One of the reasons I was cast to do the novel I’m reading right now is because I grew up in North Carolina. Of course, the story is set in South Carolina so I have the wrong accent.
Yes. Yes, there is more than one Southern accent.
To complicate matters, my parents are from East Tennessee which is entirely different from either of the Carolinas AND I was surrounded by folks transplanted to the Research Triangle Park so while I can sound authentically Southern, it’s a weird hybrid. To someone from South Carolina it won’t sound fake, but it’ll sound like I’m from some other part of the South. Because I am.
I also had little to no accent growing up which we blame on two things, the abundance of transplants in Raleigh and a speech impediment when I was little.
See a sizable part of southern accents is the dropped R. I couldn’t pronounce the letter at all and had it trained into me when I was little. But there are things that betray my regional origin. Words that, because I don’t have an accent, sound like I’m just mispronouncing them.
Two of them, I learned when I was reading A Local Habitation. I’ve said “unfortunately” and “definitely” wrong my entire life. Since I’m using a southern accent for this other book, I called home to find out how my folks pronounced those two words.
The same way I do, which means it is a regional variation.
I’ve always said “unfortunantly” and “definently.” Which explains why I’ve never been able to spell either word… It also means that I should switch pronunciations depending on if I’m reading the narrator or a character. That should be fun.
Accents… they fascinate me.
More specifically, there are two major Southern dialect areas: Southern and South Midlands. Or Lower South and Upper South, depending on which linguist you ask. Upper South being the “hillbilly” dialect, which comes in part from Western Pennsylvania. To complicate matters more: some parts of Louisiana and Mississippi sound much less Southern than parts of southern Illinois. And the Baltimore and New Orleans accents have a lot in common with those of New York City and Boston (possibly transmitted by boids or ersters.) And by the time you get to Texas, there’s a mixture of dialects.
Note that dialects don’t always (if ever) respect state borders. New York State has four dialects, three of which go past state borders.
Possibly useful: There are books and recordings intended for actors who have to assume various accents, and major public libraries are likely to have them.
That’s interesting. I have sort of an unidentified accent too. Although I spoke mainly Mandarin up till age 16, I do not have a stereotypical Chinese accent. It was partly because that the stereotypical accent might have been derived from Cantonese speakers, and partly because my first language is Taiwanese. Also, I’ve lived in the U.S. for eleven years now. And sometimes I record myself, so sometimes I tweak my own pronunciation after I hear it played back. So now I have this sort of unidentified hybrid accent.
I’ve moved so much my own accent is a fairly ugly mixed breed. Which might explain why sometimes I say “liberry” and sometimes I say “libray” when I’m talking about the building with all the loanable books in it. 🙂
On the plus side, picking up accents is a fairly easy thing for me, because of having lived so many different places.
Even within the bounds of South Carolina, we had different accents. Along the coast, where I grew up, the southern accent was relatively light, but as you traveled inland it seemed to get heavier.
Have fun with the reading! I’d love to do that sort of gig.
Best,
Gray
As you know, I grew up in NC too. My parents were both speech and drama majors and my mother was a speech therapist. My sibs and I grew up with flawless neutral accents that most folks can’t place.
However, the advantages of speaking Southern to facilitate communication with others quickly became evident. I have three variations that I can whip out. There’s what I call the Scarlet O’Hara accent — what the rich plantation heirs speak, mostly down East, but it’s also common among the upper class elite in the piedmont. Then there’s what I call Bubba Southern. This is the accent used by working class folks from the piedmont and most of the East. Lastly is mountain southern, which probably sounds a lot like your Tennessee accent. Vowels are more nasal. Consonants are harder, and as you point out, extra consonants get added.
I agree that accents are fun and fascinating. And I also agree with Gray — what a fun gig! Enjoy.
I grew up in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, but I went to college in the upstate (just south of the border with NC) and ended up staying. One day a few years back, I was talking with my best friend (who lives in Charleston), and she said, “What happened to your accent?” Apparently I’d been in the upstate so long I no longer sounded “right”.
Broke my heart.
As pronouncing words wrong, apparently I have always mispronounced “drawer”, according to all the people around me here. I say “dra-wer”, but they say “dror”. Maybe I haven’t entirely lost my accent!
My boyfriend is very aware of accents. Maybe he would be anyway, but I always think being an Air Force brat has something to do with it. He’s from Texas, but he has no detectable accent. I remember being pretty annoyed when he claimed Oregonians *did* have an accent. He described it to me: lazy consonants (especially t’s decaying into d’s), small stuff like that. I’d thought that was just me. Sure enough, a few years ago the Oregonian ran a story about linguists describing the Oregon accent for the first time, strongest in Portland. Exactly the stuff Ryan said. So now I know that what I thought of as “enunciating clearly” for songs, plays and presentations was really speaking without my accent.
I still feel a little guilty for talking this way, especially since my lazy ‘t’ means I feel like I’m mispronouncing my own name!
accents are fun. i’ve been interested in them since my high school days. i was born in st. louis, moved to kansas city when i was small and then my parents decided to live in houston. when i’m around texasans they don’t think i have an accent because of the midwest in my voice. when i’m around midwesterners — particularly folks from st. louis or chicago — i can hear the texas in my voice but it vanishes in a puff of midwest within moments. i have a friend from chicago. when we first met she kept asking me to talk because it reminded her of home. 🙂