How I discovered dissimulating my Southern accent submitted to dialect prejudice
By Grace Winfield
“I’m fixin’ to grab some dinner myself,” I said to my friend as we walked through campus my freshmen year of college.
She furrowed her brow. “You’re… what?”
I swiftly corrected myself. “I want some dinner.”
This wouldn’t be the last time someone gave me a perplexed look about something I’d said.
I’ve figured out over time some of things I say that stand out to people. There’s “critter” and “I reckon” and my grandma’s personal favorite, “Well, I declare.” I get that Southern-isms can be funny sometimes, and I don’t mind being teased. But what really gets to me is all the assumptions people make about me. They’re surprised when I say I don’t like country music and have never been a fan of sweet tea. The worst is being called a Redneck or having people make assumptions about my politics. Trump supporters confide in me their plans for a greater America, Christians share their Sunday revelations, and I won’t tell you how many times I am told with confidence how great the border wall would be.
I grew up in a town called Dewitt, in Dinwiddie County, and the culture is different in Fredericksburg. After my first few months, I started to make an effort to avoid using certain idioms and to change my accent because I thought it would deflect some of the assumptions and would make people take me more seriously. It has become natural after a while, but I still sometimes feel like I’m living an alter ego, and losing a key aspect of my identity.
A question lingered in my mind: why did my accent hold such a strong role in people’s perceptions of my character, and was I somehow abandoning my identity by forcing myself to change?
A Disappearing Accent
Dr. Janie Lee, professor of linguistics at the University of Mary Washington, explained that people often change their dialects as they move to a different region, which is known as language convergence. Language convergence is a type of linguistic change in which languages come to structurally resemble one another as a result of prolonged language contact and mutual interference. Simply put, if majority of the people a person sees everyday has their own dialect, subsequently that person will begin to sound like those around them, assimilating the dialect.
“It is a natural phenomenon that happens, and everyone is subject to it, unless they actively try to retain their native dialect,” says Lee.
Now, when I go home, people tell me I sound “Northern.” But just as quickly as I was able to adopt a new way of talking, through constant exposure and a conscious effort, the same way I’m able to easily revert back to my prior linguistic habits. I guess this is the way people are – we’re built to blend into whatever environment we’re in.
What’s in a Word?
During the summer, I spent a month at a local television station to study broadcasting. At one point, a superior recommended that I might consider hiring a speech coach.But then I got to thinking about the meaning behind it. Most news stations prefer to have their reporters appear unbiased. Because of the stereotypes associated with my southern accent, I might be perceived the same way my classmates had. At first, I brushed off what she said. But then I had a mix of emotions. I was a little offended and also slightly bewildered. She was only trying to help me, right? This was accent discrimination, Lee told me.
“Many cases of accent discrimination are where people are encouraged to change the way they talk if they want to get a promotion, or want to get a job,” she said.
She told me about the book Language and Linguistics on Trial by linguists John Rickford and Sharese King, which was about About a key witness in the Trayvon Martin murder case. Racheal Jeantel was on the phone with Martin when George Zimmerman shot him. Jeantel claimed that Zimmerman was the instigator and that Martin acted in self-defense. When she was answering questions in the courtroom, her African-American vernacular language, or AAVE as its referred to by linguists, was obvious, and made it difficult to understand her.
Most of the jury was white, and didn’t have familiarity with the dialect, thus Jeantel was misunderstood and discredited by the jury simply because of her speech patterns. “People speaking non-standard English are even seen as being of poor character,” wrote Rickford, a native of Guyana, who has seen first-hand the politics of language at work form both personal and research perspectives. He emphasized in his book how important it was for jurors and the court to make greater efforts to prevent bias against non-standard speakers of English.
The bias experienced by Jeantel is a large problem for witnesses like her who are native-English speakers whose dialects vary from Standard English, such as AAVE. Rather than being understood and accepted, the dialects are often stigmatized as improper or inferior English. What’s worse is that witnesses who speak non-standard Englishdo not get access to translators in the courtroom as speakers from foreign language backgrounds do.
It was humbling to read about the trial. I realized that the bias I experienced because of my accent was a little example of a much bigger issue: dialect prejudice, discrimination purely based on someone’s accent.
Stereotyping
As for stereotyping, it may be harder for people to change their associations with the southern accent than one would assume.
“Regionally speaking, because the southern accent has been the most associated with a negative attitude, all of the assumptions people make about the southern accent comes with that,” Lee said.
She explained that the Southern accent is known to tip people off that a speaker is uneducated or racist. On a more positive note, the accent also indicates qualities such as hospitality and politeness. But Lee says those positive connotations on the Southern accent are almost always trumped by the negative perceptions, and I can attest.
Eddie Ronowicz’s book “English: One Language, Different Cultures” says that Southern stereotypes sometimes refer to the Southern belle or hospitality. But more often, the dominant image is of rednecks and hillbillies. One chapter defined a redneck as an uneducated, bigoted, reactionary, rural working-class Southern white. I didn’t think anyone would understand how offensive redneck was to me, but Ronowicz’s book makes me believe that perhaps people are aware of the negative connotations, and just don’t care.
Staying Southern
Assumptions happen because we live in a society where its unavoidable to be exposed to stereotyping, says Lee. As individuals part of a multi-cultural society, it is important to become aware of our own stereotyping, and recognize the stereotyping and assumptions of others.
“We have to take it upon ourselves to be aware of these stereotypes and assumptions, and as a society, it is up to us to do something about that,” she says.
What we need is a call for authentic representation. It might be argued that one way to make people more accepting of linguistic differences is for the mainstream culture to promote different kinds of voices. Perhaps Lee was right. Maybe I was doing society at large a disservice by simply fitting in.
While my dialect may change as I live in the north, or anywhere for that matter, I’ll always have my Southern roots to return to. One short visit home and my twang suddenly appears, and I’m okay with that. But the hard truth is, I feel like I’m taken more seriously with my modified accent, and I don’t want years of hard work to go to waste. I’m not just the small-town gal with a southern drawl, and I’m not the yankee-wannabe. I’m a combination of my past traditions and my future endeavors.
I am who I am, y’all.