My Childcraft book from 1975 about The Magic of Words was purchased (along with the whole series) by my parents from a local library’s book sale a decade ago, and as an avid reader, I read literally all of the books. They’re easy to read, appropriate for primary-school children, and I learned a lot from them.
Anyway, I was flipping through the Childcraft book on “The Magic of Words”, when something caught my eye: the pronunciations.
This is what it says:
OK. How do I pronounce “doah”? Dough and ah? I pronounce “door” by saying “or” with the d-sound in front. “D” and “or”, or “Door”. I don’t say “Dough Ah” or try to make door rhyme with the first name Noah. :rolleyes:
I was born in Atlanta, and lived there for 40 years.
Some Southerners might drop r’s and say “suh”, instead of “sir”, but it certainly does not apply to all Southerners.
Same with stretching vowels.
I stretch some vowels sometimes, but I do not drop my r’s.
ETA: Thanks for asking for clarification instead of just assuming that everything that you read is true.
I sometimes still have remnants of a Central Virginia accent and I pronounce door as doe, not like dough (which has more emphasis on the O sound). But if I’m tired (somewhere between tard and turd), car and core and pin and pen sound the same, confusing my kids.
I’m Hoosier-born and raised, living in South Georgia. I’ve heard the suh, doah, and “ahhs” for ice. Some Southernisms that still annoy me are cent as a plural, pronouncing the L in salmon, mashing buttons, and not using a “ch” sound in mature, literature, furniture, amateur, and temperature.
My first landlady told me “no payuts” were allowed. It sounded so unlike “pets” to me she had to explain by saying no cats or dogs.
Oh- “on” is said much like “own” by many around here.
Also, people around here consider Atlanta to be about as Southern as Florida nowadays.
I’m in Alabama, and “door” rhymes with “Noah” around here. It’s almost two syllables. R can be lost pretty often, and I really don’t know why one word loses an r and another one doesn’t, or if it’s got two r’s why it keeps one as opposed to the other. No rhyme or reason to it–except that if the r is the first letter of the word, it is kept. If a word ends with r, we tend to add an “uh” behind it. Lots of times there’s no r in door at all, or if there is it’s followed by “uh” as in the name Dora. Scissors becomes “scissuhs”, library becomes “lie-berry”, corner becomes “cawner”. People from the Birmingham area and southern Georgia, I have noticed, will almost always drop the r in mother and father, resulting in “muthuh” and “fathuh”. There is often a w after the letter o, as in “cawfey” instead of coffee and “cow-ert” instead of court.
There is plenty of rhyme and reason: /r/s are lost “post-vocalically” (i.e., when they are not followed by a vowel sound), just as in typical English (as in England) accents (excluding the West Country), where the phenomenon arose, and stereotypical New York and Boston accents. For more, read up on “rhoticity”.
No, at least not in my experience. Our expletives are pretty standard, I’d think - they’re the ones I’ve heard from growing up in Tennessee, though time in Maine, Ohio, Arizona and other states as well.
To the OP, there are sections of the south where you’d hear just that accent. Parts of Alabama, parts of Georgia, parts of South Carolina are what stand out to me. There are other areas where the accent is still considered southern, but sounds much different if you have been around enough of them. For example, I hear a very different accent from my relatives who live in southern Alabama than my cousin who grew up in Atlanta, to my siblings raised with my in Chattanooga, to friends from Memphis and Nashville.
Anecdote: while living in Tuscon, I was talking to someone. At the end of our conversation, I asked him “so, what part of Alabama are you from”. His response was “Sylacauga, and how did you know that?” - he sounded just like my relatives from near there.
Many southerners will stretch out vowels and minimize the ‘r’ but not to the degree that the spellings in the OP suggest. That would be exaggerated, sort of like a very bad Hollywood version/parody of a southern accent. (P.S. born and lived in Savannah until I was 14).
Someone from the areas you mention will mainly notice the differences between those accents, whereas someone from elsewhere will mainly notice the similarities, and perceive them as either i) all the same, or ii) varieties of a southern accent.
In other words, there is a southern accent that is spoken in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, with variations between as well as within those states.
In the same way I can easily discern an American accent, a Scottish accent, and so on, notwithstanding the fact that variations exist within those countries. But if I heard someone talking about an Irish accent, I would wonder, “what do they mean; a Dublin accent, a country accent or a northern accent? Those are three completely different accents that have (to my ear) nothing in common.”
I disagree. For almost 50 years I have traveled almost all the states and abroad, and no one has ever confused my Georgia accent with a Texas or Louisiana accent.
I’m generally good at picking up on accents, and I couldn’t tell a Texan from a Georgian, even if they might sound a little different. Like Hibernicus said, I notice the similarities.
As someone from New England who has lived in CA for many years, I’m always astounded by people who talk about an “East Coast accent” out here. They can’t tell the difference between a NY and a Boston accent, whereas to me they are like night and day.
In my observation, regional accents (not just southern) tend to be most pronounced in older people and in native speakers who have not spent much time outside of that region. For example, I can discern between a Central Pennsylvania accent, a Pittsburgh accent, and a Philadelphia accent, but in older speakers. In younger speakers, I have a harder time because their accents are much less pronounced.
Part of this is due to migration and part is due to mass media. When everyone on TV sounds alike, regional accents tend to be diminished.
This is very true. Many people in rural Alabama (especially ones a generation ahead) have never left the south and in those areas accents can be extreme to the point of being unintelligible even to me, and I’ve lived here my whole life. I have never been further north myself than Nashville, TN. However, I’m often told that I “talk like a Yankee” because my accent is much lighter than most people’s. Besides exposure to television, I’m also a grammar nazi to the point of rudeness in real life. (There’s a weird convention here that goes “I done did X” as in, “I done told her to cut that light off” or “I done did the dishes from supper” or “She done went to the store” and it makes me want to rip my ears off. Grrrrr.)
I’ve noticed in south texas, it seems you hear a pronounced “I” that I haven’t heard anywhere else… For instance, Sprite, I’ve heard it pronounced, “sprought.” I suppose it’s regional but the folk from SE Oklahoma have a noticeable accent as well.
There’s a problem in asking any question about accents on a message board where very few people know how to write the pronunciations in IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) or any other system that precisely characterizes the pronunciation. The posters will have to try to talk about the accent using just ordinary English spelling. There’s no way to correctly explain the pronunciation in ordinary English spelling though. Often then, someone will claim that people in region X say a particular word in some way, but someone from region X will insist that the people there don’t say the word that way. In fact, the first person will be correct about the pronunciation, but they will have no way of explaining what that pronunciation sounds like using just ordinary English spelling.
Furthermore, it’s not easy learning IPA. I have a master’s degree in linguistics, but I didn’t specialize in phonetics or phonology. To learn how to use IPA accurately, I would have to go back and take several courses in such subjects.
