This is an interesting discussion of southern speech, and how it evolved. They especially do a good job for the 3 accents of my home state.
This is pretty mindblowing, especially how the linguist transitions between accents 🤯 pic.twitter.com/66wNODFo6U
— 【 𝓓𝖗. 𝓥𝖔𝐱 𝓞𝖈𝖚𝖑𝖎 】 (@Vox_Oculi) March 8, 2023
Basically, we sounded most like Brits at first, but the heat made everyone slow down. A lot.
My first trip outside of the deep south was a school I attended in Kansas City; they had the usual go-around-the-room and introduce yourself at the opening. As fate would have it, I was the only person attending from the deep South. You have to remember, my formative years were spent with a lot of contact with my grandmother – who was still so mad about the Civil War you would have thought it had ended last week! My young days were full of warnings about “Yankees this” and “Yankees that”. For example:
- Yankees had no manners and were unfriendly and rude
- Yankees in NYC will let you be stabbed to death and not lift a finger to help you, because they “don’t want to get involved”
- Yankee women wear ugly shoes (the worst sin of all) and lots more
Anyway, it occurred to me that Grandmother was wrong; why, these people were really friendly, because when I began to talk, everyone started smiling at me. At that moment, I actually heard my own voice as it sounded to others for the 1st time, and realized they were laughing at me. I sounded like the old Shake ‘N’ Bake commercial: “It’s not fried, it’s Shake ‘N’ Bake!”
A female Jethro Bodine, they probably thought!
But then I remembered my Grandfather, who once went up north on some business venture – and people thought he must be stupid because of the way he sounded. He made a lot of money off those folks. So I smiled back.
