news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051123/ap_on_re_us/southern_identity_accents
By JEFFREY COLLINS and KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press Writers Wed Nov 23 , 6:20 PM ET COLUMBIA, SC - "Y'all" isn't welcome in Erica Tobolski's class in voice and diction at the University of South Carolina. And forget about "fixi n'," as in getting ready to do something, or "pin" when talking about th e writing instrument.
Tobolski's class is all about getting rid of accents, mostly Southern one s in the heart of the former Confederacy, and replacing them with Standa rd American Dialect, the uninflected tone of TV news anchors that oozes authority and refinement. "We sort of avoid talking about class in this country, but clearly class is indicated by how we speak," she said. "Many come to see me because they want to sound less country," she said. Across the fast-growing South, accents are under assault, and not just fr om the modern-day Henry Higginses of academia. There's the flood of tran splants from other regions, notions of Southern upward mobility that req uire dropping the drawl, and stereotypes that "y'alls" and "suhs" signal low status or lack of intelligence. The South, because of its rural, isola ted past, boasts a diversity of dialects, from Appalachian twangs in sev eral states to Elizabethan lilts in Virginia to Cajun accents in Louisia na to African-influenced Gullah accents on the coasts of Georgia and Sou th Carolina. One accent that has been all but wiped out is the slow juleps-in-the-moon light drawl favored by Hollywood portrayals of the South. To find that s o-called plantation accent in most parts of the region nowadays requires a trip to the video store. "The Rhett-and-Scarlett accent, that is disappearing, no doubt about it," said Bill Kretzschmar, a linguist at the University of Georgia and edit or of the American Linguistic Atlas, which tracks speech patterns. "Blame it on the boll weevil," he said, referring to the cotton pest. "Th at accent from plantation areas, which was never the whole South, has be en in decline for a long time. The economic basis of that culture starte d going away at the turn of the last century," when the bugs nearly wipe d out the South's cotton economy. Even as the stereotypical Southern accent gets rarer, other speech patter ns take its place, and they're not any less Southern. The Upland South a ccent, a faster-paced dialect native to the Appalachian mountains, is sa id to be spreading just as fast as the plantation drawl disappears. "The one constant about language is, it's always changing," Kretzschmar s aid. It's packed with strip malls and subdivisions with no cott on patches or peach trees in sight. "I don't hear it," 21-year-old Roswell native Amanda Locher said of the a ccent. She's never lived outside the South, but even Northern newcomers question her Southernness. "People tell me I sound like I'm from up Nort h To hear a true Southern accent, you'd have to go deeper south than he re." But he said his accent seldom makes conversation because the area is such a melting pot of newcomers. North Carolina State University linguist Walt Wolfram said it's a misconc eption among Southerners that Yankee newcomers are stamping out traditio nal speech. More likely, he said, is that newcomers pick up local speech patterns. "When people move here and don't think they've changed at all, they go ho me and people say, 'Wow. So it's still there, still strongly identifi ed with the South," Wolfram said. But that doesn't mean that population change in the South isn't chipping away at old-timey dialects, especially in cities. Wolfram said the "dear est feature" of the Southern accent the vowel shift where one-syllable words like "air" come out in two syllables, "ay-ah" is certainly vani shing. Other aspects such as double-modal constructions like "might co uld" are still pervasive. Kretzschmar, who has recorded Roswell speakers for three years, said his suburban Atlanta studies have backed up his suspicion that the Southern accent is morphing along with the urbanizing South. "It's not really disappearing, but the circumstances of living make it di fferent," he said. "People don't have connections with their neighbors t o maintain their way of speech. "The circumstances of how people get together and talk in the cities have changed; they're not constantly talking to people who talk just like th em. But in the South outside the cities, you have a lot of similarities. understands that people with strong Southern accents are often perceived as "slow and dimwitted." But he thi nks it's "sort of a shame" that people should feel the need to soften or even lose their accents. "My father, who was a surely intelligent man, would say cain't'. "I just think that there's a certain eloquence in Southern vernacular tha t I wouldn't want to lose touch with ... There are still plenty of professions that thrive on a go od Southern twang from preachers to football coaches to a certain bree d of courtroom litigators. And South Carolina's Tobolski, an Indiana native who came south eight yea rs ago, can help there, too. As a private coach she has even taught a po litician she wouldn't name how to ratchet up his Southern accent to make him appear more folksy before certain crowds a technique she calls "c ode switching." "I don't think that any regional accent is going to be eliminated," she s aid. "There's still people who want to hang on to how they sound. And that goes from New Jersey to M innesota to Wyoming to Georgia."
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