I’ve been told I speak with a bit of an accent. I don’t really see it that way myself; it always sounds to me like THEY have the accent. I saw a link to this post by Geitner Simmons (ht: Donald Sensing), that discusses the origins of the Southern accent and dialect, and the long tradition of the entertainment folks getting it wrong:

The movie “Cold Mountain” has given moviegoers new reason to complain about bungled or exaggerated Southern accents in Hollywood films. But I recently ran across a similar gripe voiced way back in 1897, about stage productions. The complainer was Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922), whose extravagant writings did much to promote a moonlight-and-magnolia romanticizing of the Old South. From Page’s 1897 book “Social Life in Old Virginia: Before the War” (emphasis added):

Quite a large crop of so-called Southern plays, or at least plays in which Southerners have figured, has of late been introduced on the stage, and the supposititious Southerner is as absurd a creation as the wit of ignorance ever devised. The Southern girl is usually an underbred little provincial, whose chief characteristic is to say “reckon” and “real,” with strong emphasis, in every other sentence. And the Southern gentleman is a sloven whose linen has never known starch; who clips the endings of his words; says “Sah” at the end of every sentence, and never uses an “r” except in the last syllable of [the N-word]

This is something that bothers me, too. Movies almost NEVER get Southern accents right. So when I saw Fargo, I had to be skeptical that they got that accent right. I’ve been told they did, but I can’t really say from experience.

Posted in uncategorized on April 16th, 2004 by Thibodeaux | RSS 2.0 |