The one thing that people do consistently talk about to my face is my accent (or lack thereof). As soon as someone learns that I just moved here from Alabama, the invariable reaction is either "But you don't have an accent!" or "Where's your accent?" These reactions are delivered either in surprise, or slightly more rare but kind of discomfortingly, in almost a sort of anger. Most people here have never met anyone from the South, so imagine the disappointment when I fail to live up to their cultural expectations. I have all my teeth, I'm well educated, I speak with neither a twang nor a drawl. Some people at work have taken it as a sort of game, to try and spot when they can hear any sort of accent. "There it is! That sounded Southern!"
The one thing that this has really made think about is my feelings towards my background. I've never had a very strong accent (I'm not sure why) and I always assumed that people would have a negative reaction to a Southern accent. Instead, people really look forward to it and are really disappointed when I don't deliver. It almost makes me want to thicken my accent, to drawl on command. It has also really made me think about how I feel about Alabama. Ever since I moved there when I was 8 or so, I have denied it as my home state. I use what I call my "Alabama qualifier." If someone asks me where I'm from, I say something along the lines of "Well, I went to school in Alabama, but I'm from Georgia originally." My admittance to Alabama is almost always followed by that but. It happens completely on reflex now, fueled by my reluctance to claim one of the most repressive, ass-backwards states in the Union as my home.
So imagine my shock that Southern accents are cool.
1 comment:
I get the same thing - people ask me what part of the north I'm from, and seem to think that I'm lying to them when I assure them that I was, in fact, born and raised in the south, and apart from three years in Atlanta, have spent my entire life in Alabama. Since I've been working at Columbus State, where I spent 95% of my day on the phone with people who speak many dialects of English with various degrees of fluency, I've noticed some "Southern" creeping into my voice - it happens most often when I'm tired. I did notice in Alaska, though, that about 50% of the time, people said they could tell I had a "slight" southern accent, but I wonder if they were biased by the people I was with, who almost all had very strong accents.
I worry about what people outside of the south will think of my southern roots, too - but mostly I just hope that they'll be amazed by my intelligence and superior command of the English language, despite the one room schoolhouse they imagine I attended and the cow college from which I must have obtained my Bachelor's.
Are we sure that we weren't separated at birth? Because the social paranoia thing sounds an awful lot like me, too.
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