Do Southerners really speak like this?

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.