A little while ago, I spent some time at Colonial Williamsburg as a tourist. While my wife was getting dressed for dinner our first evening, I happened to watch a short film on TV entitled Portrait of a Patriot, which, I learned, was piped into all of the area hotels and motels. Briefly, the film is set in and around Williamsburg in the year or so preceding the Declaration of Independence, and attempts to dramatize the gradual evolution of its fictional protagonist, a young planter who succeeds his conservative father in the Virginia House of Burgesses, from Tory to “Patriot.” Historical figures portrayed in the film include Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, William Byrd, and Peyton Randolph, to mention a few. What struck me about the film as a linguist, however, was the fact that every one of the actors portraying these eminent Colonial Virginians had a regional accent typical of the Midwest, so that Washington and Jefferson et al. tended to sound like, say, Adlai Stevenson. As one who is fond of shocking his students by pointing out that George Washington probably sounded more like Pat Robertson than the late Illinois senator, I wondered again if the linguistic implications of Washington’s birthplace ever occur to Southerners who are not academics. Of course one could simply dismiss the matter as another of those amusing little ironies:
More @ The Abbeville Institute
When I lived in Idaho, I met a retired couple native to Tennessee who had completed a successful career in radio, a career that was only possible because they had trained themselves to speak without a Southern accent.
ReplyDeleteAs a boy growing up in North Carolina, I remember our teacher instructing us about the difference in how Northerners and Southerners pronounce, "either", and/or, "neither".
I continued pronouncing those words in the Southern fashion, i.e., as, "NEE-ther", and, "EE-ther", and was disappointed to see my girlfriend choose to pronounce it in the Yankee fashion, i.e., "AYE-ther", and/or, "NYE-ther".
A boy from Wisconsin told me about the "crick", and I learned he was talking about the creek.
I also learned that folks from the Outer Banks in North Carolina had their own accent, descended from the Scots, saying, "OOT", and, "AH-BOOT", for "out" and "about".
Since you live in that area, I reckon you know all about that.
Thanks and it is fun to spend a week at Ocracoke every year. They have camping as well as hotels. Their Fig preserves are the best.
Delete