So you have a southern accent, huh? Heads up: there is no such thing. What kind of southerner are youreally?
Regardless of where you were raised, I am willing to bet that you can fake a Southern accent fairly well. No one would ever notice you were faking, right? Wrong. Though you may be able to throw around a few choice twangy colloquialisms that you’ve heard on TV or in movies, there is a lot more to a southern accent than that. For those of you who are home grown Southerners, and self proclaimed belles and beaus, I can imagine you know a thing or two about accents. It only takes a fraction of a second to separate those who grew up in metro Atlanta from those who hail from the Georgia-Florida line.
Technically speaking, Southern American English makes up the largest linguistic group in the entire United States. That being said, you can’t expect an accent group that spans such a broad region to be anything less than as multifarious as the people who inhabit it. Does a Texan’s accent resemble that of a resident of the mountains in North Carolina? No. Does a farmer from South Georgia speak with the same drawl as a musician born in Nashville? No. Here’s the thing, though: they all qualify as people who speak Southern American English (SAE, for short).
Southern American English can not be used as an overarching distinction. Time and county lines have broken it into two main sections, referred to as Old and New SAE. Old SAE is what you’re hearing when you listen to "Miss Scaaahlet" from Gone With The Wind. It’s the epitome of a southern drawl, characterized by looong vowel sounds. Nowadays, you’re most likely to hear it spoken in northern Alabama and central Texas.
New SAE, on the other hand, has a great many sub-categories of grammatical anomalies rather than vowel sound extensions. This is the type of accent that is familiar to most of us, as it lays claim to the most well known word of the southern United States: y’all.
After being placed into a parent group of Old or New Southern American English, next, a southern accent must be identified by dialect. A singular southern accent itself does not exist. Depending on where you are in the country, the accent your ears pick up on may be classified as Virginia Piedmont, African American vernacular, Yat, Mississippi Delta, Creole, or Highland Southern (to name just a few). Each has taken on its own quirks, idioms and tones specific to the area. Each produces a sound unique to its people. If you listen closely enough, there’s a chance you’ll hear the remnants of the past – the accents of early explorers who visited America, farmers from neighboring states who rode into town to trade goods at the market, the Scottish families who were the first to establish the community or refugees who settled together in hopes of a better future.
Although the word y’all will be thrown back and forth across campus at least a trillion times, tomorrow, remember that each one is different. Each one has a background of its own. It isn’t just a southern accent you’re hearing; it’s history.
