On accents

[xiphias]

So, people called me on the phone today to set up times to meet to see the apartment. And I noticed something that I've always known tacitly, but this helped make it explicit to me.

As much as we say otherwise, the United States has social classes. And you can, somewhat, tell what social class someone comes from by their accent.

I'm sure this comes as no surprise to browngirl, whose parents were clear to the point of corporal punishment that SHE was going to have an accent which marked her as belonging to, or at least POTENTIALLY belonging to, the class which has money and power in this country.

And, basically, that's what we were being taught in Voice and Articulation class: here's how to have the powered and monied accent.

But I want to learn how to have a blue-collar accent. Actually, I want to learn SEVERAL blue-collar accents. I just think that would be fun, to be able to modulate my accent to fit in anywhere, pass as any social class.

That's also why I'm leaning more towards supporting Howard Dean over John Kerry. Kerry's accent marks him as an "aristocrat." It's not fair, it's not all that accurate. But he's percived as "different" by the majority of people in the US. Dean's accent marks him as "upper working class" -- an admired and aspired-to class by the majority of Americans. Most folks don't aspire to being aristocratic -- they aspire to working hard and becoming wealthy and comfortable and respected -- and THAT'S the accent that Dean has.

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I think there's a big difference in perception between
lower-class Southern accents that tend to provoke
prejudice, and the accents of educated Southerners.
I read a book a few years ago, about changes in
regional accents. (I remember it was by someone in
central Connecticut, but I don't remember his name.
The book is in the house where I used to live.
[bother] A blue paperback, on the set of shelves
right behind the computer.) He distinguished a
regional dialect (unique sentence structure, or
unique words) from a regional accent speaking
standard English.

He said that all the US presidents recent enough for
their voices to be recorded had spoken standard English.
Not regional dialects. They had been educated men, no
matter where they came from originally. And being an educated man who spends a lot of time talking to
businessmen, and other educated men ... that was a
prerequisite for the presidency, and it has a strong
influence on accent.

There's an interesting secondary conflict going on,
which Lauren refers to obliquely. "Even if I had my
full-blown Southern accent, and even if it was an
upper-class one, people up here would likely read it
as 'dumb,' or 'racist.'" I don't believe that's a
class conflict at all. I think Lauren is concerned
about the lingering suspicion some liberal
Northerners have, even today, that a rich white
Southerner will be a racist. Or will harbor secret
racist attitudes, having benefitted from years of
racist policy. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond didn't
sound "dumb," but they certainly sounded racist,
and a lot of people heard them as the public
voice of the Carolinas.

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

I grew up with both a regional accent and a regional dialect. You can't tell about the dialect because my writing "voice" is different from my speaking voice, and because I've mostly lost it because of constant pressure from my peers that what I say is uneducated.

The South in some senses is America's lower class. Certainly other regions of America could qualify for that too. In the South, there was that whole agricultural economy that relied on slavery, and then that war, and then that crippling depression pretty much from the war up until my mother's lifetime. The South is associated with poverty and racism and the uneducated. I'd bet that an accent like my grandma's, even minus the dialect, will come across as lower class compared to a standard American accent. I would also guess from the many poor and inappropriate attempts at Southern accents I've seen on TV that many Americans would not be able to distinguish the class difference in the accents between my mom's relatives and my father's relatives. I'd imagine that there is a very narrow range of Scarlett O'Hara-type Southern Belle that would be recognized as upper class, but I've never heard that accent in my life.

Because I speak like a Yankee now, many of my Southern relatives both fear and respect me as someone who they consider as "higher class". It's weird. They are both sad and proud. I really don't know what to make of it.