# Southern Accent Hypothesis and Question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 26, 2012, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168 "2012-05-26T14:23:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/41 "2012-05-28T22:14:31Z")
terentii writes: \> There are areas in the Appalachians where the people still speak a dialect \> almost indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s English. No. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/42 "2012-05-28T22:18:20Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > When I lived in England, I heard dialects that were very similar to Southern US, particularly south of London and in the West Country. The most distinctive feature of these was their drawl. > > The more isolated a speech community, the less it will deviate from its parent variant (in theory, anyway). There are areas in the Appalachians where the people still speak a dialect almost indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s English. > > The English/Scottish/Irish migration and settlement patterns of the American South have been fairly well established and can be found in any good book on historical linguistics. No one is going to argue that the speech patterns are not influenced by the early settlers. Of course they are. But claims about pockets of speakers who sound like Shakespeare are right up there with reports about Bigfoot sightings being remnant populations of _Gigantopithecus_. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/43 "2012-05-28T22:28:17Z")
Under revision. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/44 "2012-05-28T22:39:10Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > But claims about pockets of speakers who sound like Shakespeare are right up there with reports about Bigfoot sightings being remnant populations of _Gigantopithecus_. Not quite. I remember reading a number of years ago about a team of linguists who reconstructed Shakespeare’s English as it was performed in his lifetime, i.e., with correct period pronunciation and accent. It turned out the only people who could immediately understand it were from the backwoods of North Carolina. I forget the name of the journal, unfortunately. I am a professional linguist (and a keen student of history), but this isn’t my area of expertise. (I’m a Slavicist.) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/45 "2012-05-28T22:43:34Z")
A debunking of the myth that Shakespearean English is spoken in the Appalachians: [http://streaming.ohio.edu/cas/lingCALL/ling270/myth9.pdf](http://streaming.ohio.edu/cas/lingCALL/ling270/myth9.pdf) ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/46 "2012-05-28T22:44:18Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > Not quite. I remember reading a number of years ago about a team of linguists who reconstructed Shakespeare’s English as it was performed in his lifetime, i.e., with correct period pronunciation and accent. It turned out the only people who could immediately understand it were from the backwoods of North Carolina. > > I forget the name of the journal, unfortunately. I am a professional linguist (and a keen student of history), but this isn’t my area of expertise. (I’m a Slavicist.) I think your memory is incorrect. But you can easily clear that up by providing a cite. ---
**Author:** ![MacLir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9e8a1a/32.png) [@MacLir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacLir)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/47 "2012-05-29T16:19:23Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > And not all North Carolinians, or all Southerners, are stupid. I was a National Merit Scholar, and I can hold my own in most hard science discussions with doctoral candidates in the hard sciences. > > The sneaky subtext here is that Southerners-are-just-stupid-and-the-way-they-talk-is-perfectly-correlated-with-their-stupidity. > > I don’t appreciate the implied insult. > > In point of _fact_, the differences between British accents and Southern accent(s) are easily attributable to African influences. > > So no, not all Southerners are slack-jawed morons. We didn’t somehow pervert the British accents of our ancestors through simple stupidity, or any other type of personal or character flaws. > > I am up against ignorance here. > > I mean, sure, I also have the tendency assumptions about someone’s intelligence based on their accent, and all kinds of other assumptions about their character, too. I, however, am AWARE that I tend to do this, and keep a sharp eye on myself, for fear I’ll assume the wrong thing. Emphasis on the “ASS” in assume. > > Yes, even I tend to assume people with Southern accents are stupid, even as I have one myself. I’m aware of the assumption, though, and I know it doesn’t always hold true. Part of that is a difference in “manners.” Using a customer / clerk interaction as an example, very broadly, a northern customer will initiate the transaction by stating what they want; the northern clerk will drop what they are doing to serve them. For southerners, the customer will wait to be greeted, and the clerk will finish their current action and greet the customer. The upshot of this, if you follow the two “mixed” interactions, is that to the southerner, the northerner comes off as rude and pushy, and to the northerner, the southerner seems slow and stupid. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/48 "2012-05-29T16:28:57Z")
It seems to me that the relevant test for someplace like Ocracoke Island isn’t for an American to listen to it and say “that sounds like somewhere in the British Isles”, but for someone from the appropriate spot in the British Isles to listen to it and say “that sounds normal” (or, nearly equivalently, for a native Ocracokian to listen to the appropriate British speakers and say the same thing). Can anyone pin down just what part of Britain that accent is supposed to resemble, and do we have anyone on this board from that region? I mean, many Americans think that British accents and Australian accents sound the same, and yet Brits and Australians find that notion baffling. To some extent, we tend to file accents (and all manner of other traits) under the categories of “normal” or “like us” on the one hand, and “exotic” or “other” on the other, so a speaker of one accent listening to two random other accents, even completely unrelated, will tend to lump them together as similar to each other just because they’re both “other”. ---
**Author:** ![Sister\_Vigilante](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Sister\_Vigilante](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sister_Vigilante)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/49 "2012-05-29T18:00:57Z")
> [@Lukeinva](#): > > Snip… > > Indeed, and there are variations of accents within the same state. The same family, even. Fraternal twins in their 60s living within 30 minutes of each other nearly their whole lives. And me, the daughter of one, who always gets asked where I’m from because I “have no accent” and can’t possibly have lived my whole life in Georgia. (Yes, indeed I do have an accent.) ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/50 "2012-05-29T18:02:30Z")
The other thing is that there probably are a few remnants of archaic speech patterns in certain populations in the US. The operative phrase being “a few”. That does not make those entire accents “just like” or “almost like” accents from centuries ago in Britain. For example, the use if “h” in front “i” in words like it (pronounced “hit” in parts of Appalachia). That’s a hold-over from an earlier time, but it doesn’t make Appalachian English the equivalent of Elizabethan English (in some part of England). Rather, there are a collection of hold-overs from various parts of the UK, mixed in with any number of newer pronunciations and sound shifts that occurred after the earliest settlers arrived. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/51 "2012-05-29T18:04:35Z")
So true, Chronos. An extreme example of this are villagers in the Yucatan Peninsula who speak Spanish and some Maya, and sometimes encounter English from the TV or from tourists, and assume that English must be closely related to Maya, because, hey, neither of them are Spanish! ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/52 "2012-05-29T18:51:56Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > And not all North Carolinians, or all Southerners, are stupid. … > The sneaky subtext here is that Southerners-are-just-stupid-and-the-way-they-talk-is-perfectly-correlated-with-their-stupidity. Whose sneaky subtext? You do realize that a fair number of us \*are \*southerners, and speak with some variant of a drawl ourselves? > [@](#): > > I don’t appreciate the implied insult. And I don’t appreciate the implied insult that we all believe those misconceptions about southern speech. You are making vast generalizations and hurling them at us, all the while complaining about people who make generalizations. > [@al27052](#): > > 1. Did you even click on my youtube links? Especially the second one. They both include a lot of the same people, but the first speaker on the second link is pretty close to what I’m talking about. Granted, if you listen for a minute or so, you can tell he’s not British/Irish, but there are a LOT of words he says that are pretty indistinguishable from…well, SOMEwhere in the British Isles. Most of them sound mostly like a southern US dialect. There are hints of tonal qualities that sound a bit more lilty, especially some of their dialectal terms. There is no argument that their dialect is influenced by their Irish heritage. But that is not proof by any means that they somehow mysteriously preserve Elizabethan English as it was spoken then. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/53 "2012-05-29T18:56:47Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > It seems to me that the relevant test for someplace like Ocracoke Island isn’t for an American to listen to it and say “that sounds like somewhere in the British Isles”, but for someone from the appropriate spot in the British Isles to listen to it and say “that sounds normal” (or, nearly equivalently, for a native Ocracokian to listen to the appropriate British speakers and say the same thing). Can anyone pin down just what part of Britain that accent is supposed to resemble, and do we have anyone on this board from that region? The claim is that it is from London (or thereabouts) in the 1600s. So, do you have any native Londoners from the 1600s to weigh in on it? Modern Londoners don’t count, because their accents have also drifted, apparently more than these isolated southern US populations. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/54 "2012-05-29T19:30:40Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > The claim is that it is from London (or thereabouts) in the 1600s. Yes, but the only evidence for that claim which has been presented so far is “It sounds British to me”, as delivered by non-Brits. If that’s the evidence we’re going on, we might as well at least have Brits (and Irishmen and everyone else) give their opinion. ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Panda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ee7513/32.png) [@Darth\_Panda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Panda)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/55 "2012-05-29T19:40:02Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > we might as well at least have Brits (and Irishmen and everyone else) give their opinion. Well, we’ve already had 1 **Irishman**. FWIW, living as a Yankee in the Carolinas - I’m pretty sure most people have given up the belief that southern drawl = stupid, even if it’s still joked about. I also lived in England for a short time - gotta say, not hearing much similarity here in the Cackalackies. And I have taken a few courses in linguistics, in case that’s necessary to be able to post in the the thread now. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2012, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/56 "2012-05-29T20:55:57Z")
> [@Darth\_Panda](#): > > Well, we’ve already had 1 **Irishman**. Yeah, but I don’t count. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/57 "2012-05-30T02:39:14Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Yeah, but I don’t count. While what became the US had many Irish immigrants from the earliest days, most of them were Ulster Protestants. Once Irish Catholics began arriving in large numbers–around 1847–descendants of the earlier Irish adopted “Scotch Irish” to distinguish themselves from the Popish bog stompers; Scots-Irish is now the preferred term. (My own forebears include a few hard-headed Presbyterians but more of the Other Irish–including paternal grandparents from East Galway.) Some of the Scots Irish settled in the Southern mountains, where they preserved their folkways–including old ballads, fiddle tunes & distillation of hard spirits. Most of the Catholics initially settled in the Northeastern cities. But some Catholic Irish settled in New Orleans–which is hardly typical of The South–very early on. And it’s said their accents influenced the very distinctive English of that great city. Here’s [a fairly informal version](http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/multicultural/multiculturalhistory/irish.html) of their story… ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/58 "2012-05-30T08:58:34Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I think your memory is incorrect. But you can easily clear that up by providing a cite. Here is a BBC article that references the project, which was apparently headed by the linguist David Crystal: > **[BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | The real sound of Shakespeare?](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4694993.stm)** > > London's Globe theatre is staging Shakespeare's plays in his own dialect. But will it breathe new life into the bard? Note the reference to people from North Carolina. I don’t remember in which publication I first read of the project, and I don’t have access to English periodical literature in Moscow (certainly not like I did in the States or Canada). Crystal has a website (and there are other sites that reference him), but a cursory glance shows a search for the project might take some time. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/59 "2012-05-30T13:28:10Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Yeah, but I don’t count. Are you saying Irish people are innumerate? That we’re all too busy drinking and fighting to be able to count? Is that the sneaky subtext that’s going on here? ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/60 "2012-05-30T13:35:33Z")
This book may be of interest to the OP: [Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History)](http://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-Cultural/dp/0195069056). From a review by David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle: > [@](#): > > …This cultural history explains the European settlement of the United States as voluntary migrations from four English cultural centers. Families of zealous, literate Puritan yeomen and artisans from urbanized East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers headed by Sir William Berkeley and young, male indentured servants from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and, in by far the largest migration (1717-75), poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish fled a violent environment to seek a better life in a similarly uncertain American back country\*. These four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements. The final chapter shows the significance of these regional cultures for American history up to the present. Insightful, fresh, interesting, and well-written, this synthesis of traditional and more current historical scholarship provides a model for interpretations of the American character. Subsequent volumes of this promised multivolume work will be eagerly awaited. Highly recommended for the general reader and the scholar. \*Appalachia [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168.md?page=4)