What's your opinion on the Southern accent?

[Subotan]

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

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

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.

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.

[Strike For The South]

Meh

[Tellos Athenaios]

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

[Hooahguy]

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.

[drone]

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

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.

[Subotan]

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

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.

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

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

[a completely inoffensive name]

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

[Kekvit Irae]

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.

[Centurion1]

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

haha false.

[a completely inoffensive name]

haha false.

Give me examples.

[Hax]

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

[Centurion1]

Give me examples.

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.)