Our Southern Accent Is Not a Quirk. It's an Instrument.
The Drawl and the Song
The Drawl and the Song
(Tom Daniel, The Abbeville Institute) - At a recent Abbeville Conference, I tackled a subject that’s been hiding in plain sight all along – the Southern accent. I’ve lived in Alabama almost my whole life, so I’m definitely familiar with the Southern accent. Now it’s true that my wife and I lived in Iowa for three years, but we actually kind of liked it up there. I still make fun of the Iowans all the time – IOWA stands for Idiots Out Wandering Around – and life was definitely different up there, but it was tolerable. After all, the Iowans are mostly farmers, and farmers are farmers wherever you go, so there was at least that commonality between us.
However, here’s something funny we learned in Iowa that’s very different from the South – in Iowa, you never, ever, ever, ever, EVER ask someone how much land they have. In the South, that’s considered a polite, conversational thing to ask, because Southerners are deeply proud of the land. But in Iowa, you just don’t do that. Pretty much everybody in Iowa grows corn – it’s all corn as far as you can see. Therefore, pretty much everybody knows to the penny the exact price of corn per acre at all times. So, if you know somebody’s acreage, then you’re practically looking right at their financial statement. To ask somebody how much land they have is the equivalent of asking somebody how much they’re worth, and that’s just not done.
Now, I can kind of see from their viewpoint when you think about it like that. That would be a rude thing to ask, but Southerners don’t put monetary values on land like that. In the South, land is so much more than simple crop acreage. It’s trees and forestland, wildlife, creeks and streams, meadows and pastures, fresh air, etc. It’s all a bunch of stuff that real estate agents can’t really put a fixed number on, so Southerners don’t mind talking about how much land they have. They’re proud of it. Therefore, you can just imagine how things went for us when we first moved to Iowa. We though we were being polite and conversational by asking people how much land they had, and they thought we were being unforgivably rude.
Anyway, let me get back on topic – the Southern accent. Although the Southern accent is still prevalent where I live in Alabama, it’s not as much as it used to be. Each generation seems to be getting more and more homogenized with their…