I can do a perfect southern accent with absolutely no flaws in any word. I have no idea how I do it, because I live in Maryland and we have no accents, I have no immediate family member who is southern and I’m simply never around (nor have I been around) anyone who is from the south.
How do I know how to speak perfect…uh…southern? It comes natural to me for some reason. I DO have extended family from Tennessee, but I never see them.
When I do they always get me to talk like them because they get a kick out of it. My ancestors were from the south, though. Could accents be in the genes somewhere? I know it may be a silly question, but have any studies ever been done on accents being genetic?
As a pet peeve, I suppose, let me point out that “I live in Maryland and we have no accents” is not and cannot be accurate as stated (plop a Marylander down in Britain or Australia, say, and see how many people think their speech is accent-less). Every speaker of every language in the world has an accent; the suggestion of an alternative is a bit like suggesting there are people out there who have no hair color, no weight, no height, or such things. The phonological properties of your speech are your accent, no matter what they are; the concept of accent-less speech is largely meaningless.
Also, no, accents are not genetic in any significant way, though I’ll leave it to others to provide the authoritative cites, I suppose. Just consider how quickly accents change from one generation to the next, how people of completely different genetic backgrounds who grow up in the same speech community generally have shared accents, while those of the same genetic backgrounds who go on to live in different speech communities generally have naturally differing accents, and so on.
Some people are good at picking up accents. Some people think they are good at picking up accents but really aren’t. Until such time as your attempt at a Southern accent is evaluated by someone qualified to do so, there’s no point in answering this question. The fact that you identify it as simply a Southern accent without specifying just where in the South makes me suspicious.
We had a recent thread about what consitutes the South, Maryland is not all that cut-and-dried in terms of what section it fits in. Personally, I think it is in the South.
And I grew up in Towson, hon, and anyone who thinks Marylanders don’t have accents isn’t listening. Even outside of Baltimore, Maryland has a rich variety of regional accents.
True on the face of it but in the US there is the concept of a neutral American accent such as spoken by news broadcasters all across the country. Not technically the same thing as no accent but the typical American perceives it as unaccented.
I don’t have that typical Bawl-mer accent (because GingeroftheNorth told me so when we first met), but I know some people probably think I have an accent.
My first year in college, all the people from New Jersey thought I talked funny.
There is no “southern” accent. There are a couple of Texas accents, a couple of Georgia accents, a distinctive North Carolina accent, a very distinctive Tennessee accent, ditto Arkansas, several in Louisiana, etc, etc. All of these would be lumped together, by the untrained/inexperienced Northern listener, as “Southern,” and there is a certain amount of overlap in the rhythms and phoneme patterns, but they are absolutely not the same accent.
A lot of the points I would make have already been raised. The most important, perhaps, is that you may think you’re doing a great generic Southern accent, but without hearing it, I seriously doubt it’s all that good. Being on the receiving end of dozens of people who swore they do a “great Jersey accent,” I can assure you that very, very few were all that good.
Also, the South is very linguistically diverse. North Carolina alone has at least four dialect areas. The Atlas of North American English delineates the South based on the monopthongization of /ay/. That is, the defining characteristic of the South for that particular map is the way many Southerners say ‘hi’ as ‘ha’ or ‘tide’ as ‘tahd.’ But that’s just one variable that varies even in the South (hence the dotted lines going through Kentucky, Tennessee, etc). You’ll also note that, based on this variable, parts of Maryland are in the South. But this is just one of many variables, and if all of them are taken into account, as it is in the Atlas itself, there are many more regional varieties that can be sussed out.
But, supposing that you do a great imitation of one particular accent, that is probably due to lots of exposure to that accent. If you have relatives that speak it, you could probably be able to glean a lot from them. Further, the stereotypical Southern accent is all over popular media, so that gives a lot of fodder for imitation.
And, no, accents are not genetic. The only thing genetic about the way you talk is the size and shape of your vocal tract. Your accent is learned.
I didn’t (and don’t) want to debate it, you just flatly stated that Maryland wasn’t in the South, and I said that the the question of it being in the South or not isn’t that cut and dried. If you don’t want to debate it, perhaps you shouldn’t debate it.
Not to be contrary, as some folks are certaintly skilled at impressions, but are these Yankees you’re asking to verify your accent? The stuff that gets passed off as a southern accent in movies and TV is very fake sounding to my southern born-and-raised ears, but none of my non-southern friends seem to notice or care.
It’s only neutral to Americans though; put such a person in a roomful of British people and he or she will only have to speak 2 or 3 words for everyone else to realise that this person is from North America. And that’s without using any American words or usages.
Even outside of Baltimore, Maryland has a rich variety of regional accents.