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I think people are looking at extreme Southern accents, and them exclaiming that because they don't sound like that, there are no Southern influences.
I also suspect that some reject the notion of Southern influences, as they see it as "country" and not what modern city dwellers should be linked to.
The reality is that the vast varieties of AA accents do have Southern influences. How much depends on origin of the Great Migration, generation and social class. Younger and more educated AAs have fewer influences. Also accents of the Deep South are more stereotypically Southern than those of the Southeast.
That's exactly it. I actually used to think NYC Blacks had zero Southern carryover in their dialect, but when I listened for it, it was apparent that it is there on some occasions. It's definitely NOT the dominant sound of Black NYC speech but it is there. And again, those with no Southern roots are less likely to display it.
No one (or at least not a large number of people) is saying the NYC Blaccent is Southern, just that it has some Southern influence. Overall a Black NYer is going to sound Northern unlike a Georgian.
It is true that East Coast Southern accents are different than Gulf Coast Southern accents. Especially those of the Carolinas and even as far south as Jacksonville with Gullah culture that are more Geechee influenced than they are English or Scotch-Irish influenced. That type of Southern sounds way different than the stereotypical plantation Southern.
The plurality of NYC blacks have origins in NC, SC, and VA. Their "Southern" is just not based on GA.MS, AL. and AR. Most second, and virtually all 3rd generation NYC blacks of immigrant background take on the dominant American accent, as do most immigrant offspring. In this case it will be the local NYC AA accent.
In fact many PRs have an AA influenced accent, which definitely marks them off, even from Italians, whose accent is NOT free of AA influences.
You're saying the plurality? I always thought that at least a third of Black NYers weren't from the South from the West Indies/Africa.
Also, to your last point, are you saying the Italian NYC accent is AA influenced a bit? I'm confused. To me, NYC Italians speak textbook New York English with zero Southern accent.
I'm black from the midwest and lived in the south over 15 years. Most black people IMO do not have a southern accent. If you actually lived in the south and know what a southern accent sounds like and you meet black people in the Midwest, Northeast and the Western portions of the USA, you would know that most black people do not speak with a southern accent.
It took me over a year to understand people speaking in a southern accent when I went down south to attend college. People in the south thought I was from "new york" lol because I didn't have a southern accent. All the native southerners knew that I was not from the south and immediately would ask me where I was from.
In regards to different speaking patterns between blacks and whites in America, I do think that that is common. But it is not a "southern" accent. I also agree that many black Americans in the north and out west have grandparents/great grandparents who were from the south. Almost all of my great grandparents (born early 1900s) were from the south but none of my cousins, nor myself have a southern accent. My mother's family has lived in Ohio since the mid 1800s (they were free people of color) and my husband's family who live in Chicago but are from Georgia have told me that I speak much differently than they do. But not in regards in accents as they all have a Midwestern accent. It is just that they use common, what I call "southern" words to describe things, like "gutters" on a house. I grew up calling them "eaves troughs" and my husband was confused about that. In the midwest many of us call "vacuuming" as "running the sweeper" and my in-laws had never heard of that either lol. I also use "collander" for what my husband said he called "the bowl with the holes in it" but I'm pretty sure he was just being funny lol.
I'm black from the midwest and lived in the south over 15 years. Most black people IMO do not have a southern accent. If you actually lived in the south and know what a southern accent sounds like and you meet black people in the Midwest, Northeast and the Western portions of the USA, you would know that most black people do not speak with a southern accent.
It took me over a year to understand people speaking in a southern accent when I went down south to attend college. People in the south thought I was from "new york" lol because I didn't have a southern accent. All the native southerners knew that I was not from the south and immediately would ask me where I was from.
In regards to different speaking patterns between blacks and whites in America, I do think that that is common. But it is not a "southern" accent. I also agree that many black Americans in the north and out west have grandparents/great grandparents who were from the south. Almost all of my great grandparents (born early 1900s) were from the south but none of my cousins, nor myself have a southern accent. My mother's family has lived in Ohio since the mid 1800s (they were free people of color) and my husband's family who live in Chicago but are from Georgia have told me that I speak much differently than they do. But not in regards in accents as they all have a Midwestern accent. It is just that they use common, what I call "southern" words to describe things, like "gutters" on a house. I grew up calling them "eaves troughs" and my husband was confused about that. In the midwest many of us call "vacuuming" as "running the sweeper" and my in-laws had never heard of that either lol. I also use "collander" for what my husband said he called "the bowl with the holes in it" but I'm pretty sure he was just being funny lol.
That's fair, but do you agree that there is at least some carryover especially when it comes to glide deletion in certain words?
What Midwest region? In Chicago, Blacks can sound very Deep South like.
I am from NW Ohio/Toledo area. But my husband is from Chicago. His grandmother was from south Georgia and his mother is one of the youngest of 8 children. Neither she nor her siblings have a southern accent.
That said, I have known people from Chicago who have hints of a southern accent. I went to an HBCU (historical black college/university) down south and many of my classmates were from various, non-southern portions of the country and one in particular joked that black Chicagoans are "country ghetto" in their language due to "all their grandmothers being from Mississippi." LOL
I found that hilarious but I'm not very sensitive. A few of my Chicago friends were as they did have grandmother's from Mississippi lol.
But where I'm from, we have a regular old Midwestern/Great Lakes accent. And FWIW, even though Detroit also had a lot of blacks move there during the "Great Migration" of the early to mid 1900s, similar to Chicago, I cannot remember one person who I knew/know from Detroit who is black who has a southern accent. And even the "country ghetto" speak of Chicago is not "deep south" like. Far from it.
As stated, you all must have never lived in the south if you think that. The only people who have a pretty deep accent who I know who live in Chicago are actually from St. Louis and they have a pretty harsh southern accent due to being more "southern" in Missouri.
Last edited by residinghere2007; 09-09-2015 at 12:45 PM..
That's fair, but do you agree that there is at least some carryover especially when it comes to glide deletion in certain words?
No, not after so many generations. For example, in the south the word "here" is frequently pronounced "hee-ya" amongst southerns and in my experience black southerners. I had never heard that in Ohio nor in SE Michigan until I moved south. All the word that rhyme with "here" are pronounced similarly in the south.
If you are speaking of leaving off -ing or shortening -ing words that can be considered, but that is not something unique to the south and is not indicative of a southern accent. Most whites I know also leave off -ing from particular words.
Regional speaking habits are not based on race. All the ethnicities in a particular area usually develop a region's speaking habits. Where I live we have a lot of people of German and Polish descent. We have a decent sized Hispanic population. During the 1980s we received a large Vietnamese and Laosian refugee community. I went to school with all these kids with various backgrounds. We all pretty much spoke the same except for the Asian immigrants who immigrated at a later age. Most of my Vietnamese friends came to America as toddlers but some were 8-12 when they immigrated an the older age at immigration made them have an accent. The one's who immigrated earlier did not. Most of the hispanics I knew (they were primarily Mexican/Chicano) were 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants as were the Polish. None of them had accents. Most of the black people in this area migrated between 1915 and 1945, so they also do not have an accent. Many of us, like my family have been in this state and this part of the country since the 1800s. Ohio and Michigan were heavily settled by runaway slaves via the Underground Rail Road and had sizable black populations in the late 1800s in particular after the Civil War. So contrary to what many think, most black people in the midwest more than likely are not the descendants of "new" migrants from the south. They have been here longer in most cases than white Americans descended from the Poles and Irish in particular. The Germans here have been in this area since the mid 1800s as well but they didn't stop being "German" (speaking in German in their schools/churches/communities) until WWI which coincides to when blacks began moving here in large numbers. Prior to the 20th century, all the big cities in the Midwest in particular were not heavily segregated. In Toledo there was not a "black" neighborhood until after large populations of black migrants came here between the aforementioned years. This was the same in Chicago and Detroit and other smaller cities in the midwest.
Risidinghere2007, your posts in this thread have been the most accurate, factual, sensible, and objective out of all 70+ pages. To claim that all Black Americans (and ONLY Black Americans) have some type of Southern accent---even if their families have not lived in the South in generations---is ignorant, inaccurate, and borderline racist. Especially coming from so many "experts" in this thread who aren't even Black American and/or who have never even lived anywhere in the South among actual Black Southerners anyway. The OP of this thread is even white, which should tell you all you need to know (he claims he's lived in Mississippi but yet can't tell a black Southern accent, from a black NY accent, from a black Cali accent, etc and says they all sound the same/Southern ).
What Midwest region? In Chicago, Blacks can sound very Deep South like.
I would say that that is true in the Midwestern cities like Chicago and St. Louis where black people have been migrating heavily and consistently between there and states like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee since as recently as 50 years ago (and many still are to this day), but that's it. And even then, the black person's class and level of education would come into play and determine how their accent and speech patterns sound. But in most of the rest of the Midwest, like Ohio and Indiana, and places in the Northeast and out West, that's not the case at all. If you think a black person from from the Bronx, one from Cleveland, OH, one from Oakland, California, and one from Hattiesburg, Mississippi in a room and all of them are going to sound the same or sound Southern, then you need to either get your ears checked, or you need to stop being ignorant and racist and expecting all black people in 21st Century America to speak in a stereotypical Stepin Fetchit plantation dialect.
Read more of the recent posts and I see that it seems most of the posters are confusing specific words with being "southern" also associated BVE (black vernacular English) with "southern."
Neither of them are "southern" at all.
The word "y'all" is not a southern invention. If that were the case all the poor whites up in Maine or NY state would not say "y'all" but many of them do.
BVE is based upon a mixture of English with African dialects, and is a pidgin language of sorts. It is not an accent. An accent is a distinctive, regionalized way of speaking. Due to black Americans all being descendants of long ago Africans, it is fair to conclude that we all understand and/or speak some portions of BVE/AAVE (aka "Ebonics") but most people misunderstand what BVE/AAVE actually is. For an easy review, from wikipedia:
It shares parts of its grammar and phonology with the dialects of the Southern United States. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares enough characteristics with African Creole languages spoken around the world that AAVE itself may be an English-based creole language separate from English;[3][4] however, most linguists maintain that there are no significant parallels,[5][6][7] and that AAVE is, in fact, a demonstrable variety of the English language,[8][9] with verifiable origins primarily from older, nonstandard varieties of British English.[9]
As with all linguistic forms, its usage is influenced by age, status, topic and setting.
BVE/AAVE has no particular "accent." I do feel it may remind people of southerners due to the south having influenced the speaking patterns of our black ancestors, but again, it is not an "accent." It is a distinct "creole" language and one IMO that is shunned way too much being that it is the only thing that really connects black Americans (I don't consider myself an "African" American due to me being so far removed from Africa) back to the African continent. IMO it is a miraculous that so many aspects of traditional West African dialects in regards to the phrasing and tense use has survived across the centuries.
So again, most black Americans do not have a southern accent, unless they, themselves, are from the south (and FWIW, I know MANY black southerners who do not have a southern accent). If their parents are from the south, just like white/European, Asian, and Hispanic immigrants, by the 2nd generation those persons no longer have an "accent." They are Americanized.
FWIW, threads in CD about black people are always interesting being that it seems so many white Americans view blacks as very foreign from them. What I stated above is true - most blacks have ancestry in America longer than most whites in this country period. So to be seen as foreign IMO is very odd.
Also, there were free black people in southern states prior to the Civil War. There were more free blacks in the south than in the north. There were free blacks in the Mid-Atlantic (my Ohio family was originally from PA and MD) and in the Great Lakes region and even out west. Most free blacks were highly educated for their time periods and they were the ones who helped the southern migrants when they re-settled from the rural south to the urban north in the mid 20th century.
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