Southern accents in the rural west? (transplants, movies, high school)
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do some people in the rural parts of the west, such as in the backwoods/logging communities, have southern accents? i've even seen confederate flags on cars where i live!!
do some people in the rural parts of the west, such as in the backwoods/logging communities, have southern accents? i've even seen confederate flags on cars where i live!!
In Eastern WA/North ID, some people have a redneckish accent, I wouldn't call it southern, but I'd call it totally informal.
do some people in the rural parts of the west, such as in the backwoods/logging communities, have southern accents? i've even seen confederate flags on cars where i live!!
I see that out here in the HD and think they're mainly a bunch of wannabes from OC or some other non-ag area who watched too much CMT/GAC and such.
The companion to the "suburban thugs" who watched too much Yo!MTV Raps and such back when those particular channels were showing music videos.
Definitely southern New Mexico. It is interesting to hear the voices of the candidates in the congressional race down there. It is like getting news from a foreign country ;-) Most of the caucasians in southern New Mexico are the descendants of Texans and similar folk.
Central New Mexico's anglos are mainly Midwestern in origin with a recent(ish) influx of west and east coasters. Most southern accents you might hear around here are due to the diverse modern migrations and not part of a general flow from the South, but rather, some dude from Georgia who came to work for Intel or some hippie from Asheville who came for whatever reason hippies crop up.
In northern New Mexico I have heard some anglos with a discernable Hispanic accent as that is the dominant accent in the state, especially up north. Almost never hear a southern accent up there.
People in the rural northern West will tend to have either a Northern (think Canadian, here - of course I'm speaking very loosely) accent or a 'General American' one.. and of course either variety can be informal (i.e., ending '-ing' words with '-in'', etc.).. a lot of that has to do wtih 'register' (or style/context), though. Having a sympathy towards the South/the Confederacy isn't really the same thing.. of course, there would be stats like '% of specific population sympathetic to X' (and these days the Confederacy is sometimes associated by a lot of people with extreme fiscal conservatism/libertariasm), but I've seen people online as far away as the UK with Confederate flags as/as part of their avatars or whatever. I could let that offend me, since I'm black, but I don't. Oh, and there's such a thing as a transplant from the American South, remember.
Where in the West are you talking about, though? Of course you will find Southern accents in Oklahoma, Texas, parts of Arizona and New Mexico, etc.
Where in the West are you talking about, though? Of course you will find Southern accents in Oklahoma, Texas, parts of Arizona and New Mexico, etc.
The two pairs aren't comparable. In Texas and most of Oklahoma, Southern American English is the norm. They are not part of the true West (i.e. Interior SW, Mountain States, Pacific Coast) but the South. Especially in this regard (speech patterns, due to settlement patterns).
Southern migration -- mostly from Texas -- made a penetration into eastern New Mexico (as ABQconvict noted), so a "Southern accent" is not all that uncommon in that area.
Another area -- from what I have heard -- is in and around Bakersfield, California, due to the high numbers of Southerners (particularly Texans, Okies, and Arkies) who settled in that region during the Depression. But of course, that is not a rural area, so may be irrelevant to the question. I guess one will find Southern speech in Western rural areas where there is a high concentration of Southerners! LOL
On a tangent, is very detailed dialect map another poster shared sometime back. Interesting!
The two pairs aren't comparable. In Texas and most of Oklahoma, Southern American English is the norm. They are not part of the true West (i.e. Interior SW, Mountain States, Pacific Coast) but the South. Especially in this regard (speech patterns, due to settlement patterns).
Southern migration -- mostly from Texas -- made a penetration into eastern New Mexico (as ABQconvict noted), so a "Southern accent" is not all that uncommon in that area.
Another area -- from what I have heard -- is in and around Bakersfield, California, due to the high numbers of Southerners (particularly Texans, Okies, and Arkies) who settled in that region during the Depression. But of course, that is not a rural area, so may be irrelevant to the question. I guess one will find Southern speech in Western rural areas where there is a high concentration of Southerners! LOL
On a tangent, is very detailed dialect map another poster shared sometime back. Interesting!
Thanks, TexasReb, but I'm a dialect/sociolinguistics geek, too. (I actually studied it [ok, just plain 'linguistics,' actually, but sociolinguistics was my area personal area of interest] for awhile in graduate school [at Northwestern U. outside of Chicago] but switched to a different, more 'practical' program about a year in.) Anyway, I know Southern accents are the norm in Texas in Oklahoma (aside from Northern transplants in some of the larger cities.. particularly Texas, these days; my SO grew up in suburban SA [in the '80s - early '90s] and says almost no one in his high school had a "Southern accent"). I was mainly trying to get at what part of the 'West' the OP was talking about. The label 'the West' (TM.. heh) has *frequently* included both Texas and Oklahoma - it's not an official term, by any means. But I do understand what you mean when you refer to the 'true West.' I know next to nothing about the dialect situation in AZ and NM - just that there are notable numbers of places in each state where you'd encounter Southern dialects. The same obviously *cannot* be said for states in the northern part of the West.
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Originally Posted by Alicia Bradley
Thanks, TexasReb, but I'm a dialect/sociolinguistics geek, too. (I actually studied it [ok, just plain 'linguistics,' actually, but sociolinguistics was my area personal area of interest] for awhile in graduate school [at Northwestern U. outside of Chicago] but switched to a different, more 'practical' program about a year in.) Anyway, I know Southern accents are the norm in Texas in Oklahoma (aside from Northern transplants in some of the larger cities.. particularly Texas, these days; my SO grew up in suburban SA [in the '80s - early '90s] and says almost no one in his high school had a "Southern accent"). I was mainly trying to get at what part of the 'West' the OP was talking about. The label 'the West' (TM.. heh) has *frequently* included both Texas and Oklahoma - it's not an official term, by any means. But I do understand what you mean when you refer to the 'true West.' I know next to nothing about the dialect situation in AZ and NM - just that there are notable numbers of places in each state where you'd encounter Southern dialects. The same obviously *cannot* be said for states in the northern part of the West.
Sociolinguistics is really fascinating. I love it how we can tell so much about a person by the way they speak; I find this not so much the case in America, however, where gender, social class etc doesn't correlate with accent and other speech characteristics as it does here.
Have you ever seen 'Boys Don't Cry?' about Brandon Teena, played by Hilary Swank? I find it weird how in the film Teena/Brandon has a really strong cowboyish accent (as played by Swank) as do some of the other characters. They hail from a small town in rural southeastern Nebraska. I saw a documentary on the case (read up on it if you don't know) and none of the characters spoke like that at all. Brandon himself (she identified as a transgender male) spoke with a boring GenAm accent, as did the convicted killers and most everyone else who knew Brandon who spoke. I think Hollywood with it's Cowboy movies makes it out like Cowboys from Idaho to Montana all speak with a sort of Central Texan drawl when in reality many of them probably sounded like the convenience store attendant, maybe with a few 'informalisms' or a 'looseness' to their speech.
[quote=Trimac20;16171931] Sociolinguistics is really fascinating. I love it how we can tell so much about a person by the way they speak; /QUOTE]
Agree with both you and Alicia Bradley that socio-linguistics is a facinating subject. I never formally studied it (as it was never offered at my university), but did/do a lot of "layman studies" on my own.
Something interesting to pass along (or at least I think it is! LOL), back in a college freshman English class I had, the prof had a friend of his come in and speak on the subject. He (the speaker) had a standing bet with anybody he could talk to you for a short while and tell you not only within 50 miles of where *you* came from, but where your *mother* was born!
He demonstrated it for the class and I was flabbergasted! Of course, perhaps he just asked some "key questions" which might telegraph the answer, but he got the answer right each time (according to the students who volunteered to be tested). It was something...
Sociolinguistics is really fascinating. I love it how we can tell so much about a person by the way they speak; I find this not so much the case in America, however, where gender, social class etc doesn't correlate with accent and other speech characteristics as it does here.
Have you ever seen 'Boys Don't Cry?' about Brandon Teena, played by Hilary Swank? I find it weird how in the film Teena/Brandon has a really strong cowboyish accent (as played by Swank) as do some of the other characters. They hail from a small town in rural southeastern Nebraska. I saw a documentary on the case (read up on it if you don't know) and none of the characters spoke like that at all. Brandon himself (she identified as a transgender male) spoke with a boring GenAm accent, as did the convicted killers and most everyone else who knew Brandon who spoke. I think Hollywood with it's Cowboy movies makes it out like Cowboys from Idaho to Montana all speak with a sort of Central Texan drawl when in reality many of them probably sounded like the convenience store attendant, maybe with a few 'informalisms' or a 'looseness' to their speech.
Don't even get me started on the media's portrayal of accents--they're almost never accurate. Television and movies almost always portray rural western accents as southern. Having lived in the rural west (granted not far from Texas) there were some people with a little bit of a Texas accent, but it wasn't prevalent. Even the Dallas area (which I believe has transformed into a Midlands accent overall) is usually portrayed on television as having a deep south accent, which is certainly does not in reality.
Not to say I haven't met people in the rural west with southern accents--I have. However, they have almost always been either transplants themselves or children of transplants from the south.
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Oh, and there's such a thing as a transplant from the American South, remember.
