Can you tell a Black Southerner apart from a White one just by listening? (gated community, living in)
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I would say I can. I think that White and Black Southerners speak differently even if subtly. Here is how:
R-lessness. Put simply Blacks in the South tend to drop their r's a lot, even by British standards. Southern Whites by and large do not. If they do, then we go to the next point...
Vocal range. Blacks tend to speak in a register lower than Whites. This is heard in modern day West Africans whose languages are spoken in lower ranges. These languages definitely had carryover to African Americans.
Short vowels. African Americans pronounce the short O much differently than Whites of the South. Whites of the South would say "hot" phonetically whereas Blacks would say it closer to "hat" (but not exactly.
Lexicon. This is one is sort of irrelevant in reading but in everyday speech it will be a giveaway. Some terms used by Blacks (like boojie or bama) are not as frequently used in communities of White majority.
TH- Fronting. Put simply, South would be said Souf. North is Nawf. I think this one comes from Southern England (common Cockney feature) but fell out of favor amongst Whites.
Geography: Certain cities of the South have well known Black lexicon and dialect. Cities like Baltimore, Charleston (modern day not 50 years ago), New Orleans, Atlanta, and DC that have significant Black communities have their own variance of a regional dialect. I have also personally observed this in Louisville where you will never hear a White refer to a beer as a "burr"
What are your thoughts? Some others on the other hand say all Southerners speak the same way. I personally have met Blacks that sound like White Southerners but I would say that is rare. Surprisingly I rarely met a Black person in the South who sounded White. It was most always up North where I met Blacks who could vocally pass for White Southerners if you never met them. That is even more common up North for some reason???
But that is my own personal experience. I will say Dave Chappelle is an example of a Black guy who sounds like a White Southerner. If I didn't know his physical appearance I would think he is a White hillbilly. Randy Moss also sounds like a regular White guy from Louisville.
Last edited by EddieOlSkool; 12-11-2016 at 12:50 AM..
White people, generally speaking, can't even tell a black southerner from a black northerner/Midwestern (There are similarities but black southerners sound much more "country" to other black people's ears). But yes I can tell the difference but the men can be confusing sometimes especially when speaking to them over the phone.
There seems to be far more variation in accent and dialect among white Southerners than black southerners*, and both groups have significant regional variation.
That said, in my experience, the most generalized description of AAVE(BVE) overlaps in accent, vocabulary, and gramar with dialects found among white Southerners of Scots and English heritage living in the northern part (centered around Virginia and North Carolina) of the South's Appalachian foothills, stretching eastward to the Piedmont, but diminishing rapidly towards the coast where accents diverge greatly among both white and Black populations.
*I think that features of AAVE have spread from that region throughout black vernacular across the South (and indeed in black communities across the entire country) due to mingling and movement in an endocultural, segregated community, but there still exist a discernable (at least to my ear) difference between black people with an origin in Virgina or North Carolina and black people from Mississippi or Louisiana which are populations existing at the geographic ends of the spectrum of what was historically the densest population of American Blacks prior to migrations out of the South in the last century or more.
TL;DR: Black and white Americans from a fairly restricted region of the upper South have very similar sounding dialect in accent and grammar while outside of that area dialects tend to split noticably along and between racial lines while still sharing some features.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Not every black person speaks the same, same goes for white people, but I understand what you are getting at. I think it might be easier for southerners to tell apart the accents, but for me as a westerner(who is half black and half white lol) there were multiple times where I really couldn't tell the difference when I visited the south (New Orleans). In terms of the black/white accent(if we are going to generalize) the easiest for me to tell apart is the NYC accent.
White people, generally speaking, can't even tell a black southerner from a black northerner/Midwestern (There are similarities but black southerners sound much more "country" to other black people's ears). But yes I can tell the difference but the men can be confusing sometimes especially when speaking to them over the phone.
So you're telling me that if a white person heard a black guy from brooklyn and a black guy from Jackson, MS speak he wouldn't be able to tell the difference in accent?
So if you heard recordings of ,lets say George Wallace, and Martin Luther King speaking, there are people I presume from the north that couldn't tell the difference ? That's ridicules, and so is this thread. Enough is enough!
There seems to be far more variation in accent and dialect among white Southerners than black southerners*, and both groups have significant regional variation.
That said, in my experience, the most generalized description of AAVE(BVE) overlaps in accent, vocabulary, and gramar with dialects found among white Southerners of Scots and English heritage living in the northern part (centered around Virginia and North Carolina) of the South's Appalachian foothills, stretching eastward to the Piedmont, but diminishing rapidly towards the coast where accents diverge greatly among both white and Black populations.
*I think that features of AAVE have spread from that region throughout black vernacular across the South (and indeed in black communities across the entire country) due to mingling and movement in an endocultural, segregated community, but there still exist a discernable (at least to my ear) difference between black people with an origin in Virgina or North Carolina and black people from Mississippi or Louisiana which are populations existing at the geographic ends of the spectrum of what was historically the densest population of American Blacks prior to migrations out of the South in the last century or more.
TL;DR: Black and white Americans from a fairly restricted region of the upper South have very similar sounding dialect in accent and grammar while outside of that area dialects tend to split noticably along and between racial lines while still sharing some features.
At one point Blacks and Whites in Charleston sounded more or less the same (Whites even had the Caribbean sounding long O pronunciations like goat = goh-uht and road = roh-uhd).
Nowadays Charleston Whites sound accentless but Blacks still have that Gullah sound.
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