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The Southern Accent

Stephen Colbert once said that, when he was young, he realized that, on TV, a Southern accent was shorthand for stupid. He was right.

The South, in the US, is famous for a lot of things. Among them are: ridiculous laws (the phrase "fightin' words" was once in the Georgia constitution), hospitality, being politically conservative, and our accent. The Southern accent manifests itself in two forms: the refined, Old Money accent, and the white trash accent. The only problem is, Americans who aren't from the South don't make a distinction. When they hear a Southern accent, it doesn't matter if you learned it in yourgreat-great-grandfather's plantation from your mother, who just happened to be the president of the Junior League*. If you have a Southern accent, you're "simple" - stupid.

A large part of this comes from the history of the South. Southern history is very colorful, with lots of big events. Milledgeville is known as "The Antebellum Capital," and while that sounds very beautiful, really, it does, it's actually a reference to the Civil War: ante, of course, meaning before, and bell meaning war. The reason "Antebellum" sounds so pretty is that young, pretty, Southern women are known as "belles," as in "the belle of the ball," but I don't think the two uses are connected. Regardless, even as long ago as the Civil War was, it's still a huge thorn in the side of the Old South. In Macon, GA, there's a house called "The Cannonball House," and it's a tourist attraction. It's has that name because, during the war, a cannonball was shot into that house. That's it. But it is a landmark. Even today, among the older generations, you can still find people very angry about "The War of Northern Aggression."

That's all fine and dandy, but what does all that talk about Civil War have to do with negative perception of the Southern accent? In the South, there's a culture built up around not letting things go. We are proud of our heritage, even though it is only a couple of hundred years old. That affects the Southern accent two ways:

First, we stand on tradition. Our grandmothers are not women, but girls. True Southern belles, upon getting married (as virgins, of course, I don't know what you're implying) get a set of silver flatware. My mom has her grandmother's, my great-grandmother's, and it still has a slip of paper in her handwriting with a list of all the pieces and how many of each. A big tradition in the South is family. In the Old South, family meant money. Either your family had it or it didn't, and that was how it was going to stay. The rich were rich and the poor were poor, period. That means that the socially elite married amongst themselves (leading to a number of inbreeding jokes that I wouldn't deign to embarrass myself with) and hired each other. Companies had a line of succession, similar to kingship, really. And while that's not that unusual, what makes the this different than most places is that, in the South, no matter how lazy or unskilled someone was, if their father owned a company, they would own it. Their cousins would work for them. And their wives/sisters/daughters... well, they're women. Working was beneath them.

Secondly, and more importantly, we don't let anyone else forget who we are. Yes, we made a couple of bad decisions (um... slavery?), but that won't change the fact that we are proud of history.

Even more recently than all of that, though, the Southern states continually score in among the lowest in test scores. We have low test scores, high drop-out rates, and a high rate of teen pregnancy. Not everyone has access to those statistics, though, but everyone knows how religious the South is. We're called "The Bible Belt." Primarily, we're Baptist. I was raised Episcopalian, so I don't really know a lot about the Baptist branch of Christianity, except it really emphasizes Hell. In a time when most people in the US are moving away from religion to a more secular frame of mind, being from a place with a higher church-to-resident ratio than Starbucks-to-resident ratio is not something most people would be proud of. But we're Southerners, so we are.

I worked hard to get rid of my accent. I don't know, now, if it would've become a refined Southern accent or a white trash accent. My goal was to sound neutral, as far as Americans go, and, largely, I've achieved that. However, I still slip into it when I want something or when I'm in trouble... or when I've had a little to drink. The accent is looked down upon as stupid, but it's also seen as very cute, which is useful, sometimes.

* A very elitist society of rich housewives who devote themselves to helping the less fortunate. A nice idea in theory, but it usually ends up being a popularity contest (as the Junior League was THE original sorority) as well as being very self-serving.