terrific 'cept for the fact that he was 'sposed to be from Miss’ippi?
Thing is, these accents aren’t just correlated to region. They also tend to vary along socio-economic lines.
Y’all aren’t from around here, are you?
Bless their hearts.
I know what that means! You just called us assholes!
Even “just Virginia” accents vary widely. Most likely it was an Appalachian accent which is wildly different from what you’d hear in central or eastern VA. In the far south-west parts of VA it is almost like a different language.
After I lived in NC for about 10 years I worked with a guy with a very thick southern accent. I understood about 25% of what he said to me. I haven’t run into many people like him and I have been here almost 40 years.
No, no…well, maybe. Not usually though. More like, “They can’t help it, they’re not from around here.”
It can mean anything from “I’m very sorry that happened to you” to “What a dumb ass.” Someone on the board compared it to “Dude!”
I could not understand a word a gas station attendant in Pennsylvania said, and sometime Mrs. Plant who is from Long Island, and I from Arkansas cannot understand a particular word the other uses, and her theory that simply saying it more loudly and more slowly will translate from one dialect to another is sadly mistaken.
My favorite example is September 11. It was just a bunch of people on the news speaking like TV people until some med techs drove from Tennessee to help and were interviewed. Hearing literally my Mother tongue, it became very real and I wept for the first time.
Here’s my native accent: Reading Uncanny X-Men #341 aloud.
I’m from central Mississippi, but I’ve had people guess all over the South and even Britain (!). A good movie if you want to hear genuine Southern accents is Red Dirt, from 2000, starring Dan Montgomery, Jr. (Texas) and Walton Goggins (Alabama), although the rest of the cast is all Yankees I think. The movie is set in and filmed in Mississippi.
New Orleans’ Yat accent is one I’ve never even heard attempted in a movie, as Hollywood usually equates Louisiana with Cajun, and gives everyone in New Orleans terrible Cajun accents instead of Creole or Yat accents.
I decided to try another Pat Conroy adaptation, for comparison, so I loaded up Conrack, with Jon Voight. I must say, he’s not perfect by any means but he’s a lot better than poor Nick Nolte. Those children, on the other hand! It is essential to the plot that Conroy can’t even understand what the hell they’re saying in the beginning. They’re black illiterate kids on Daufuskie Island - they don’t have Southern accents, they have Southern accents married in an unholy fashion with Gullah, probably to an extent that you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere now if you tried. The first scene with the children they can’t pronounce “Conroy”, which is why the damned movie is called “Conrack”. The scene makes zero sense in the movie, because the movie children speak just fine! The older people in the movie have what seems like authentic (yet intelligible) accents, although I’m no expert on the coastal islands by any means. I’m a Midlands girl. But I know damned well that kids on Daufuskie Island before the coming of mass media to those places did NOT sound like these children, who thus far have had less accent than Jon Voight, who is supposed to have come from Beaufort. The movie doesn’t even make sense without accents!
Many years ago I spent a summer in rural Illinois. Some of the country accents of the people who lived in that area were so thick and indecipherable that I mostly nodded my head and smiled when they spoke to me. It wasn’t just me, either … I was with other college students from Chicago and elsewhere (not the South) and they couldn’t understand them, either.
Brett Butler had a great bit on this topic – looked for a clip online, couldn’t find one. She describes how she overheard to NY dudes with typical thick NY (Brooklyn? Bronx? dunno) accents who were talking about how stupid people with Southern accents sounded. Of course, when she repeated the conversation, she did so in their accent. Hysterical.
Ahem! 
I have the same issue with West Virginia accents. Bad West Virginia accents tend to be either generic hick or generic Southern. Russell Crowe in *Beautiful Minds * was awful. Chris Cooper in October Sky nailed it. (Of course, he also nailed it in one of my favorite movies, Matewan.)
The sad truth is that some actors can’t do dialects or accents or whatever you want to call them. You could put them with the best vocal coach around, and they’d still mangle it. It’s like musical skill. Some people have innate ability. Some can master it through hard work. And some people are tone deaf.
Back in the Dark Ages, when I was working on my theater degrees, one of my required classes was a dialect class. We had to learn the IPA and be able to speak dialogue transliterated into IPA. I have no idea if that kind of training is common anymore.
Look, if they made a movie where the setting was really, really important, and it was a South Carolina coastal island, you’d roll your eyes and be kind of pissed off that your intelligence was insulted if it was, you know, the wrong ocean, and filmed in Malibu. Or Maine. Or Vancouver. It’s the same thing, only more people can figure out that there aren’t a lot of pine forests in Vietnam than can tell that, whoa, those are six different accents and they’re all totally fake.
The black school teacher in Conrack nails the “black Southerner making an effort to speak with an “educated” accent instead of their native one” accent, I must say.
They are, but I’ve heard numerous complaints that they affected accents different from their natural ones in the movie, which people found distracting. I haven’t seen the movie myself, but if it’s true I can see that being a negative.
This episode of This American Life has a really good essay on the subject, essentially there is one dialogue coach from NYC responsible for a lot of the accents in movies.
Link:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=782
Sometimes it seems that having a fake Southern accent is a way of showing that this particular character is just really not that bright, or is at least rather uneducated.
One of the things that I liked about the Matlock series is that it showed a Southern person, with a Southern accent, with Southern courtesies, who could also out-think any damyankee he came across. The Matlock series had its flaws, but I did get a kick out of the way Matlock would smile and beam and be very polite, and a Northerner would think that he was dealing with a dumb hick, and then Matlock would show that being from the South doesn’t mean that he’s stupid or ignorant.
How were the accents in the movie based on John Grisham’s A Time To Kill (set in Mississippi, I believe)? Were they terrible, OK, or very good?
When someone lives day-to-day around people with an accent, they start to adopt that accent. So the solution is to have these actors live with/around people that have the accent they’re trying to portray. I will volunteer to host Megan Fox. 
Well, suddenly that movie makes a hell of a lot more sense. I was forced to watch this movie at a summer program in my teens, and I was never really clear what the hell he was supposed to be doing with those kids that was so mega-huge.
Oh, whine, whine, whine. I just don’t get where these complaints are coming from. Hollywood always seem to nail my regional accent without any difficulty whatsoever :p.