It's just talk

What accent?

Ahm fixin’ to declare that Ah don’t talk with a drall.

[Throat clearing here] OK, radio voice…

An essay in The Atlantic’s One Story to Read Today newsletter, “The Last Days of the Southern Drawl,” just caught my eye. I recall, when I was growing up and my father was regularly transferred—Mississippi to Texas to California to New Mexico—there were classmates at each new family stop who would study me, one eye halfway closed, trying to pinpoint why I talked funny. Gol-lee. And when I settled in New York after college, visits to my siblings in Texas and Missouri and to my aunts and cousins in Louisiana brought remarks from them about my apparent altered mode of communication. Oy.

It seems there was something of a moving target in my speech patterns—literally based on moving. Might I have been saying “Y’all” at times, then “You guys” at others? Maybe mimicking, intentionally or otherwise, different regional accents to which I was exposed, with some unavoidable genetic link? (Both parents were born and raised in Louisiana.)

In that Atlantic piece, Tennessee native Annie Joy Williams wrote that she had been determined not to have a Southern accent when she grew up because, as a child, she had “watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey,” she said. “Sweet but simpleminded.”

I don’t recall any such self-analysis or thoughts of rejecting my roots in the way I spoke. But there possibly were subconscious, changing patterns of adaptation to different regional language. As a rule, people here in New York—my home since college graduation a half-century ago—do speak more rapidly than high school pals did in Hobbs, N.M., and fellow students in Columbia, Mo. And, I mean, you have to keep up.

(There was a period, years ago, when I briefly was my newspaper’s ice hockey beat reporter, spending a fair amount of time around Canadians, and suddenly detected myself ending sentences with “Eh?”)

I’m going to assert that I never conversed in a full-out drawl, which I have seen defined as “speaking in a slow, lazy way with prolonged vowel sounds.” Lazy!? In his delightful 1977 book “Crackers,” Roy Blount, Jr. railed against Northeasterners’ dismissal of the accent from his native Georgia as a sign of ignorance, prejudice or bumpkinism. As if the way he talked somehow was confessing to hating Blacks or “confessing to being barefooted,” which he wrote would prompt him to “get right up there at the dinner table or whatever it is and show them my shoes. Not that I’m wearing shoes for any Northern person’s benefit.”

In the Crackers chapter titled “Being from Georgia,” Blount wrote, “I am talking the way it feels right in my mouth. ‘Pore,’ for instance, is a lot better way of pronouncing the word poor than ‘pooor.’ When you say ‘pooor,’ you purse your lips like a rich person. When you say ‘pore,’ you say it the way poor folks and poor old souls and poorhouse residents say it when they say, ‘This is a poor excuse for living.’”

Blount argued that “you’re supposed to sound like the way you grow up. Advancing it along and remixing it, up to a point.” He had relocated from Georgia to Massachusetts (and then with a second home in New Orleans), and related how “people back down home accuse me of losing my accent. And then I get off the plane on the other end and people are saying, “You’re not from the city, heeya. I thot I heard a little….”

That’s what I’m talking about here. New childhood friends in California, after our family had arrived from Texas, likely placed me somewhere between a cowboy and a rube. My sister recalls schoolyard peers calling us “Tex.” Then, going back the other direction, to New Mexico, the locals again put me in the outsider category based on my speech. (Maybe with the hint of a Valley Guy accent? Was I saying “like” too often?)

By the time I got to Missouri, where that state’s natives themselves don’t even sound the same, depending on whether they’re from rural “Mizzou-RUH” or citified “Mizzou-REE”—there was yet another transmogrification of my larynx detected.

I have, somewhere among my various (insignificant) possessions, a “Texas Passport” that I purchased at a Dallas airport curio shop years ago. That document helpfully emphasizes some Texas assumptions with a couple of pre-printed personal statistics: For height, it says, “6-foot-6.” For sex, “Yes.” As if that stereotype somehow defined me beyond a doubt.

Shaped by geography, social class, ethnicity, listening to sports radio play-by-play on the radio, it is reasonable that my pronunciation and pacing might vary. My daughter, raised on Long Island without, I insist, a Lawn Guyland accent, lives now in London with her Scottish-born husband and English-born son, and I’ve certainly noticed that my grandson says “Toe-MAH-toe.” While I say “Toe-MAY-toe.”

But sociolinguistics have noticed that things can change. The Atlantic article noted how early years of the Great Migration, from South to North in the U.S., resulted in the older generation “taking their accents with them,” but that their descendants, part of the more recent relocation to Southern climes, don’t talk the same way. Not to mention online influences at work over the years. YouTube and such.

Listen: I refuse to be pigeonholed merely based on articulation. Drawl, schmawl. I self-identify as a Citizen of the World.

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