Atlanta southern accents (lack thereof)

[KittyAtlanta]

What you're talking about is not a "Southern" accent. A Southern accent is somewhat soft and quite genteel. What you're talking about is "Thug". IF you want to hear it, go over to the neighborhoods around Spelman, Vine City, the Bluff, West End, Morehouse, English Ave., and other neighborhoods with a high crime rate, where everyone wants to be a "gangsta".

[Mutiny77]

Originally Posted by KittyAtlanta

What you're talking about is not a "Southern" accent. A Southern accent is somewhat soft and quite genteel. What you're talking about is "Thug". IF you want to hear it, go over to the neighborhoods around Spelman, Vine City, the Bluff, West End, Morehouse, English Ave., and other neighborhoods with a high crime rate, where everyone wants to be a "gangsta".

There is no one Southern accent. Smh...

[DONNIEANDDONNA417]

chile please i be not have no southern accent..now leave me be so i can go get me some lurch

[KittyAtlanta]

What's that??????????? I will concede that there is an array of "southern" accents. I haven't heard all of them. I'm only familiar with Genteel and Thug.

[AnsleyPark]

Butchering a language does not equate to having an accent.

[ElleKaye]

Originally Posted by Pinealley

I thought that's how accent works, right? Dialects and accents are usually intertwined.

You could be right, but I think accent leans more towards pronunciation of the words. Even with different dialects, you can somewhat depend on context clues to figure out what was said.

It's the pronunciation that can really throw you for a loop. For example, I have a South American friend for whom English is his third language. He pronounces vowels with the standard Spanish sounds. He was trying to tell me something about a "pee-low" and for the first few seconds I could not decide whether he was talking about a cesspool or the chicken, peas, and rice dish until I realized he was saying "pilot".

The post above that is being discussed contains a bit of regional accent like "finna" which would assume you knew that "fixing to" meant "about to" in the first place, but a lot of it is just slang and not accent. Like with most things language based, just listen and you should have enough words in there you understand to figure out what is being communicated. After all, the whole point of language is to communicate, right?

[Mutiny77]

Originally Posted by Pinealley

I thought that's how accent works, right? Dialects and accents are usually intertwined.

Precisely. An accent is usually more pronounced within a particular dialect; the one I'm most familiar with in this regard would be Geechee/Gullah.

[Tobiashen]

Wow! I just watched that video!!!!

I was born in Atlanta, as was my father, in 1917. I don't recall black culture there at all, but I left in '91 and moved to the Mid-southwest, then the Northwest. Even in the early '90s, though, I worked in Midtown and Buckhead, and people would ask me where I was from. When I said, "here," they looked astounded, as though it was strange to encounter a native-born person -- even then, the melting pot was beginning to boil over.

I don't think I ever carried a particular accent, except when I was young; I know my parents and extended family did, and I recall that sound well (and didn't and still don't like it)! I lived in SE Atlanta for the first 7 years of my life and then we moved to the Decatur/Agnes Scott/Emory area.

[Clayton white guy]

Y'all know I am an Atlanta native. Once again, I feel like having a southern accent is a great deal like whether you grew up around mostly southerners or transplants. I grew up in the Forest Park/ Morrow area (City of Morrow, but in the Forest Park High district). People from my community all had southern accents as a matter of course (including the many Asian students we had around Forest Park, Lake City, and Morrow back then; after all they all learned their English in Northeast Clayton County!) Teaching in Henry County these days, the children, at least, seem to have noticeable southern accents in our very diverse elementary school. Again, like the native Atlanta comments on other threads, it really depends upon where you reside. If you are in North Fulton, East Cobb, or even Peachtree City which are heavily populated by transplants, perhaps not. If you are from other communities, absolutely. I even joke with my neighbors who moved to our Lake Spivey community a couple of years ago from Washington state that we are "rubbing off" on them: They now say, "Hey!" and "Y'all".

[AnsleyPark]

Originally Posted by Clayton white guy

Y'all know I am an Atlanta native. Once again, I feel like having a southern accent is a great deal like whether you grew up around mostly southerners or transplants. I grew up in the Forest Park/ Morrow area (City of Morrow, but in the Forest Park High district). People from my community all had southern accents as a matter of course (including the many Asian students we had around Forest Park, Lake City, and Morrow back then; after all they all learned their English in Northeast Clayton County!) Teaching in Henry County these days, the children, at least, seem to have noticeable southern accents in our very diverse elementary school. Again, like the native Atlanta comments on other threads, it really depends upon where you reside. If you are in North Fulton, East Cobb, or even Peachtree City which are heavily populated by transplants, perhaps not. If you are from other communities, absolutely. I even joke with my neighbors who moved to our Lake Spivey community a couple of years ago from Washington state that we are "rubbing off" on them: They now say, "Hey!" and "Y'all".

I grew up in rural south Georgia. Talk about having accents! When I first went to school in Boston, my roommate was from Bar Harbor, Maine. We literally could not understand one another!