Southern Accent and its Perception across the USA

The Southern American English dialect is often labelled as the least respected American English dialect, its speakers, due to cultural stereotypes, reflexively deemed as less cultured, less intelligent, and even less employable than those with accents of less stigmatized regions, which are themselves contrasted with Standard American English (SAE) – the “TV journalist” dialect that is the object of accent reduction training and itself mimics a central mid-western dialect.

SEE ALSO: Accent Discrimination, Language Prejudice and the Workplace

However, even while such typecasts can have a source in truth, discrimination based on superficial traits rather than the individual’s proven ability can inhibit that employee from reaching his or her full potential and cause tension within an organization.

Accent is detected within the first half-second of speech, and this may arouse prejudice that one originally holds against a specific group of people, a specific culture.

It therefore serves to understand that the American South should be viewed as an American subculture, its history, politics, economy, education, geography, climate and religion all forming a distinctive society.  Perhaps the most damning of these traits include history and economy (which intertwines with education), the former conjuring newsreels of racism and the latter images of overall clad, toothless, barefoot hillbillies.  Today, entertainers such Larry the Cableguy and Jerry Springer exploit negative typecasts of American southerners.

Prejudiced preconceptions of American southern culture rarely take into account the diversity and the complex linguistic relations within the South itself.  When the umbrella label southern accent is used, it shelters multiple dialects of multiple cultures that exist in the American South: Coastal, Midland, Highland.  Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Texas; each region is the source of a distinctive southern culture and, yes, dialect.

Within this diversity itself is a sociolinguistic status hierarchy with the Virginia Piedmont, the Charleston, and the Savannah dialects balancing on the highest rung with the support of their deep, colonial, aristocratic roots (and this accent may be most distinguished by the pronunciation of r only in syllable-final position (like in British English).  We therefore have /V AH JH IH1 N Y AH/ for Virginia.

The least respected southern dialect, the Appalachian dialect, comes from the mountainous U.S.  region of historical poverty, isolation, and lack of education—all disadvantages that have helped to fossilize negative prejudgments.  Predominantly of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh settlers, the terrain ensured isolation from the rest of the United States, preventing access to power-centered U.S.  cultures and developing independently in ways of religion, politics, and dialect, which can be recognized by the diphthong /AY/ (IPA /aɪ/) losing its second element, which gives makes words such as fire and tire sound more like far and tar.  Even more exotic is the “intrusive R,” which gives us “worsh” for the word wash.

Even though some negative typecasts may be founded in an unflattering set of statistics or history (typecasts, after all, originate from somewhere!), how can one avoid discrimination?

A workplace should encourage cultural and linguistic diversity as a means of expanding perceptions and minimizing ignorance.  A dialect may stimulate prejudice against a culture, but as is inherent with stereotyping, this perception ignores the diversity of that culture and the people within it; individuals are likely to defy even the most fossilized labels.

The same rules must apply to any intercultural interaction: appreciate and learn from differences, avoid prejudgments.  It is a grave mistake to discredit the person for the dialect, for everyone has an “accent,” including those of Standard American English, and no accent is a defect.  Ultimately, having been nurtured in one dialect instead of another does not indicate the person’s capacity or character – appropriate concerns of a collaborative team.

Mycah Banks grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, studied literature and history at university, and then moved to Japan to teach English.  Settling back into the eastern U.S., she is now an aspiring librarian.