Shoot yes. When I lived in Yankeeland, I’d lay it on pretty thick. It was partly because I deeply resented the attitudes of several people I worked with who were aghast that I was really from a benighted place like Alabama (I worked at a pro-environment NGO whose message I agreed with, but whose ultra-granola neo-hippie culture made my teeth itch), and partly because I met quite a few cute girls there who found it fascinating. 
I’ve been away from the day-to-day Alabama talk long enough that I feel I should ask the Bama guys rather than spout it off as a tell-tale sign of the region, but in my observations there’s one word that can give away an Alabamian faster than any other: area.
If you hear an Alabamian say area you’ll try your hardest to master that sound, only to fail miserably. It has at least five syllables, with the first one a heavily leaned on long A.
Would you Bama types refute that?
As a follow-up I have noted that TV types from Alabama (the south in general) will shy away from the word and favor region or section or zone or (if they’re more than a little hoity-toity) go for the more flamboyant environs.
Any of you True Alabamians have any other tell-tale words?
“Oil”. That’s a biggie. It can be “oahl” or “ouhl” or “awl”, or even “ole” but rarely “oyl.” I have to concentrate to put the “i” sound in there myself, and I don’t have a thick accent.
Just listened to the Alabama Number 10 (that’d be a good title for… something) and she reminds me a lot of Fannie Flagg (who grew up in downtown Birmingham in the 40s/50s).
One of my pet peeves in Forrest Gump was the ending of words that end in ‘er’ with ‘uh’. A redneck pronounces the N word as “nigguhs” and Forrest says something about “a rivvuh” in Vietnam.
NO.
The “er” is almost more likely to be overpronounced than to be dropped. The most likely consonant to be dropped is going to be the g on the end of a word ending with “ing”, thus “The RIV-vur’ is risin’” would be a believable sentence.
I’m not sure if your play has any black characters, but the African-American accents down here are at least as varied and complex as the white accents (and again, middle class black people born Gen-X or later generally have exactly as much accent as they want to have at that particular moment).
A lot of older black people, again especially the rural ones, do drop the ‘er’ from the end of a word. For that matter a lot of older black southerners tend to be almost French when it comes to dropping final consonants, while their syntax is often a bit different from that used by whites but does have it’s own logic. Verbs often appear at the end of a sentence, for example: “What time it ih?” or “wheh you goin’?” (with ‘ih’ being ‘is’ with just a tiny hint of an ‘s’ and “wheh” instead of where).
My brother and sister are 6 and 8 years older than I am and both have rather thick accents even though we grew up in the same house and our mother hardly had an accent at all. I attribute this to several factors but perhaps most importantly the fact that they went to a ritzy private school where southern accents were almost looked down on and, like Ogre with the granola folk, deepened their own almost as a form of “Up y’all’s” rebellion. (Both graduated valedictorian as well.) Also, my brother spent a lot more time with our father, who as mentioned had a deep and thick and booming accent, while I grew up inside the tents watching television and associating more with our mother who had very little accent and definite Germanic clip words; when I learned from genealogy that her paternal ancestry is about 3/4 wildly inbred/intermarried Germans who lived remotely for more than a century (and the older of whom still spoke German as a first language when they came to Alabama in the 1820s) it explained some of their non-traditionally southern speech patterns.
Speaking of the N word: something relevant for a piece set in 1900 Alabama is that every southern relative I knew who was alive in 1900 used the word “nigra” (or “nigruh”) but- very important point- it was usually NOT used as a pejorative term. It’s simply what they grew up calling black people and was just a word not unlike “tree” or “broom” or “Eye-talian” and was in fact a polite alternative to nigger (which has almost ALWAYS been meant as a pejorative). The word colored was the most polite way to refer to blacks at the time and was used in formal writing (both north and south) and on signage and in legal documents.
Here in SC we have Walter Edgar, elder statesman of South Carolina history, who shows up on our public radio. It’s almost too Southern Academic.
I’ve noticed I do that as well. I spent two weeks in Maine this past summer - sheeeit, y’all, they got a funny accent up there!
Oddly, Maine is the place I’ve been in the US that’s most like home. It’s weird. They have the same sort of “outsider to the country” outlook, they have a really, really, REALLY obvious accent, they’re super-friendly - I really felt at home there. The weirdest thing is, the cars stop when you cross the road! Really! The sign says “Stop, look, and wave” and you do and they stop! I was sure it was going to get me killed when I got used to it and came home.
ETA - the Maine people in that dialect link sound nothing at all like the schooner (“schoooona”) people I met in Maine on the boat. “It’s goinna be a bahnbuhner today!”
Coca-Cola pronounced “Cocola” (and don’t you DARE refer to anything as “pop” except maybe your grandfather)
There pronounced with two syllables (roughly “tha*-yur” [*=‘tha’ as in ‘that’)
Vienna Sausages = vienna rhymes with hyena
“Goddamn!” = “gawd-dam!”
And a colloquialism that even tangles southerners: “Turn right there.” (Right is a sort of clipped ‘t’, and even we can’t always tell if we’re being told to make a right turn tha-yur or is that road is ‘right’ where we should turn left.)
True story: My sister is (to borrow a line from a friend) incapable of joining a church that doesn’t have blood, fire, rock, tabernacle, or holiness in the name, and at one point in the late 90s when she was a member of 2nd Blood Rock Tabernacle of Holiness Fire (Reformed) (the 1982 Reformation) (Southern Chapter) I went to services with her and their minister ranted and railed against the sin of IDOLATRY. Idolatry was tearing families apart, the President of the United States practically bragged about committing idolatry, all Hollywood seemed to care about making movies and TV shows about was idolatry, and a whole generation was going to be raised to think that idolatry was no big thing at all.
I was a bit confused by some of the context. I could see how idolatry is commonplace if you count things like ‘worshiping’ celebrities or status or technology or what-not instead of Jesus; while I disagree with the sentiment of course I could even understand how shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or allowing multicultural holidays into school could be somehow considered idolatry in its broadest sense, but I couldn’t understand how the president was an idolater or how it was being praised in movies as often as he seemed to think it was, but my sister agreed with him.
When I asked her later just how Clinton was an idolater she responded “He’s a damned textbook case of it! Screwing around with that Monica Lewinsky when he’s married to that lesbian she-wolf!”
The minister had been saying “adultery” but with his very thick “not from Alabama” accent it had come out “ah-DOLL-a-tree” and I’d reinterpreted it.
New Hampshire was like that for me; even some of the vocal quirks were the same. Just like rural Alabama the people were redneck in their interests and could be wonderful people once they relaxed around you but that wasn’t going to be in the first 10 minutes; you saw just as many cars on the sides of houses and just as many flannel shirts and boots and the like. The main thing that was really foreign to me about that area wasn’t weather (it was summer and I was surprised by how hot it gets up there) or music or anything like that (other than the absence of sweet tea) or even using “Please?” as “I beg your pardon?” or “wicked” for “very” (both of which were easy enough to remember once they were explained) but something I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Then a few days after I got there I saw a black family in the mall and it occurred to me “They’re the first black people I’ve seen up here… that’s what’s wrong with this place!” (This is not to imply that I put my finger on said black family.)
Absolutely fascinating, Sampiro, and completely believeable.
It’s probably not just Alabama, or just Fundamentalist, or maybe not even TV evangelist, but the stereotypical preacher of the Caucasian persuasion with the slicked back hair and the bow tie who says “Jeee-zus” and “Gawwd” and a lot of Personal Savior thrown in has to be why some people don’t want to travel through Alabama.
And yet the shaped-note singing in North Alabama (Sand Mountain?) as heard in the movie Cold Mountain is enough to draw the curious to the (here it comes) area. A land of too many contradictions. Love it!
Here’s the ultimate sacrilege, though: Red Army Choir Does Lynyrd Skynyrd | WIRED
The end is nigh!
Yeah, there was that. My parents were with me for the first half of the trip and we started a game we called Spot the Black Folks. You got a dollar if you saw one. I only got one dollar, but it was in the LL Bean Super Giant Emporium, go figure. My dad got two bucks because he saw the car before my mom did. Mom went home empty-handed. For us, it’s absolutely surreal to go days and only see white people, ever. Ever! I went to a laundromat and it was all white people! Wal-Mart with only white people! Dude, the maids in the hotel were white people who spoke English! I thought I was in a foreign country. I couldn’t imagine how incredibly weird it must be to be black and have your company or something move you to Maine. It must be like being the first redhead the Apache ever saw. Where would you get your hair stuff?
Also, the only fat people are tourists.
Also, they sell liquor in Walgreens!
Maine on the coast, however, is cold as shit. It was July and there was a day on the boat where I was wearing every layer of clothing I’d brought. If I could have put on two pairs of pants I would have. I think it was something like 50. Two days later it was 80, and they called it their “bahnbuhner” and cried about it all day. I thought it was marvelous. They took their shirts off, I took one of my jackets off.
ETA - reading that it looked like I was surprised not to find black people where poor people might be - what I meant was, I went to places that weren’t tourist places, like the laundromat and the Wal-Mart, where I expected to see the “true” makeup of Maine society, and it was all white.
RE: the African-American population in Vermont or New Hampshire or Maine. A guy I worked with back in the 70’s had the observation, on seeing the census data by ethnic group for New England states, that, “There are more black people in my apartment complex than in Vermont.” Kidding aside, that image has stayed with me (as you can tell) for over 20 years. Helps to make a point about the ways different regions of the country view the Race Issue.
OOOH. That is awesomer than awesome.
(It’s a little odd, but I love, love reading about accents. 
)
Michael Jackson claims that he suffers from… oh sorry, misread.
Damn! I worked in Alabama hotels with large housekeeping staffs (twenty five or thirty people) where there literally wasn’t a single maid of whom both of the above could be said.
I went for a job interview last year in Dahlonega, Georgia, which for those who don’t know is a very pretty Gold Rush town in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains, and that was also surreal: there were some Spanish speakers but no black people and this just 90 minutes north of Atlanta. I haven’t researched it, but I’ve wondered why it’s such a tiny percentage of non-whites there. (There were actually more there in the 19th century- in fact one of the miners who struck it rich in Gold Rush days [Dahlonega was the nation’s first major gold rush] was a free black man.)
It’s odd how much the demographics of the south have changed in my lifetime. There were a smattering of Asian students* in my junior high and high schools (maybe a dozen) but the only Spanish-as-first-language students were exchange students from South America. The rest of the school was about 60% white and 40% black. The three cities where I lived in Georgia (Albany, Americus, and Milledgeville) were the first places I’d ever encountered significant numbers of Spanish speakers and by that time I was in my early 30s. For some reason the Hispanic immigrants (legal and ill) arrived in Georgia several years before they did in Alabama (which has roughly the same agriculture as Georgia [peaches, cotton, etc.] and is basically Georgia minus Atlanta). I visit a friend of mine in Alpharetta, GA every so often (Alpharetta’s a middle-class suburb about 10 miles north of Atlanta) and there are more Spanish speakers than there are blacks there.
*Asian students presented a sort of a dating enigma in small town Alabamica 1980. Black-white interracial dating was legal by then but one of those “do so at your own risk” things (I’m not proud of this at all, just reporting it as fact)- the couples would be ostracized- but neither the black guys nor the white guys could quite decide whether this extended to Asian girls. The only male Asian I remember from school [Cambodian I think] was a good looking cowboy hat wearing Buddhist Bubba who dated both white girls and black girls, sometimes at the same time, which once led to a fork fight in the cafeteria; the next week the cafeteria got bigger forks and it was rumored among students they were encouraging race violence. Ah, 1980 Alabama- without our racial mistrust and long sharp cafeteria forks our lives would have been as shaky as a fiddler on a hot tin roof.
My pronunciation of “area” is pretty normal, although my in-laws do use the long ‘a’ sound. They’re from the Arab area (“Arab” also being pronounced with the long ‘a’, of course.)
I have a distressingly thick accent. Not in my head, but I’m always a little shocked to hear a recording of my voice. When I try to “turn it off” I sound like I’m doing a bad British accent. My tell-tales are words like “five” and “time” - I have to make an effort to pronounce the “i” sound correctly. Also the word “your” becomes “yer”. And like **Sampiro **says, I overpronounce the ending “er” rather than drop it, and I tend to drop the ‘g’ on the end of “ing” words.
I’ve never in my life heard anyone say “environs”.
Maybe you’re not running in the right level of the hoity-toity set. 
The area thing may be a residual effect from the 70’s for me. A co-worker and I overused that word for almost anything relating to location. (One’s office, room, apartment, home, section of town, region of country – all were simply area). It all started when his boss, who was from Jasper if I remember right, used “area” in a particularly bizarre context and the buddy just wouldn’t let it go. The buddy was from Memphis so it’s not like he was poking fun at the accent or anything. It was just that one pronunciation/usage that got him (and then me) going with the idea. This was about the same time when “your basic ____” was all the rage.
I checked an old 1930’s dictionary my folks (whose “area” was the one I tried to describe earlier) had lying around, and was dumbfounded to learn that the long-a version was standard back then. The movement to the err-e-ah or are-ee-yah preference probably parallels other movement to the schwa in other words. It’s not hard to accept that my generalization works less well with younger people.
It was mostly an effort to assist with the “accent” issue in the OP by pointing out that specific words and their regionalizations may be as big a detail to master as the vowels, dropped consanants, slurred sounds and all those other nuances that go into Alabama speech patterns. And if “area” has lost its tell-tale status, maybe there are others that still stand out as giveaways.
The recent Ken Burns The War series featured an older woman from the Mobile (I think it was) area (oops!) and her pronuciation of war (something like waw-wuh) was so much like my mother’s that I had to shake myself to be sure Mama wasn’t in the TV set. Mama had a way of saying words ending in -ture (furniture, temperature, amateur, etc.) that defies description, but hers was more nearly Alabamian than most folks’. I suspect it may be harder for Alabamians to spot these things than people from other areas, but it’s always fun to be able to hear your own non-standard tendencies.