Southern Accents

Going, going and soon to be gone?

Several years ago, I was giving a talk at a conference when I noticed that the woman who had invited me was sitting in the front row whispering with her neighbor. Their conversation went on for some time so when she greeted me afterwards, I asked, “what were you talking about?”

“We were trying to decide where you were from, “ she said. “And we decided that it was Iowa.”

As one of my kids once said, “wrongo bongo.”

When people find out that I grew up in Georgia, the next question is always, "why don't you have a Southern accent?"

Now mind you, these folks usually do not have an accent from wherever they grew up whether it be New York, Michigan, Massachusetts or any number of other places we associate with a strong regional accent. My parents, for example, one from New Jersey and the other from Wisconsin, had a running battle over whether the correct name for the ice cream topper was “sprinkles” or “jimmies” but neither had a detectable accent from their home state.

Somehow people just expect Southerners to sound like Jed Clampett or Gomer Pyle or perhaps Scarlett O’Hara. And worse, some just expect that if you have a Southern accent, you're either dumb as a sack of hammers or an unmitigated bigot or both.

Turns out, I am not alone in being a Southerner without a Southern accent. And thanks to transplants from elsewhere (including I suppose technically myself since I moved to Atlanta at age 2), a recent study by a team at the University of Georgia found that starting with Generation X (defined as those born between 1965 and 1982), the classic Southern accent has gone into a steep decline.

Like the nostalgia most of us have for things from our childhood, this makes me sad. 

Jenny, my first housemate in DC, grew up on a farm in West Tennessee. She not only had a strong accent but also liberally sprinkled conversations with all manner of Southern expressions, noting for example, when someone or something was “slicker than greased owl shit” or describing a large quantity as “more than Carter has liver pills.” And when I needed a ride somewhere, she’d be happy to “carry” me there just so long as I “mashed the button” to lock the car door.

My parents' dear friends, John and Ann Griffin, had the most delightful accents, his from Monroe, Georgia (midway between Atlanta and Athens) and hers from the Virginia Tidewater. Another friend, historian Dan T. Carter was a great storyteller, his tales enhanced by his South Carolina drawl. And best of all: Jo Anne Stubbs, who grew up near Orlando, long before Disney transformed the area. I will never forget picking up the phone in the kitchen when college friends were visiting from Philly and upstate New York and seeing their astonishment as I drawled “Hey Miz Stubbs,” echoing her warm and welcoming and very Southern “Why Anne!”

My memories of all these folks just makes me smile.

Of course there are times when a strong accent requires translation, like the time when my husband and I were visiting my mom and decided to spend an afternoon enjoying the beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains north of Atlanta. It was in the days before GPS and Google Maps and somehow we got turned around on those winding two-lane byways. At one wide spot in the road, we sent my husband in to a small store to ask for directions. He came back to the car shaking his head, commenting about the clerk: “I didn’t understand a word she said.” I went in myself and while I don’t recall what I heard, apparently I understood because we did manage to make it home that day.

This medium doesn’t really lend itself to a full appreciation for the range of Southern accents so if you want to immerse yourself both in the sounds of the South and Southerners’ feelings about how they talk, I’d suggest the Bitter Southerner podcast, particularly the first episode of Season 2.

Y’all enjoy now but don’t dilly dally. You best catch it right quick before those accents disappear altogether.