Ask anyone what the most appealing feature of a southern belle is, and the first thing they’ll tell you is that thick, southern drawl. Supposedly, it’s awfully cute. When I travel, people tell me my southern accent is so cute. At home, people will marvel because I don’t have an accent. It makes me wonder if people up north only hear a southern accent because they know I live in the south, or if people down here think I don’t have a southern accent because it’s not as prominent as theirs.
My oldest daughter likes to pretend she has a southern accent. She’ll say “Rhat” instead of “Right” and “heyad” instead of head. People around here think it’s adorable; but when I ask her to talk correctly, she does. She only talks southern because she likes the attention associated with it, not because that’s how she talks.
I, personally, am not a fan of the southern drawl–it makes people sound uneducated. While other girls in high school were laying their thickest southern accents on the boys to peak their interest, I was busy practicing enunciation–hoping their dialect would not rub off on me. And I was convinced, still am, that the southern accent was created by southerners to make themselves seem more personable. These people are perfectly capable of talking normally, but they choose not to because no one coos over them when they talk normally. It just amazes me how a southerner will have a slight southern drawl at the beginning of a conversation–and minutes later will forget that words have vowels.
Don’t get me wrong, there are so many good things about the south. This is the land of front porches and sweet tea; time slows down, people wave at each other in traffic–it doesn’t get any more laid back or hospitable. It’s just that I don’t see why anyone finds a southern accent so attractive. I just don’t see why southerners can’t just talk the way they’re supposed to-at least to prove they passed the fifth grade-and quit pretending that they really talk like this. It’s not a real dialect, ya’ll!
I suppose people like the way southerners talk because it’s so different from the way they talk, much in the same way that I like hearing a British and Australian accents. I even like making people from Boston say, “I’m going to walk my dog and get some coffee.” There was this guy I knew in college (the first time I went) that said “yak” instead of “throw up. I’m not going to tell you how I know that. If you are one of those that “oohs” and “aahs” over a southern accent; well, that’s your thing–but I am still going to cringe every time someone comments on mine.
