Do most young Texans in the cities still have Southern accent? (Houston: how much, movies)

[Tina W]

Originally Posted by Pavement Pounder

Met a girl from Waco, Texas, now living in Austin (she's here for 6 months though) and she didn't sound southern at all! I said, 'you don't have the accent', and she said it was because she was urban. I've been to Texas, but only really passed through, and didn't get a good sense of how prevalent the accent was. In Lubbock most of the teenagers at the drive-in didn't have much of a Southern/Texan accent, while one old-timer had a strong accent, and a man probably about 30 years old did a bit. In Austin I asked directions from one young man and he had a moderate Southern accent, but of course no idea where he was from. It seems most young people in the larger Texan cities (maybe under 35) have a weak or non-existent southern accent, even the smaller cities. Would you say that's true?

It varies, but generally the Texas drawl seems to be fading. It's more prevalent in East Texas than West.

[wpme]

I grew up in San Antonio in the 60's and 70's, to this day, where ever I travel, people ask why I don't have an accent, wtf, do you think we're all hicks?

[meilmarc]

Originally Posted by Metro Matt

Oh please.

As if Blacks from New Orleans don't have a Southern accent either...they may have that smidgen of French influence from several hundred years ago, but they are realistically more a part of the Deep South & are more like the rest of the Deep South than France or Europe.

Chill out dude lol I didnt take it as an insult, me and the new orleans neighbors would make fun of each others accents, they never said they didnt have a southern accent they just said my Houston accent was "country" and I would say they there were a different type of "country" sounding.

[SouthernBoy205]

Originally Posted by winkosmosis

That's not a Southern accent-- That's African American Vernacular English which is mostly the same nationwide with some regional variations.

The Texas accent is a variety of the Southern accent and you will find it in rural areas, among some suburban people, but not much with people who grew up in urban areas. But even across the state the Texas accent varies. In East Texas it's indistinguishable from Southern. Going northwest it turns into a more western accent and blends into the Oklahoma accent

[SouthernBoy205]

Originally Posted by soletaire

To me, the black new orleans accent is the countriest sounding accent their is outside of alabama blacks.

I'm a black Alabamian, and I do have real thick accent. My accent and dialect are very country.

[TexasReb]

Originally Posted by Tina W

It varies, but generally the Texas drawl seems to be fading. It's more prevalent in East Texas than West.

The drawl is, Tina...but the "twang" (of Upper/Mountain South origins), is strongest in western Texas. This excerpt sorta explains it...which has lots to do with settlement patterns of the state:

"THE MOST BASIC EXPLANATION OF a Texas accent is that it's a Southern accent with a twist," said Professor Bailey, who has determined that the twang is not only spreading but also changing. "It's the twist that we're interested in." The preeminent scholar on Texas pronunciation, Bailey hails from southern Alabama; he has a soft, lilting drawl that, for the sake of economy, will not be phonetically reproduced here but is substantially more genteel and less nasal than Bob Hinkle's twang. The broadly defined "Texas accent" began to form, Bailey explained, when two populations merged here in the mid-nineteenth century. Settlers who migrated from Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi brought with them what would later become the Lower South Dialect (its drawl left an imprint on East Texas), while settlers from Tennessee and Kentucky brought with them the South Midland Dialect (its twang had a greater influence on West Texas).

On a related tangent, in lots of ways, I maintain that a "Texas accent" (loosely defined, as per the article), is the consise "Southern accent"... as we are the only state in the Old Confederacy, which actually blends both an Upper and Lower South dialect.

Also, the other influences (not nearly to the degree as exists with those brought by southeastern pioneers, but German(ic) settlers had an early, even if minor, influence for sure), give another dimension in microcosm. That is, Texas being essentially a Southern state, yet possessing characteristics that make it unique among the same(the western frontier history is another).

[doctorjef]

TexasReb, I've seen you make this assertion before, associating the mountain Southern twang with West Texas, and the drawl with more eastern parts of the state, but I have personally never heard it that way. When I was 14 and my dad retired from the Marine Corps, we moved first to Monroe, LA where he had an academic post. There for about the first week, I literally couldn't understand what people were saying. Monroe is in northeast LA, and there isn't any significant Cajun influence there -- it's very deep Southern, Mississippi like drawl. After the initial adjustment to the speech pattern there, I perceived that most people had what I would previously have thought to be an African-American accent -- that was due to my own naiveté and the fact that things were indeed different in this country back in the 1960s. Of course, what I had naively thought was a "black" accent was simply a Deep Southern accent pattern. When we moved from there to Lubbock, I found the accent to be much lighter in general, but to the extent that there was one amongst natives, it was very much what I would call a Texas Southern drawl. There wasn't much of what I would call twanginess about it. When I moved then to Austin to attend university, I found the accent amongst true Central Texas natives to be much different again, and more of a twangy sound and soft drawl -- in contrast to the flat vowel sounds of Lubbockites (e.g."mah" rather than "my"). Speaking of flattening, Beaumont is the only place I've ever heard the car make, Volvo, called a "vulva"! Just one more thought on this: during our years in VA and DC, we made annual summer trips down to my mother's relatives in Denton and Tarrant Counties, so I had a lot of exposure both to North Texas speech of the time, and to the way people spoke throughout the South, since we used a whole number of routes and this was also before the interstate highway system was fully developed. It always struck me as a kid that the speech I heard in Tennessee was a lot like what I heard in North Texas, and interestingly by maternal lineage had come to Texas from Tennessee prior to the Civil War.

[ozarksboy]

Southern accents are fading. Your Texas drawl is going away. Even our Ozarks twang here in Southern Missouri is disappearing with each generation. I suppose it is the result of TV influence, new people moving to the region, plus a conscious effort by people to shed the accent for business and professional reasons.

I have a heavy rural hillbilly accent that is the result of being around my maternal grandparents during my formative years. I nurture that accent and lay it on thick when I talk on the phone to some particular pretentious person from the East or West or North.

There was a move a few years back to degrade the English language with something called ebonics. I oppose such shenanigans. I speak in grammatical English, but i speak with an accent and, depending on the listener, I might even work in a colloquialism or two.

Nevertheless, in this age of celebration of diversity, when we embrace and demand the acceptance of various sexualities, fashions, lifestyles, morals and appearances, we also have trendy, hip Texans who respond with such inanities as "where ever I travel, people ask why I don't have an accent, wtf, do you think we're all hicks?"

My wife, a native of Houston, retains her Texas form of speech, thank goodness. I love to hear her speak.

I don't get why we don't just love the heck out of different accents.

[hellpaso]

Originally Posted by ozarksboy

Southern accents are fading. Your Texas drawl is going away. Even our Ozarks twang here in Southern Missouri is disappearing with each generation. I suppose it is the result of TV influence, new people moving to the region, plus a conscious effort by people to shed the accent for business and professional reasons.

I have a heavy rural hillbilly accent that is the result of being around my maternal grandparents during my formative years. I nurture that accent and lay it on thick when I talk on the phone to some particular pretentious person from the East or West or North.

There was a move a few years back to degrade the English language with something called ebonics. I oppose such shenanigans. I speak in grammatical English, but i speak with an accent and, depending on the listener, I might even work in a colloquialism or two.

Nevertheless, in this age of celebration of diversity, when we embrace and demand the acceptance of various sexualities, fashions, lifestyles, morals and appearances, we also have trendy, hip Texans who respond with such inanities as "where ever I travel, people ask why I don't have an accent, wtf, do you think we're all hicks?"

My wife, a native of Houston, retains her Texas form of speech, thank goodness. I love to hear her speak.

I don't get why we don't just love the heck out of different accents.

I agree with you, ozarksboy, & it saddens me that a regional accent is equated with being uneducated and/or stupid.
I once had a patient (I'm an RN) demand that I not enter his room because I "sounded like a racist".

[doctorjef]

TV and other mass media get credited a lot with the homogenization of accents, but I wonder if that's not overplayed. I suspect that the degree of geographical mobility in the US (and in the modern world generally) is a bigger influence. Yet England has many more local and regional accents than does the US, despite mobility and mass media in that country. It's true that to an extent people can suppress and modify their accents for various aspirational reasons, but most people can't completely eradicate all linguistic traces of their origins. I'm not completely convinced that American regional accents are going away; rather, I think they may be changing, sometimes with one accent pattern consuming another (something that I think has happened in New England, where a downstate NY accent seems to have eaten up the old New England accent to a great extent).