On the tonight show clip, he mentions that he is from Oxford, TN. Mama Plant is from Tennessee, and didn’t have that accent. Oxford is just above Mississippi, and a couple hunnert miles from Little Rock, where a bunch of us talk like at.
I’ve always tremendously enjoyed the great variety of accents in the world, and grew up noticing both how people spoke, and what my own reactions to them were. I’ve tried to noodle through where both my own, and other peoples’ sensibilities about accents came from.
I think that most obviously, it’s all about associations, as well as about direct training/indoctrination.
Growing up here in the US, with an early and very impressing two year visit to London England (two and a half years as a child starting school), I have seen a LOT of influences affect me.
There’s most clearly, a lot of indoctrination that takes place through television and films. I suspect that if someone made a careful study, that they would find that whatever the prejudices were during the childhood of the generation of people they were looking in to, that the accents associated with who was what during that early time, would tend to remain throughout most of that generations’ lives.
When I was growing up, we had cheap TV and movies. Lots of heroic war films,wherein various British people were the good guys, and all Germans were horrid. Lots of comedies, where the people with upper crust accents of various kinds were well meaning, but achingly idiotic, requiring us more experienced commoners to rescue them from themselves.
It all added up to assuming that a posh accent of any kind meant snobbery; a southern American accent meant racism, ignorance, and general bad intent; Western American accents meant sort of wise, but mostly “jest passin’ through” kind of people; New York related accents meant abrasive, aggressive, often over-eager, but generally well meaning; German accent meant extremely clever and sneaky and smart, but dangerously so; Japanese accents meant conservative to a fault.
Australian accents were thought of as the closest thing to American without being American that you can get, since Aussies were always portrayed as having the same devil-take-the-hindmost carefree approach to whatever was going on that Americans like to pretend that WE have.
I’ve long suspected that accents were the result of peoples mixing with each other, such that when the American Appalachian mountain areas were colonized by a lot of Scotch and Irish, who intermingled with the second and third generation English and German immigrants moving West from the lowlands, that the various peculiarities of those areas came into being.
One fascinating thing I learned only recently, is that a lot of the accents I grew up hearing in older American films, were ENTIRELY CRAFTED FOR THE FILMS. The design was built up by mixing some British flavorings, with harder R sounds added in, and lots of OW sounds flattened out.
As a particularly egregious example of this, some years ago I heard a recording of a woman from the US deep South making a phone call to the FBI. She had a very heavy drawl, aaaaannnnd taaaaaalllllked soooooo sllllooooolllly, drawing out every single word just like that, as if she needed the time while speaking one word to think up the next word. She took several minutes to say something that most of us could have spit out in 30 seconds or less, without using any more words. By the time she finished I had forgotten what she was talking about.
Aside from a small handful of British people I’ve met personally, my entire exposure to British accents comes from movies and television. I can usually distinguish between English, Scottish, and Irish, but as far as just England, all I can distinguish is “standard” and “Cockney”. Cockney simply stands out because it’s so emphatic and over-the-top compared to the “standard” accent, and I’m not sure how much of that is deliberately exaggerated for film/TV.
I do find that, when watching British TV or movies, I sometimes need to turn on subtitles to understand what’s being said. That is mainly when a particular actor tends to speak quickly - the accent + pronunciation differences between British and US English ends up blurring everything into a jumble of sounds. However, once I get my ears trained to a particular actor’s speech patterns, I can do away with the subtitles. An example is Martin Freeman. The first thing I ever saw him in was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I saw it first-run in a theater, and for perhaps the first third of the movie I had difficulty understanding him. By the midpoint I was understanding him just fine, and haven’t had any trouble with his speech since then, in other work.
ETA: Oddly, I don’t recall ever having any difficulty with Monty Python. Despite the actors’ rapid speech, it was always “clear” to me.
I’ve always found it amusing (and worrying) when I visit the US and see people from English-speaking countries being subtitled (in English!) in documentaries etc.
I’ve been told I have an excellent ear for accents so I’ve never had any trouble understanding people from pretty much anywhere in the Anglosphere (major exception: Glasgow) or the USA. The idea that an average person from (say) Britain could have an accent that’s not understandable to an American is baffling to me.
We always turn on subtitles for British speakers, hell, sometimes for Yankees.
There are some accents that are just grating to the ear by nature, for me that would be the Jersey accent. A light Boston accent can be ok but if its really heavy its pretty awful. I don’t really know all the British accents some are pretty pleasant and others not. Sometimes it depends on the sex of the speaker for some reason, like a guy speaking in a cockney accent is fine but women with that accent sound dreadful to me. I had a female college professor once from France and I don’t know what region she was from but it was like heaven to listen to her speak.
A very important item which has actually been mentioned by several posters is that an accent is better received if it’s light. And when is an accent light? When it’s present but doesn’t make the speaker difficult to understand; when the conversation doesn’t devolve into a succession of “excuse me, could you repeat?” “I’m sorry, I don’t know what a aglazlzd zlwiyagkj is, could you explain?”
Better communicators are able to soften their accent and avoid dialectal expressions when speaking with “outsiders”, one of the ways to change register depending on your audience. Bad communicators can’t. A bad communicator which has the same accent you do, or an accent that’s considered “standard” for your language/country, will still be understandable; one who combines being incapable to switch accent/dialect with having one that’s very different from yours is lighting up a neon sign saying “this is gonna hurt!”
My last boss was Australian, Melbourne accent. I worked closely with him for five years and still couldn’t understand everything he said the first time. On the other hand, Kiwis have a lovely, intelligible accent that never gave me a problem.