My apologies for the length of this. I’ve lived almost 70 years in Tennessee and my degree required that I take linguistics courses.
There are a lot of misconceptions about accents and grammar.
Everyone in the USA has an accent. You speak as those you spend time with speak unless you make a concerted effort not to.
There is no standard American accent. The reason that broadcast voices often seem to have the same accent is that originally, most broadcasting schools were in the Mid West. That isn’t necessarily true anymore, but that manner of speaking had become what is expected. (And there are bound to be several variations on what sounds Mid Western.)
The word “y’all” is not ungrammatical. It’s just often part of a Southerner’s dialect. It is considered informal English. “Y’all are a lot of fun” is perfectly grammatical, but it wasn’t used much outside the South until more recent years. I wouldn’t use it in a term paper or a business letter.
There are no superior dialects and no inferior dialects. JFK said “Cuber” instead of "Cu-bah as most of us pronounce it. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t saying it correctly. Even GWB’s “newk-u-ler” is an acceptable pronunciation according to the dictionaries that I checked. To my ears, “nu-cle-er” sounds better, but both are okay.
In the 1960’s I read a study having to do with accents. Southern men who moved North tended to lose some of their Southern accents. Northern men kept their accents more often when they moved South. The opposite is true for women. If they moved North, they kept their Southern accents. Northern women who moved South picked up the accent.
Celebrities used to try to change Southern accents. Ava Gardner was from one of the Carolinas. So was Edward R. Murrow. Now days actresses tend to keep their Southern accents: Kim Basinger, Holly Hunter, and Joanne Woodward are all Southern women. Dixie Carter had a very “refined” Southern accent. She was from West Tennessee.
The most interesting change that I am familiar with is that of Stephen Colbert. He is from the Deep South – Charleston, South Carolina.
Finally, I was asked once to do an intro for “Good Morning America.” In those days, someone gave her or his name and origin and then said “Good morning, America!”
When I said that I was from Nashville, the guys behind the camera said, “You don’t sound like you’re from Nashville.” I said, “Oh, you want ‘Magnolia.’” They laughed. I did another take and added some drawl and dropped a g. It got on the show. I did sound like Nashville – on the first take. But they were expecting a different sound. The ideas about Southern accents perpetuate fake accents.
Recently I saw two families from Kentucky on “Family Feud” and the two teams sounded as different as they could be. I recall that one woman said, “Be up air.” That hurt my ears. I speak differently when I am in West Tennessee or speaking with a West Tennessean on the phone. We just fall into a slightly different dialect and accent. BTW, Kathy Bates is from Memphis (West Tennessee). Cybil Shephard too.
curtsy (exits)
