Accents Sound Stupid?

The fact that I was born and raised in Brighton Michigan, which is just north of Ann Arbor, raises the question of my southern frame of mind.  I was raised by parents that grew up in the south and didn’t move north until 1940 when jobs were few and far between in Arkansas.  The car industry was booming in Detroit.  Then the war came along and things really got to moving.  I came along in 1950, the tail end of the boomers.  With that background, one should understand that I was accent deaf. I didn’t know my parents had southern accents.  I didn’t know I didn’t talk like other kids in my class.  I only noticed southern accents when I talked to my cousins who still lived down south or if I talked to someone who had just moved up north.  The first time someone told me they loved to listen to my mom talk because of her sweet southern accent, you could have knocked me over with a feather.  My mom had an accent?

I was pushing thirty when I moved to Alabama.  The land of cotton and old times there were not forgotten.  The first several years I lived there was not horrible but it wasn’t easy.  Sometimes when I would go into a store and ask for something, people looked at me like I had two heads or horns protruding from my head.  After a few years I suppose they gave up and decided I wasn’t going to move back north were I belonged.  Although till the day I moved, I was still looked upon as that Yankee girl.  Sadly, when I would visit Michigan my old friends would make fun of me for my now southern accent.  Seems I was in no man’s land.

Even after spending eleven years in Montana, people would still ask me where in the south I was from.  To be honest, I’m still accent deaf.  I just don’t hear my drawl.  In fact, it amazes me when anyone asks where I’m from.  I usually throw them for a tail spin when I say, Montana, after all that was my last home before Arizona.

I just want to express my feelings regarding my manner of speech.  Just because I talk slow, or pronounce words a bit differently, or call things by a different name any you, I’m not stupid. I’m standing up for all my southern friends and family and myself.  You have seen the jokes and posts on Facebook regarding shopping carts as buggies, oil pronounced ol, bowl called bol, and how we eat grits and gravy on everything.  This my friends does not make anyone dumb.

My biggest problem is that I tend to write like I talk.  This causes tons of extra hours of editing.  I write Southern, then have to go back through the conversations of the manuscript and translate into Yankee.   It’s hard to for most folks to understand, ” ya’llwanto go to the store?”  If ya don’t get it, that would be used instead of, “Do any of you want to drive down to the super market with me?”

Just the other day I posted a joke about how all soft drinks in the South were called “Coke.”  Speaking of Cokes, when I was growing up, Dr. Pepper was a southern thing.  We would go visit family in Arkansas and always bring back a case.  We saved them for special occasions as we knew it would be a year before we would get more.  Even though we lived in Michigan, we did not drink Vernor’s ginger ale.

If I write or talk a bit differently than you, now you know why.   My Southern roots run deep and seem to mostly come out through my mouth and finger tips.  Please remember, accents don’t make one stupid.  Being stupid makes one stupid, but that’s another story.