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I don't think it is that so much as that so many northerners have moved south over time that the older accents are diluted. Top that off with mass media being dominated by accents from outside the south, you have the human sub-conscious growing up on what is becoming the more standard American speech.
Not as many southerners have moved north by comparison.
Not sure about the north, but plenty of southerners have moved to California over the years, and while some still keep their southern accent after many generations, most don't. But then again, Calfornia has gotten an influx of northeasterners too and we don't hear that accent very much around here either.. probably even less than the southern accent.
I was going to give you an actual reason why but then you went ignorant at the end so I won't bother wasting the keystrokes. What the real question should be is why are (some) Southern natives SO beyond obsessed with South vs North.
People's accents change naturally, but they will always keep some of their origins. I worked with a woman born in England who came here at 18 and 40 years later still said things like pahth for path and dahnce for dance and pronounced her t's very precisely.
When I teased her about her Brit accent one day she looked shocked. She thought she no longer had a discernable accent because when she went back to England to visit, they teased her about sounding like an American.
I've travelled to the south plenty of times, and I find the southern accent to be totally annoying
Which Southern accent?!? There are MANY different Southern accents, even within each Southern state.
I hate when people who aren't from the South (usually Northerners) try to lump all the many different Southern accents together as sounding the same. I mean, don't people realize how BIG and diverse a region the South is?!? There's no way everyone across the entire South could have EXACTLY the same accent. Geez!
People's accents change naturally, but they will always keep some of their origins. I worked with a woman born in England who came here at 18 and 40 years later still said things like pahth for path and dahnce for dance and pronounced her t's very precisely.
When I teased her about her Brit accent one day she looked shocked. She thought she no longer had a discernable accent because when she went back to England to visit, they teased her about sounding like an American.
Ummm...it's very hard to lose an accent. It might take a couple of years to learn a language, losing an accent takes a couple of decades. If Southerners move to the North and "lose their accent" it's usually because their accent was not that noticeable in the first place,
EXACTLY!!! And when it comes to learning a foreign language, if you haven't learned it fluently by the age of about 12, you're never going to be able to speak it without noticeable traces of your original accent to the point where you sound like a native speaker of the language anyway.
Also, I'm glad someone finally pointed out that in any region or place, some native speakers are going to have milder accents than others. Another thing worth pointing out is that even in the American South, people from big cities and large metropolitan areas are doing to sound much different from people from rural areas. In other words, a Richmond accent doesn't sound like a New Orleans accent which doesn't sound at all like an Atlanta accent. Moreover, you could drive an hour outside of Memphis or Dallas to a surrounding rural area and notice a COMPLETELY different native accent than the one you just heard 45 minutes to an hour ago within the actual city limits.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Warszawa
not all Southerners sound like Forrest Gump characters
THANK YOU!!! And not all Southerners sound like the backwoods hillbillies from Deliverance, either.
I think it's all individual and for some people, they're more vulnerable to a change in their accent than others. There are some people that can easily pick up a foreign language beyond age 12, while others it's difficult.
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