). Some vocabulary remains among regions. The mass media, beginning with radio and films, have wiped out stronger regional accents.
The divide between North and South in Italy is more than northern snobbery toward the south. For one thing, it goes both ways. Further, in Italy, people have well-developed ears and can tell an accent almost instantly. I say “ca za” for casa, which marks me as a northerner. In Sicily it would be “ca sa.”
And accent in Italy is highly local. The Chocolate City has its own accent as well as a number of expressions and words that other Italians find mystifying — and, sometimes, appalling.
The divide in Italy is strong because of the ancient towns and regions. There is even a slight difference between north and south in how one uses the past tense — divergent structures are not as evident in U.S. accents / dialects.
And it gets even more complicated when the important regional languages get involved. The strongest regional languages, still holding on, are Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian, Friulian, and Piedmontese. Here in Piedmont, the debates among speakers of Piedmontese can be highly amusing — “You say ‘seller’ for celery? In our town, we don’t say ‘seller.’ Only barbarians like you do.”
As for regional languages, in Veneto and Alto Adige, we must not forget Ladino, still widely used in the alpine regions. Moreover, German and associated dialects are also spoken.
Yes, but there are also doctor accents, religious accents (and not just holy rollers), show folk accents, scientific accents (I can tell how much chemistry someone knows just by how they use or pronounce certain words), philanthropic fund raiser accents, arts mother accents, etc. These signal who is in the club, and who is faking it, just like style of dress.
I’m fascinated by how American gay guy voice came to be so well defined. What’s the story behind its development. There was a doco called Do I Sound Gay? (the whole thing appears to be on YouTube) about a guy who wants to stop sounding gay but it didn’t answer the question how he came to sound that way to start with.
I’m not attuned to the finer variations in US accents, but I always found it curious that contemporary subtitling and dubs of 1950’s Japanese movies for the US market always seemed to use an ‘Okie’ accent to represent a character in the film who was considered low class or a rural bumpkin. Curiously, modern subtitles/dubs for movies from all over the world always seem to be very reluctant to attempt to match accents, even when they are important to the plot, nearly always using a standard unwavering West Coast dub, with perhaps an occasional English accent for the baddie. The dub of one fairly recent Japanese anime completely ignored the plot device that the Tokyo/west rural accent of the two main characters was fundamental to how some scenes worked out – I assume the dubbing director simply thought it wasn’t worth the hassle of (for example) using someone with a strong ‘negative’ southern accent for the right character.
One confounding factor is the huge popularity of American rap/R&B/soul/pop means that a vaguely southern or urban black accent is very strongly represented among young people worldwide who have learned English mostly through music and popular culture. This seems very much an internet phenomenon – travelling in the 1990’s I heard a lot of vaguely west coast American or BBC type accents in various places around the world, but increasingly that accent seems to me to be becoming a default among millennials who speak English as a second language.
I mean “Slow Tohoku folk” and “Idiot from Osaka (Kansai)” are common “stereotypes” in Japan, mostly based on accents. Similar stereotypes exist almost everywhere else. (Better anime dubbing try to accommodate these using somewhat analogous American ones–I do wonder about ghe reverse, though, ie if Bugs Bunny spoke with Osaka accent in Japan…)
What, nothing about the Maine accent??!? Longtime favorites of mine are a bunch of dubs who called themselves The Wicked Good Band. You could see them play every year at the Yarmouth (pronounced Yah-muth) and in their tribute to the state, aptly titled State O’ Maine, they touch on the local pronunciation. One doesn’t just drop “r”s where they should be, but adds them where they should not –
“We say August-er , not Augusta
Don’t say buster, we say bustah
State O’ Maine!”
Pretty sure the band are all native Mainers and the accent is pretty mild in that one, but you can find some other songs where they really turn it on.
Years ago someone asked what the Maine accent sounded like and when looking for an example, I stumbled on the following, which is actually sung by a New Yorker I think, but he does a very good job of getting the accent right. And the theme is universal – young guys full of piss and vinegar with not enough to do head to the bar. Or should I say “bah”. I present the soon to be known world wide [Family blog] ‘Em Up Toddy.
I was going to mention that you could still visit The Chez mentioned in the song, but apparently it has now closed.
This is about class prejudice and accents. I don’t think the Maine accent, even though very pronounced, is seen as low class as much as cutely eccentric.
Contrast that with the Boston Southie accent, prominently featured in Good Will Hunting and The Departed.
I wanted to add a little humor before I started in on the latest war news more than anything. I agree that it doesn’t have quite the negative stigma that the Southern accent does. Rural New England accents are considered “quaint” and while I don’t have a strong one myself, many family members do and I never cared for the way tourists (or ‘people from away’ as they are called in Maine) sometimes looked at the locals.
Just up the road from my family’s farm in VT there is a hunting and fishing club for well heeled flatlanders (as tourists are referred to in VT) who come up for weekend getaways. A couple of these hunters came down to my uncle’s house one day and asked him if they could go hunting on his property. He said that it depends, and asked if he could go fishing at their club. They said no, because it was a private club. He told them “Well, I think you just answered your own question” and shut the door. I will give them credit for at least asking.
Perhaps the reason the long time locals are considered more eccentric and quaint than low class is because the flatlanders have come to realize they may need assistance from the locals for things like pulling their expensive vehicles out of a dirt road ditch when it turns out they aren’t so good at driving through the snow. Years ago my father aided a couple who went off the road on the way to an exclusive executive resort. He didn’t charge them, just helped them out like he would for anyone. A little while later, the couple sent my mother a Tiffany vase as a thank you, which was a very nice gesture!
PS: I jokingly mentioned going to Southie recently to find some Departed-type wiseguys, and was told that that culture had largely been gentrified away in recent years.
I’m familiar with the Maine accent because two of my father’s siblings emigrated there from St John River valley New Brunswick — so I had an aunt in Houlton and an uncle in Millinocket. Another of my father’s brothers emigrated to Massachusetts where a great aunt of mine lived in Beverly. We used to visit the Maritimes almost every summer of my childhood, and I remember those characteristic sounds very well!
I’m not sure it’s a southern accent, full stop, (there are several southern accents), as much as it’s a perceived rural accent. A southern rural accent is very distinct from a northern rural accent (which is also looked down on).
A southern rural accent is easier for northern “city” people to identify.
There was an obnoxious, recent episode from Due Dissidence mocking the accents of rural rally goers at a T rally intended to trash Thomas Masse in favor of T’s preferred candidate. The NYC
city boys (due dissidence) spent more time mocking the rural attendees’ accents and figure-of-speech than anything else.
(NYC is very provincial in it’s own way. / ;)
Not sure I agree. I lived in Birmingham, Alabama. This is a city based on iron and steel, incorporated in 1867, as in never agricultural, always industrial. Nearby towns in keeping named Bessemer and Trussville.
Everyone has a Southern accent. The small suburb I lived in was in the top 100 in the US in BAs per capita. Public high school in the top 1% nationally. So full of professional and corp. execs and Southern accents.
Similarly, Maine is rural. It’s biggest city, Portland, has only 70,000 residents. I don’t think most Americans look down on Maine accents. At most, they might think Yankee salt dog.
As a lifelong resident of the deep South I agree with our host that Southern accents are pervasive here. However, I think flora does have something of a point. I hear some differences sometimes in the accent as expressed in differing ‘classes’ of people. I use the term ‘class’ loosely, and not necessarily strongly affiliated with economic class.
In my opinion and to my ear, in Mississippi there are roughly several ‘classes’ of the Southern accent, with often subtle but sometimes not so subtle differences. There is a more strictly rural class, where regardless of economic status the drawl will be thicker, with more pronounced drawing out of vowel sounds. This is associated with less travel and less access to broadcast, cable, and internet resources in the past several decades. There is a slightly milder accent, with less of a drawl, confined to the more urban areas where exposure to outside influences has been greater. There is also a ‘genteel’ form of the accent, which brings to mind the Old South, which is spoken by interbred descendants of the historically upper economic class.
There are also racial background differences in accents and usage that mirror these distinctions among the ‘white’ peoples of Mississippi. There are at least two variants spoken by Black people that I can distinguish — rural and urban. Rural is broader in vowels than Urban, etc., and vocabulary choices and pronunciations still vary from the ‘white’ forms.
Finally, any of these ‘class’ differences can be found anywhere at any time, spoken by anyone of any apparent race, as they are more indicative of generational and childhood background than current economic class. Although there is still much de facto segregation here in Mississippi, there is also more contact between races in everyday life than is found in other places in the U.S. And, as the article points out, all of these linguistic micro-distinctions are fading with time. See more of my observations and opinions in the comment below.
No mention of Henry Higgins and all that Shavian satire?
As I’ve said here before national TV has homogenized the country and I don’t think Southerners even still have much of an accent. But perhaps I simply don’t notice it. We do have a lot more of those Yankee carpet baggers showing up with their clipped accents. Oh sorry…slipped up there and revealed my raisin’. Those of us of a certain age do still remember the time when the local radio station would sign off every night with a lovely choral version of Dixie.
It’s all gone with the wind–twice now.
My older sister is stuck in Oklahoma because her son teaches at a school there. She’s not religious. Her politics are left democrat. And, she’s got a thick Boston accent. So she has few, if any, friends out there and things aren’t going well for her.
An acquaintance who is a speech language pathologist happened to mention a large percentage of her clientelle are legal professionals or law students seeking to suppress their native accents or adopt a different accent because they’re taught in law school this really makes the difference between winning and losing cases.
Looks like to succeed in higher levels in America, it is not only having a full set of “pearly whites” but also having a lack of an accent. I understand that Georgians have a deep drawl but that it is starting to fade with time. A sort of homogenization of American speech patterns.
An acquaintance who came to the US from England 30 years ago told me that he worked at maintaining his accent because hearing it, Americans assumed he was smart. Said it was a real edge in business.
The cliche NJ accent is actually a Jersey City/Hudson county accent and is shared with those in Queens. Which makes sense if you look at a map. My freshman Speech professor pointed this out. Never had that. The only way my speech stood apart when I moved to Southern California was my tendency toward sarcasm.
I suspect the negative view of southern accents was related to the great migration of southern laborers to northern factory jobs. It’s a class marker and class is the real division here.
An anecdote: I knew a guy who is Russian and grew up in Brazil because his father worked on engineering projects there. He found it amusing that Americans held Japanese in such high esteem because in Brazil the Japanese were mostly working class laborers.
Oh, yes, any non-East-End British accent is worth 20 attributed IQ points in the US. An Indian upper-caste accent, at least 10. If they can pull of the Indian guru act, can be even more than 20 (I know two Indians at McKinsey who mastered that; in fairness, one was very clever, the other actually was brilliant)
Or even an East End accent. Sir Michael Caine has done quite well for himself.
Slipping in a movie recommendation Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have a series of travel movies where they spend much of their time doing impressions of people like Caine and Sean Connery while eating at posh restaurants. It’s hilarious and shows how Brits are a lot more attuned to language than we half literate Yanks. Many Brits in American movies have better American accents than Americas do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trip_to_Italy
Not to nitpick but Michael Caine was from Bermondsey. That is a South London accent he had, not East End.
I second your film recommendation. Very funny.
All nitpicking welcome. Sorry for shooting from the hip on that one. I have been to London–decades ago–and even bicycled around the place.
Believe Caine says he is from Elephant and Castle where he lived after WW2. Wiki says that is in Southwark/Bermondsey.
Deepak Chopra to J. Epstein: “God is a construct, cute girls are real.” The wisdom of an Indian guru.
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain (I’ll say it again).” The wisdom of ‘Scouser’ John Lennon, which I just couldn’t resist quoting.
Lyndon B. Johnson had the kind of disadvantaged accent being discussed in the article but he was still the President (much to the chagrin of the Harvard crowd I’m sure), and he used his accent to project humility, relatability, and Southern credibility, especially when pushing civil rights legislation that alienated some white Southerners. And it certainly helped him when he ran against Goldwater, for similar reasons.
I have an accent, Scottish, even though I’ve lived in Canada for nearly 60 years. It gets me into many conversations about Scotland. I have found people seem easier to talk to because of my accent, they make assumptions about me.When I was working as an RN many of my patients were older men who went through WW2 and were stationed in the UK….they sought me out just to talk with me a reminisce about Scotland.
So I would say having the “right” accent can help and so having the “wrong” accent would be detrimental
LOL. I’ve know this my whole life, having been born in Arkansas. Rather than the antebellum Southern of Georgia and Alabama, I spoke hillbilly Southern with and Oklahoma/Texas twang. The hillbilly accents of Appalachia and the Ozarks often elicit the most judgement. That being said, I have said “y’all” my entire life, and I can turn the twang on and off at will, depending on my audience.
My dad was a veterinarian with a Phd and mom was a musician and horse trainer, neither intellectual slouches, and I was lucky enough to attend a good liberal arts college in Minnesota. There my accent was an oddity with the Canadian long “o” being more common. My use of an “r” sound in “wash” and the weird long “a” in fire and tar was finally beaten out of me there, and I learned to speak proper American Midwestern English, which I think is as close to standard English as you can get in our diverse country.
I learned the trick of the blonde. When useful, I could turn up the accent to blend in, go under the radar, and become invisible. Essentially, to use others’ language bias as an advantage or camouflage. When in Rome….
Having grown up in the north end of Iowa I found the accent that was affected in movie Fargo to be very familiar, though in my opinion it was overdone.
My wife was born in San Antonio and moved with her family to Baton Rouge at a very young age. The family spoke Spanish at home and, although she was exposed to English, it wasn’t until she started school that she needed to use it on a daily basis. She learned the basics in a school run by an order of nuns from Indiana. If she had told me on the day we met that she was from the Midwest I would have believed her.
The rest of her family, parents and two younger siblings, each spoke with a different accent. Her mother was educated at a private academy in San Antonio where the instruction was in English and Spanish that leaned toward Castilian. Her father came out of San Antonio’s west side and retained his Tex-Mex accent. Her sister has a soft Louisiana drawl and her brother developed a Cajun accent because that was the crowd he hung out with while growing up.
My grandfather grew up in a dirt floor cabin in Appalachia and earned a PhD from Columbia. I can’t imagine what he went through. When I (MFA) go north past the Mason-Dixon Line I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.
Oh, the fascinating joy of language and accents. Some light personal bits to shake the war dust (always read that post first) off my brain:
1. World business development tour for the Korean company I was working for. Spend a day in London touring, with a thoroughly delightful Scottish bus driver. He’d usually do a running tour-guide bit, but explained out that Asian groups really didn’t care much about anything but getting to the next stop for “I was there!” pictures. He was happy to learn of my history degree, and as a result I had my own personal tour guide with loads of Q&A back and forth. Mid-afternoon he suddenly asks about where I’m from. He explains he prides himself on recognizing accents, often down to parts of a city, but while it’s clear I’m American he cannot even figure out a region. We then talked about the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania coal country and how, prior to TV, it was one allegedly one of the most accent-neutral parts of the world, supposedly in high demand for AT&T long distance operators because of their “interoperability” between most of the rest of the nation. Since “you’re born in the Valley, you live in the Valley, and you die in the Valley,” it was no surprise to him that he’d never bumped into my ilk before. My time in the Army, various overseas bits, and move to Oregon for law school and practice didn’t help much, I’m sure.
2. Korean, like Japanese, is a very monotonal language. Also like Japanese, regions will have a “patter,” which is more pronounced the further south you go. As a native English speaker, I tend to intonate for emphasis, rather than adjust word position, so it sounds like I have a southern “patter.” Secondly, while men traditionally use the formal form for verb endings (-kka) and women use the polite form (-yo), I found the conjugation of the polite form to be slightly easier. As a result, and was often pointed out to me, despite being a middle-aged man I sounded more like a woman from Pusan, a situation that amused my co-workers to no end….
3. Finally, speaking of accents and speech patterns, I find Donald Trump’s public speaking voice almost physically painful to listen to, and not just due to content. I’m told he has a different voice in person, but all I know is that I prefer to read the transcript rather than listen to the audio….
A bit of a Russian language perspective…
The Soviet Union is a bit of an idiosyncratic case that deserves its own lengthy discussion, but if you look at either the Russian Empire or the post-Soviet Russian Federation, a marker of class and status seems to be not so much the “accent”, but the usage of foreign loan words and syntax.
In other words, in the 19th century you start out with the nobility learning to speak French, as children, before they speak Russian, and you can draw that thread of interjecting French loan words and phrases all the way to the end of the Empire, with maybe a bit of German and Latin sprinkled in, the latter to indicate that one had completed private school (where the Classics would be taught). Usage of Russian or Slavic words where a French expression could be substituted was the basic marker for “lower class”. You can clearly see this in the literature of the day, spanning the century from Gogol to Chekhov – if you read it in the original, of course, the English translation takes a good bit of the nuance away, in my experience.
Today, it’s kind of similar, but with English and anglicisms replacing French. And there are shades and hues to it. The affluent Moscow hipsters just throw in a bunch of (badly pronounced) English words to substitute for perfectly serviceable Russian equivalents. This is separate from loan words like “pizza” or “trader” (no stock market traders in the Soviet days), this is more like using the English word for “marketing” (“marketing”) in place of the extant and very much used Russian equivalent (“reklama”).
The business and political elite, meanwhile, has gone deeper. They often adapt their syntax to where they may still utilize mostly Russian words, but the grammar is “English”. I have read more than one Medvedev speech from when he was president, for instance, where you could literally do a word-for-word translation into English – which you shouldn’t be able to do due to the vast linguistic gulf between Slavic and Germanic languages (speaking from experience of translating a wide variety of texts back and forth). In Russian, it sounds…technically correct, but somehow wrong, artificial*. Medvedev himself has backed off this, by the way, trying to be more of a populist these days, I suppose. But various oligarchs and “high-end” business writers in Kommersant, and more than a few academics and television commentators, are still guilty of same. It’s not the spoken accent, per se, that is the class marker, or even necessarily English words, but the very way you speak…
* – A very basic example. In Russian, the term for Central Asia has, for at least a good century, been “Middle Asia” (“Srednyaya Aziya”). Saying “Central Asia” (“Tsentral’naya Aziya”) in Russian is technically correct, and still uses all Russian words, but “feels” wrong, because it is a translated anglicism. The same principle can be, is, applied to syntax for entire sentences, phrases, paragraphs, especially evident when some high mucky-muck from the banking or financial sector gives a television interview…
Fascinating comment! I hsve often wondered why the Russian word for nightmare is a French word, cauchemar. Didn’t the Russians have nightmares before they went to France?
I live in rural Oregon and hire a neighbour lad to help me with yard work. He and his cohort (white, working class) speak in a severely elided way. He told me he was saving up to buy a ‘foweler’. I couldn’t understand until he showed me a picture of a 4-wheeler on his phone.
The linguistic class gap is widening, and it doesn’t bode well for them that don’t speak right.
“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.”
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Shaw also quipped, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”
Pronunciation is often different. For example, a middle t is usually pronounced with a soft d in front in US (ward-ter instead of war-ter for water), and which of the first two syllables is emphasised is usually reversed.
Spoken like an Irishman. (I think Shaw actually did say something about how it took the Irish to teach the English how to use their language properly…)
Canada has its regional English accents as well — Newfoundland, Haligonian (Halifax), Quebecois, Ottawa Valley to name a few. I am less familiar with any variants west of Ontario, but I don’t doubt they exist.
My aunts from Calgary always sounded like the munchkins in Wizard of Oz, to me.
@eg at 4:44
I was in Newfoundland some 25 years ago for work and faced “lard tunderin jayzuz” and “jumpin jayzuz” quite often. Enjoyed it a lot.
I live in Quebec and speak French well. There are many quite different regional accents in the province.
A la prochaine les amis!
Welcome relief from the impending doom-loop y’all. Indeed all y’all at NC.
Thanks, ThirtyOne. I agree!
And really nice — and correct — usage there!
@ThirtyOne at 5:16
Entièrement d’accord trente et un! Une parenthèse bien appréciée.(Completely agree 31! A parenthesis greatly appreciated)
There are reasons the Southern U.S. has produced, and still produces, great and good writers at a pace above the per capita average of other regions. The many reasons could be the subject of a book length examination, I think. But the overall Southern form of spoken word is an important one of them. Southerners tend to speak more slowly — the accent upon and expansion of vowels slows down the pace of speaking and results in a more generally assonant overall sound. Consonant sounds serve to break the flow of vowel sounds. Listen to the great Black preachers and other leaders from the South of the past century, and hear this part of the dialect at its best — mellifluous, melodic, paced, content-packed and efficient in its own sort of way. [“I-have-a Dree-ee-am…a-a-awll God’s children…,” MLK]
When speaking more slowly, one tends to lyricism naturally, I think. Instead of plowing through a ton of words in a “New York minute” we Southerners tend to try to pack more thought into fewer words, and with more feeling. Many of the great and good Southern writers are noted for character and story, not necessarily lengthy landscape descriptions, for example…
When I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, I learned to tell Southern accents apart fairly well, each region having distinctive “tells” in terms of assonance and terminology and length and type of drawling vowels, etc. In the 80’s and even into the 90’s I could fairly reliably place someone’s accent to a region no larger than a typical state – “That’s an Arkansas accent” or “that’s a North Alabama accent” and sometimes even a city — and yes, to a careful listener, New Orleans DOES have an accent all its own, amongst the diversity of languages and dialects there. However, as is noted in the post, all these small differences have now become less pronounced — decades of television and now online videos and podcasts have changed the accent landscape. It’s harder to pinpoint the speaker of a Southern accent’s original ground than it used to be. It’s sometimes somewhat easier with older people in my experience — as the article mentions, we seem to cling to our linguistic roots.
As for discrimination against a speaker with a Southern accent, I can certainly attest to that. When I left the South for college, I was headed to “B-aaw-sten” and somehow ended up in “B-ah-ston”! It made for an especially interesting time for me. I did ameliorate my accent over time but never blended it out completely — I didn’t want to and I didn’t care after a while. Those who will discriminate based on accent instead of content of speech fell out of my life and those who listened didn’t care, or found the charm in the accent. After a while, upon carefully noticing the differences in how people behaved in general in the North compared to the South, I came to view my somewhat toned-down Southern accent as a badge of honor. Still though, navigating Boston-area and college bureaucracies was necessary. Ingrained hostilities did seem to make a difference in how I was treated some of the time, although the general harshness of the Northern big city compared to typical general Southern hospitality and good manners may have jaded my opinions and experiences.
As a person who speaks with a Southern accent, I have found that it has advantages as well. I can, to some extent, turn it on and off and drift between ‘classes’ of people without arousing strong ‘othering.’ It can also be disarming to some people who judge you as ignorant because of accent, only to find out later that your command of logic, rhetoric, and fact exceeds their own — a short-term tactical advantage, if you play it that way.
And I have never understood why some people think that ‘code-switching’ is necessarily inauthentic. It happens naturally to me depending on circumstances and is as authentic to me and my personality as any other way of speaking. When I’m around Northerners, I revert to a more bland accent; when around Southerners, I let my accent flag fly; when I’m around urban Southern Black people, I use more terms that are more familiar to that style of representation. But I’m still me, and I don’t say anything that I wouldn’t otherwise say. To me, it is the same as speaking Spanish when in Spain and French when in France or writing in the python computer language when programming a computer. I am multi-slang, multi-accent, and multi-lingual. No difference in me, just in how I choose to express myself at a given moment and place in time.
And finally, I must admit that I do, myself, draw conclusions about a person’s overall background from the strength of a Southern drawl. A very strong drawl does signify, still, the amount of isolation a person has experienced among strictly Southern speakers and tends to be associated with a rural and provincial background. I don’t think it makes me terribly biased against these speakers, just more aware of their probable background. Overall, I do enjoy linguistic diversity, except when obvious rules of grammar are ignored. My most recent pet peeve is when correct verbs are ignored or missed — i.e. “have went” is wrong, just wrong. It should be “have gone.” It doesn’t take an accent to mess things up! [ I constantly have to prevent myself from turning into the online grammar police, LOL! ]
Shelby Foote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCnK_4nj5Gc (0:27)
Thank you wol.
What a nice clip of Shelby Foote’s manner of speaking. It does ‘illustrate’ (or ‘audiate’ maybe?) the description I gave above — the flowing of vowels interrupted by consonants, the vowels almost forming melodies as a sentence flows. At this point in Shelby Foote’s life, he was somewhat travelled, so you won’t hear the thickest of accents from him, but isn’t his delivery beautiful?
Here’s one for you and others, as well – Eudora Welty. By this time in her life Eudora Welty had traveled widely, and while her accent is still fully Southern, I would have to say it is a bit less strong than Shelby Foote’s I think. However, in her reading of her own story, you can hear the same melodious delivery that I think makes the Southern accent so wonderful. You can literally hear why the words and sentences she weaves are powerful in their arrangements. It is prose-poetry-music to my ear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO-i31EXSo4
In chapter 3 of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe gives an example of a hitherto déclassé accent that became fashionable:
“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot … coming over the intercom … with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself …
That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in the daylight’. … It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”
In Germany this issue is a returning discussion subject.
Until the 2000s apparently Bavarian-speaking children e.g. were taught to drop their accent.
To this day German dialects however are very strong in a sense of identification.
Remember that unlike other major European powers German nationhood came very late essentially with the 1918 revolution. If one leaves out the Prussian dominated German Empire of 1871 for centuries Germany was merely an association of various regional powers which caused a power void in the centre of the continent.
The Holy Roman Empire ended by Napoleon on 1806 was more of a symbolic function. In reality it was made of 300 regional powers who hardly identified themselves with a national term of “German” comparable to such Western entities as Sweden, France, Spain, England, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Scotland to name a few.
Correspondingly you had countless accents. And as small powers were extremely keen on preserving themselves and often were facing larger enemies the interior cohesion often rooted in such accessable, everyday features as language. And this attachment has oddly remained. I assume not least due to the rather short period of a central power that ruled in Germany uncontested by the people.
To put it short: Accent made you different and proud.
With the advent of modern administration and stratification of education, the idea of “Hochdeutsch” / “High German” as the official accent became accepted. And due to the relegation of many everyday matters to a central government for the first time a hierarchy of accents came into being – interestingly as a counter to the usual progressive developments that 20th century nationhood in most areas would promise for the citizens accents for the first time were reason to be disregarded.
Now local accents for decades became a dinstinguishing moment of cultural resistance.
As such it was picked up by the arts and local entertainment in various forms.
German style political stage comedy called “Kabarett” (not cabaret!) became a major focal point where accents were cultivated. Often as a sign of independent thought.
This might correspond with the mainstream Hollywood role of the average Southern accent often regarded as a characteristic of anti-establishment as understood by Europeans.
This romanticization would bleed into such special cultural phenomena as Bavarian Blues where the Bavarian accents (there are several of those btw) would serve to correspond with the pecularities of American tongues common among various slave societies in the US.
I don´t know if US fiction literature knows a strong nationally acknowledged traditon of local accent Classic writers. In Germany there used to be a few and this attempt to help survive accents by way of literature has been unchanged (songwriting like in the US is probably even more prominent in this context).
By now the educational systems too have adopted this view and instead of levelling differences in tongue are intent to help children handle “both”, keep their local accent and master the official German. Of course in professional life that mostly takes you only so far.
Unless you end up at acting school, film/theatre or as a TV show host – or a politician.
A few accents (mainly Bavarian, North German kin to English sounds, and Saxonian) are very popular in comedies.
Think of the French 2008 hit comedy “Welcome to the Sticks” which made nearly $240M revenue at the boxoffice in Europe, a film about a Frenchman from the South of France who finds himself sent near to Dunkirik in Northern France where he hardly understands a word. I remember it to be rather annoying but it resonated with domestic audiences.
I remember visiting a Bell Labs New Jersey facility in the 1980’s to demonstrate some equipment.
The salesman who covered this facility advised us to be cautious about Bell Labs employees who spoke with a Southern accent.
As I recall, he said southern accent speaking Bell employees would be teased about their accents by fellow employees in the labs.
As a response to the teasing, some southern accent holders would , supposedly, delight in using their accents to back visitors into technical corners by asking increasingly difficult questions.
I did not experience this behavior during the visit, but remember the caution.