What's your opinion on the Southern accent?

So recently, I began to use a southern (american south, naturally) accent with a couple friends. Then for some reason it began leaking into my normal speech, and at this point I now use it as much if not more than my usual non-accent. I even got some compliments on it (very uncommon in Northern Virginia; met only a couple people with it, and they were real old), and it is a good conversation starter with people I don't know.

But what I want to know is your guys' opinion on it. Quality is not an issue, as growing up for 9 years in North Carolina has provided me with ample experience with it.

So what do the Orgahs think of the southern accent? Cute? Annoying? Funny? What?

Honestly, I think most Southern accents sound really vulgar (just like some British and Australian accents on women) on men and women. It is not because I associate it with something bad, but just that they sounds seems very guttural and vulgar. I definitely do not hold it against someone if they have one, but it annoys me. (as does a New England accent...but for different reasons :P)

I don't know what y'all are talking bout, we don't have an accent. Everyone else just talks funny.

i have one. obviously i like it. most people who grow up around the military or are in the military pick one up.

Poncey Southerners. Say "Ite Love" to them and you get the right odd "Good thanks, yourself?" back at ya. I reckon it's all that sunshine what makes them all so feckless.

I say that as someone who is accosted by Southerners as a Northener, and vice versa because of my untraceable accent, so I'm probably not the best person to go to on advice for that.

In reference to the OP, the American Southern Accent is rather like the Scouse accent, in that it amplifies certain qualities of the individual, notably class. For example, the Scouse accent is lovely when a Scouser is being nice to you, but when they are being nasty it is absolutely terrifying. Likewise with the American Southern accent, only with class.

Meh.
The Brooklyn accent is the best.

But I don't find anything wrong with the southern accent at all.
Of course, most of my experience with it has been with Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy, so thats not saying much.

I've a half accent, myself. Family has it, people in the region dont, generally. It is homey.

having lived with this accent all around me (miraculously leaving my accent largely intact) for 4 years, I can say that what I told Richard over at project SYW still holds true (it's in context of being in Colorado):

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Originally Posted by Ibrahim

....they don't speak in this annoying Texan twang.

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Texan, as some might tell you, is in fact a southern accent. as to why I find it annoying? well, it's almost unintelligible to me-the drawl being the main reason. it's hard to decipher what a person is saying when they sound like this: "owl dem gahs oh-vuh i-at the howlding pin awr fyeedin' duh hawgz". though to be fair, it's not something that is reprehensible or shameful: it's just the way the accent is. it's what happens when your accent's origin lay in another accent that drawled a bit (Cornish apparently).

I'm not a big fan of the southern accent but I like to do one at home for fun.

Some FLDS polygamists have an accent similar to a southern one and it's one of the most awful accents I've ever heard in my life, especially when it's a young adult male who's speaking.

Accents in general don't do anything for me. Though I always have a good laugh when people claim I have one. :rolleyes: Yeah right.

Pahk the cah at hahvahd yahd. Can't top that. I did go to Virginia once, funny how the southern accent seemed to pop up once you went south of the Maryland border.

my town in maryland is pretty southern. we get the first day off deer season off and we are renonwned for our old tobacco plantations. Its the tip of the old southern black belt.

Lovely country down there. I enjoyed the scenery much the further south we went. W. Virginia was so wooded, I loved it!

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Originally Posted by JuJuBee

Lovely country down there. I enjoyed the scenery much the further south we went. W. Virginia was so wooded, I loved it!

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W. Virginia is indeed very nice, those mountains are creepy as heck if you drive through them at night though. :sweatdrop:

I can understand that! Big Foot or something might lurk out there!

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Originally Posted by JuJuBee

I can understand that! Big Foot or something might lurk out there!

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Don't even joke around about that. Sure, you're laughing, having a good time, then suddenly you hear a knock at the window. And there he is. Starring at you. And he shakes his head disappointingly.. and then walks away.

There is no greater shame than to know Big Foot disapproves of your life-style.

i feel like some of the residents themselves are more frightening. im pretty sure you can find entire clans of bigfeet ?(plural) at the local walmart supercenter

We used to joke around with a friend of mine who had claimed that he saw bigfoot crossing the street near where he lived. He was adamant that he saw bigfoot, but none of us beleived him. Another time, some friends of mine and myself were hiking in the white mountains in New Hampshire and one of my friends stepped in poop that was larger than his foot print in said poop. It was huge. After that, we all said that that was proof of big foot living there. A shame none of us took a picture of it.

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Originally Posted by Subotan

In reference to the OP, the American Southern Accent is rather like the Scouse accent, in that it amplifies certain qualities of the individual, notably class. For example, the Scouse accent is lovely when a Scouser is being nice to you, but when they are being nasty it is absolutely terrifying. Likewise with the American Southern accent, only with class.

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Spot on!

Southern is quite awful when some hick speaks it. But when spoken by an educated Charleston Belle....yummie! Just the sweetest accent ever. I could listen to it all day long. :smitten:



I am quickly at a complete loss when somebody speaks in a variant of English from the British Isles. I don't understand you if you speak Geordie, or Scouse, or Cockney. American variants by contrast are always easy to understand. Never a problem.

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Southern is quite awful when some hick speaks it. But when spoken by an educated Charleston Belle....yummie! Just the sweetest accent ever. I could listen to it all day long

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Totally agree! It's much more enjoyable than someone with equivalent sophistication with a Yankee/Cali/Midwest etc. accent

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Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

I am quickly at a complete loss when somebody speaks in a variant of English from the British Isles. I don't understand you if you speak Geordie, or Scouse, or Cockney. American variants by contrast are always easy to understand. Never a problem.

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I'm reminded that Trainspotting needed subtitles when it was released in the United States. That said, you're not alone, as one of my friend's mum has a lot of trouble understanding another friend's dad, who is Glaswegian. I can understand him fine, but I guess that's the result of having an utterly noxious cocktail of accents.

Meh

@Subotan: on the Internet, Scouse is not just another accent. It's got its own language code: "en-scouse".

I have a very, very slight southern accent, even though I was born in Manhattan.

Probably has something to do with living in the south for the past 16+ years.

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Originally Posted by Subotan

I'm reminded that Trainspotting needed subtitles when it was released in the United States.

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Well, they dubbed Mad Max when it was released over here, so I think it says more about us than about the accents.

The "southern" accent covers a lot of ground though. A Texas twang is a lot different than what you get in North Carolina/Virginia. And God only knows what the people in Louisiana are saying. :no:

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Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios

@Subotan: on the Internet, Scouse is not just another accent. It's got its own language code: "en-scouse".

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That's brilliant! Looking at Wikipedia, it seems that that was done whilst the internet was still largely whimsical, as I don't think it could get permission to do that today.

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Originally Posted by drone

Well, they dubbed Mad Max when it was released over here, so I think it says more about us than about the accents.

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I still need to see that film, as well as Trainspotting.

I am from Southern California, we have perfected the ability to not have any uniqueness to how we pronounce English.

There really aren't such things as 'accents', rather they are varying forms of dialects (variations of a common language). Words are comprised of phones, phonemes, and morphemes. Phones are the most basic sounds you make (pronouncing 'l' in 'love'). Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that carry meaning, differing from phones in that they carry the same equivalent in sounds (cat and kite). Morphemes are phones and phonemes stringed together to form coherent phrases ('fire', 'fight', and 'er' in 'firefighter'). Note that I left out other variations of speech, such as allophones.
Simply because someone strings together morphemes differently (uses "y'all" instead of "you all") doesn't mean they are dumb, just culturally different.

Everyone, to some degree, is a little ethnocentric when it comes to dialects other than their own. Case in point: Pop in your average law movie, and your attention will immediately be drawn to the hotshot lawyer with the thick Texan dialect. It may or may not be that we feel that he isn't suited to the job simply because he's speaking a different dialect than Standard Spoken English, it's just that we are culturally hardwired to draw our attention to people who vary greatly.

Going back to what I said before, just because someone has a perceivable drawl doesn't mean that they are less intelligent than you, it just means that their cultural dialect differs from yours. This also gets to be a problem in some situations, like job interviews, when a person is expected to speak Standard Spoken English rather than their own dialect. In these cases, unfortunately, that a lot of people have to be bi-lingual; speaking their own dialect at home or with friends, and SSE in a work situation.

As you might guess, I'm taking a Linguistic Anthropology course this semester.:juggle2:

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

I am from Southern California, we have perfected the ability to not have any uniqueness to how we pronounce English.

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haha false.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

haha false.

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Give me examples.

Loved it, but that's what you get for listening to Levon Helm's voice all the time. Or Cajuns. Cajuuuunz

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

Give me examples.

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surfer accent and yes its real. And don't tell me people don't say things like gnarly. They do and its distinctly Southern California.

not to mention the method of speaking is drastically different. slow speakers typical with the California way of life. of course it speeds up when you get around la in some cases.

lets not even get into different dialects like Chicano and some of the crazy Eurasian mixes you see up near parts of like Irvine and other dense Asian populations.

anyone who thinks they don't have an accent unique to their geographic and cultural region needs to visit the rest of the US. I don't blame you though acin your typical Californian the earth revolves around California.

Though i think we can all agree that Northern Californian accents are a 1000x more annoying. I mean the word hella literally makes my ears bleed.
(Sources)

7 years of life in Rancho Bernardo and Coronado, two summers of work in san diego on a fishing boat my mothers entire family split among la mesa, murrieta, la, hillcrest, orange county, other assorted san diego neighborhoods. mex-american family as well.
(just so you know im not pulling this out of my *** and basing it off stereotypes.)

That's like totally gnarly dood...

That is how I imagine people in California speak.

Och the noo, its a saer fecht, ye ken whit am talkin aboot?

That is how people in Scotland speak all the time, true story.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

surfer accent and yes its real. And don't tell me people don't say things like gnarly. They do and its distinctly Southern California.

not to mention the method of speaking is drastically different. slow speakers typical with the California way of life. of course it speeds up when you get around la in some cases.

lets not even get into different dialects like Chicano and some of the crazy Eurasian mixes you see up near parts of like Irvine and other dense Asian populations.

anyone who thinks they don't have an accent unique to their geographic and cultural region needs to visit the rest of the US. I don't blame you though acin your typical Californian the earth revolves around California.

Though i think we can all agree that Northern Californian accents are a 1000x more annoying. I mean the word hella literally makes my ears bleed.
(Sources)

7 years of life in Rancho Bernardo and Coronado, two summers of work in san diego on a fishing boat my mothers entire family split among la mesa, murrieta, la, hillcrest, orange county, other assorted san diego neighborhoods. mex-american family as well.
(just so you know im not pulling this out of my *** and basing it off stereotypes.)

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Surfers are a subculture of Southern California and probably make up around 1-3% of the population of Southern California. The vast majority of SoCal's probably don't surf. I doubt there is one in all of Bakersfield. I have not heard anybody say gnarly except surfers.

Again with the Chicanos and and Eurasians they are not individually a majority of Southern California.

I don't know why you interpreted what I said as being typical Earth revolves around California. If you knew me, I am anything but. I got the **** out of SoCal when I chose a uni because I didn't care for it. I have been living in the heart of it for my entire life.

You have proven my point that there is no single overarching uniqueness to how Southern California people talk. Only Chicanos speak like Chicanos, only surfers speak like surfers, only valley girls speak like valley girls.

Every region in the US encompasses multiple ethnic groups but in almost every region there is still a unifying thread of culture that ties the way english is spoken across the region. There are lots of ethnic groups in New York and yet there is still those recognizable "New York" accents and mannerisms that are prevalent across all people in the region, same for Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans etc... The fact that you basically just highlighted the different ways that ethnic groups talk in SoCal proves my point that there is no uniqueness to how SoCal in general speaks. You have to identify what ethnic group you are in in order to get a good understanding of how you sound in SoCal. Hence, no overarching "SoCal" voice.

Also I agree 100% about NoCal accents. Being in Santa Cruz means I have to hear the most absurd usage of the word "hella" everyday, and I hate it.

no there is. yall speak slowly its almost a drawl of sorts.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

Though i think we can all agree that Northern Californian accents are a 1000x more annoying. I mean the word hella literally makes my ears bleed.

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Ha kids here used to say hella a few years ago, but it's phased out now I never hear it anymore.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

no there is. yall speak slowly its almost a drawl of sorts.

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You should meet the girls from my high school...

This was not uncommon: http://youtu.be/wRpaTM1Sv6Y

Totally depends on the person whose speaking.

As far as my accent, I guess Montanan... I have a drawl, and an apparently rough sounding voice but I've never noticed. Closer sounding to our Brother's to the North (Canada) than any equivalent US accent.

Your Southern accent has nothing on the Aussie accent, especially a bogan (Aussie redneck) accent:

Oy maaate, whadaya doin this arvo? Reckon we'll go out on the piss? Get slaughtered and smoke a few durrys riooght? Oy, so I chucked a sickie today, :daisy: it mate, :daisy: it! I copped a rioght earbashing of me boss, rioght. :daisy: that :daisy:. Mate, today was a rioght scorcher, the boss can go :daisy: himself, chuckin a sickie was the way ta go. Rioght, c'mon mate let's get :daisy: pissed!

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

You should meet the girls from my high school...

This was not uncommon: http://youtu.be/wRpaTM1Sv6Y

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Some of my female friends speak a little like that... :skull: Imagine that plus a little bit of Aussie, yeh, not great.

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

You should meet the girls from my high school...

This was not uncommon: http://youtu.be/wRpaTM1Sv6Y

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https://img690.imageshack.us/img690/...makeitstop.jpg

I've lived my whole life in Alabama and I've got a horrendous Southern accent. Oddly, I didn't have one until some point in my teenage years, when I picked it up big time. In college (at Auburn University, War Eagle baby!) I even received comments from friends, who were also native Alabamians, that I had an unusually thick accent. It's kind of embarrassing sometimes. Honestly, I think how non-Southerns perceive one bearing the accent largely depends on how physically attractive they consider you. If they think the person is hot at first glance, the Southern accent will only add to their appeal. It the person it ugly, they'll likely label them an ignorant, incestuous, racist hick. I know that's painting some broad strokes, but it's my observation.

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Originally Posted by Subotan

Poncey Southerners. Say "Ite Love" to them and you get the right odd "Good thanks, yourself?" back at ya. I reckon it's all that sunshine what makes them all so feckless.

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I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say here. I suspect it was just a joke that I didn't catch. But now I'm curious and would love an explanation.

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

I am from Southern California, we have perfected the ability to not have any uniqueness to how we pronounce English.

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Don't know about that, but regarding the OP's question: one of my very best friends is in the Marines and recently spent 3 months in San Diego. He claims that his Southern accent was definitely a +plus+ to the ladies there, and also in Las Vegas, which he visited 2 or maybe 3 times. Now, he's also admittedly very handsome, which goes along with my theory.

Just my thoughts.

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Originally Posted by B_Ray

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say here. I suspect it was just a joke that I didn't catch. But now I'm curious and would love an explanation.

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In England, the Southerners are the posh elite, whilst the North is the poor, crap end of the UK. Southerners generally speak in RP (The traditional English accent) or variants upon them, whilst Northerners speak a variety of dialects.

I was watching a television program some time ago about a fishing vessel that disappeared in the waters north of the UK. Left port from some northern English fishing town. They were interviewing some townspeople about the fishing vessel and I couldn't understand a thing they were saying. As far as I knew, they were speaking English. I thought I spoke that language? I could pick out a few words, but that was about it.

I noticed a distinct difficulty as well in understanding English Accents the further north I traveled from Somerset, by Newcastle I resigned myself to a lot of nodding in conversations I didn't understand/comprehend.

That's understandable, as the wrong side of the Pennines are a different type entirely :yes: