A quick audio lesson on Southern linguistics. Anyone who thinks that Southerners sound ignorant just because of their accents should listen to this. Beautiful.
I wish I knew where this came from, or the name of the woman who’s speaking here. All I know is that she’s a tour guide at one of the plantations in the South… (Edit: Since posting I’ve found out that the speaker is named Judy Whitney-Davis, and the plantation she works at is Houmas House in Louisiana.)
But the primary reason most people don’t realize that the American Southern accent is not a sign of ignorance but actually the fact that, according to linguists, we’re the only people left in the United States that still sound like our ancestors.
Because if you listen to native-born Southern speakers, the average Southerner tends to sound like this — what we call this “Moonlight Magnolia Drawl” — because if you speed up that Southern Drawl, over time it rapidly becomes a British accent.
Most people don’t realize that people that came here from Europe were largely from the United Kingdom so when they got here, this was more along the lines of their speaking tones but that’s the first and second generations coming off the boats, not their children. By the third and fourth generations, the kids don’t sound quite like Mum and Dad anymore because they’re starting to develop a slight elongation in the way they talk; what’s today called the “Virginia Tidewater Accent”.
It’s not a complete Southern drawl because that’s port area but as you go farther into the Southern interior and the years progress, the accent tends to get thicker, deeper, richer by Arkansas/Alabama/Georgia, HECK YEA you got a full-blown Southern drawl.
But people don’t realize that in most cases in Louisiana, many of the native speakers don’t sound like that. Dey tend t’ sound like dis, I garontee. Speshlee round d’bayous. Cuz you speed up dat Southern Louisiana Cajun/Creole accent, over time it becomes en français — French.
With, of course, certain exceptions in New Orleans which tend to sound more like New Yorkers because of the Irish and the Sicilian Italian influence. So they tend to sound a bit more like this. And people tend to get a lil’ bit confused cuz they think “What, ya from New York?” “Nah, I’m from N’AWLINS. Why?”
So you have to realize that, at the end of the day, Southern Speakers, like I said: we’re not ignorant, as it’s often been assumed, but we simply sound like the ancestors that came here so many years ago.
