There is more than one southern accent, right?

Many people who have not lived in or visited the south believe that southerners have one generic accent. However, anyone who has spent any amount of time in “the south” knows that accents vary from region to region. The website with the “Yankee Test” did a very good job showing that the south has more than one accent. The test gives results like “way down south in the land of cotton,” “Atlantic Seaboard and southeastern U.S.,” “Louisiana and Texas,” and “Carolinas to Indiana.”This demonstrates that accents vary in the regions throughout the south. This is historically accurate because the different southern regions were settled and colonized by different nationalities. Louisiana has a strong Spanish, French, Native American, and African influence, while parts of coastal Georgia and South Carolina have a stronger English influence so the accents there sound more refined than the more coarse accents in Alabama and Mississippi. While the “Yankee Test” showed respect for the many different southern accents,”Southernese,” another article from the same website, does not. The “Southernese” article is accompanied by a dictionary that assigns definitions to words that are spelled like they would sound if they were spoken with an accent usually heard in rural Georgia, Alabama, or Tennessee and no other variation of a southern accent. This lack of acknowledgement of different accents shows that the author is viewing the south as a monolith, which explains the result that, “northerners remain very unaware of what differentiates one southern variety of English from another, thus producing the one-size-fits-all accent when trying to “sound southern” (Lippi-Green, 203).” This idea that all southerners have a cookie-cutter accent is what has contributed to the uncertainty that southerners feel when speaking to people who seem to have no accent since that cookie-cutter accent usually entails that the speaker is slow and dumb-witted. This one website promotes the idea that not all southern accents are alike with the “Yankee Test” article and then turns around and gives the impression that there is only one southern accent with the “Southernese” article.