The day has come. You’ve arrived on campus, fresh off a long trip from another part of the United States, perhaps even another country entirely. You’re now suddenly face-to-face with an entity you’ve only encountered in popular media or in regional stereotypes: the Southern accent.
Or maybe you’re a native of the Southern U.S. and are completely familiar with the accent’s famed quirks and drawls. Regardless of where you come from, the Southern accent is more than just a few unique ways of pronouncing words; it’s diverse, endearing and marked with fascinating linguistic history. And for what it’s worth, a PennStakes study found it to be considered the most attractive accent in the country.
To begin: What is the Southern accent? What are its so-called quirks and characteristics?
There is a wide array of dialectical variations across Southern states, and not every person who lives in the region speaks with the accent. There are, however, a few prominent traits.
First is the accent’s tendency to draw out vowel sounds. Some examples of this elongation are words like “there” and “bed,” where a single-vowel middle is often stretched out multisyllabically — “there” could be “the-yur,” and “bed” could be “bay-ehd.”
There’s also the “ah”-ification of “ay-yee” sounds. Take for example the color “white,” whose middle “I” typically follows the “ay-yee” pronunciation; a Southern speaker might pronounce it more like “waht.” “Kite” could be “kaht,” “eye” could simply be “ah,” and so forth.
Aside from phonetic characteristics, you’re also likely to hear aspects of Southern grammar and syntax. Most popular among these is “y’all,” the South’s signature second-person plural pronoun that, while seemingly informal, offers a useful reference tool that English doesn’t traditionally have. You might furthermore hear things like “might could,” a modal verb phrase somewhat comparable to “maybe,” or “fixin’ to,” a phrasal synonym of “about to.”
Next: Where does the accent come from?
This is another complex answer, but to tackle the question, we must do what all red-blooded Americans hate — look to the Brits. Many prevalent British accents are widely known for not pronouncing R’s in certain parts of words. Interestingly, this is not a natural part of those accents, but rather a created one; in the 18th century, many upper-class Britons began losing the R pronunciation in order to distinguish themselves from lower classes. The linguistic feature of dropping R’s is known as non-rhoticity.
There are two main points here in relation to the Southern accent. First, the non-rhotic accent movement began after the earlier immigrants from England inhabited the American South, meaning that the feature was not at that time carried over. Second, those who did come after non-rhoticity began were from less wealthy areas of England where R’s were still pronounced.
These less wealthy English people moved to agriculture-heavy parts of the South rather than the city-heavy areas of the North, and as a result they didn’t have as much exposure to international trade in port cities. That exposure is a large reason why accents like the famed Bostonian accent bear resemblance to British non-rhoticity.
Most important with any of this, beyond any accent traits or history, is recognizing that these are not inherently good or bad. There is a wealth of stereotypes about intelligence and character associated with the Southern accent, but they follow a mistaken idea of accents carrying personality traits.
Especially as students on a campus where it won’t just be Southern accents, but rather varying ways of speaking from around the world, we must acknowledge there is no good or bad, intelligent or unintelligent, or overall superior accent. Nobody owns the English language, and nobody can own the right accent.
We’re an enormous collection of cultures and nationalities, and our way of talking to each other in our own specific ways is an identity feature, not a bug.
