Different Southern Dialects...is there a difference?

Carol Raterman
Different Southern Dialects...is there a difference? Blog

When a “Yankee”, also known as a Northerner, comes down to the south, they hear different accents and dialects from different areas of the South. All of these dialects are very different from what they ever hear in places such as Ohio, Maine, or any other northern state. Every person wants to be their own person and sometimes wants to be different from others and is proud of being an individual. Southerners are no different from everyone else in the fact that they want to be recognized as their own group of people.
The “Are you Rebel or a Yankee?” quiz distinguishes a difference between the North and the South. This quiz ensures that how you speak determines what part of the country you are, or should be, from. The South is thought of as a monolithic when reading the title of the quiz, but as you read some of the questions, the results that mention where you should be from is not only the north or the south but it is phrased “throughout the south, including Texas.” This is calling Texas as sometimes south and sometimes just not categorized.
If a southerner and a Yankee are discussing a topic of politics, the Yankee may think he is going to know much more information and is much more intelligent than the southerner merely because of where he lives and his accent. The assumption that a southerner is “less intelligent” because of how they speak or where they are from is a stereotype. This theory may be true for some people but is not true for many people as well.
When a family moves from Ohio to Georgia for a job, the family is not surrounded by people who speak the same way they used to. Everyone has a different accent than what they hear all the time in the north. After a short period of time, the family is more accustomed to the different accents people have because they hear the accents much more often. After a longer period of time, the Yankee starts to acquire an accent without even noticing. “Strategies of Condescension is a tactic whereby an empowered individual – someone with social legitimacy in terms of employment and language and other kinds of authority – appropriates the subordinated language for a short period of time.” This is where an employee from Ohio moves down to Georgia and acquires the accent of a southerner because of the people who are “in power”.