Is okla. The sout, midwest or niether?!?! (Oklahoma City, Kansas: college, living)

[Merlander]

Personally I think Oklahomans are shaped most by life on the Great Plains. Sure it has some of the South, and is also shaped to a lesser extent by the West and the Midwest, but the Plains effect dwarfs the others. Not everyone enjoys [or can even deal with] the wide open spaces in America's heartland, the big sky, etc. Once you can, it gets in your blood and you're well on your way to being an Okie.

[averagejoe76]

I lived in OK and Texas and OK Feels more like Texas to me than Kansas or Nebraska.
I would argue that OK is Southern because of these reasons:
Heavily Baptist
Cuisine:Biscuits N Gravy,Sweet Tea,Alot of BBQ,etc
Many Country Artists:Reba,Garth etc
Accent: many Okies have an Accent,maybe not so much in Tulsa or OKC
Many Southernors moved to OK including my grandfather
Support for the Confederacy
That said Oklahoma isnt very Southern like Alabama or SC
Its also a Mix of Western,Midwestern culture.

[Goodpasture]

Originally Posted by averagejoe76

Heavily Baptist

And Methodist, and Catholic, and Jewish, and pagan, and heathen, and wiccan, and mostly non-denominational............

Originally Posted by averagejoe76

Cuisine:Biscuits N Gravy,Sweet Tea,Alot of BBQ,etc

That ain't cuisine.....that's chuck or chow......cuisine starts with someone sticking a cork next to your nose.......

Originally Posted by averagejoe76

Many Country Artists:Reba,Garth etc

They aren't country......they're western.......with a Bob Wills Heritage more than a Hank background........and DON'T tell me JJ Cale or Leon Russell are country.........

Originally Posted by averagejoe76

Accent: many Okies have an Accent,maybe not so much in Tulsa or OKC

Only to folks that don't live here..........

Originally Posted by averagejoe76

Many Southernors moved to OK including my grandfather

And Irish and Missourians, and lets not forget the various trails of tears, or the greatest horsemen of the plains....the Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne........

Originally Posted by averagejoe76

Support for the Confederacy

They didn't support the confederacy so much as they just wanted to shoot guys in blue uniforms...........sort of a get even for making them take long walks where friends and family died..........

[FL-NC-AZ-TX]

I think Oklahoma is probably a transition state where the line between south and midwest becomes a little blurred. It is not really one or the other, it is a little bit of both.

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by FL-NC-AZ-TX

I think Oklahoma is probably a transition state where the line between south and midwest becomes a little blurred. It is not really one or the other, it is a little bit of both.

perfect! Even though, from what we learned in school a hundred years ago (we were told it was south) I think it lies between the two.


Nita

[karibear]

The midwest is a lot of things, but I don't see much of any of it in OK. By far the most racist person I ever met was from Nebraska, and he was rabid, to put it mildly - but he was also from a very small town, and if you closed your eyes you wouldn't have been able to guess what color he was rom his speech. As for accents, I hear a lot of different ones around here. It's more a rhythm and dropping g's than anything, like 'goen to the store', or 'runnen up to town.' I spent two summers in Ft Worth, and the only difference I heard there was a tendency to start sentences with 'Y'all.' There were two Okies I knew very well about 20-odd years ago in AK, one had a drawl and could sing like an angel, the other was from Muskogee and had no accent at all - unless you count having a voice like sandpaper. I wouldn't consider either of them good examples of anything, though. The 'drawl' is more rural, in my experience. I've heard it all over the country, outside of cities. I will say it's more pronounced in people from the deep south, but I've heard the same thing in rural OR, CO, WY, MT, and MO, among others. I also think a lot of accents have been homogenized away because of radio and television.

[colleeng47]

I work for the Department of Libraries right in the middle of OKC, and I hear a sufficient amount of y'alls during the course of the day, both from co-workers and the general public coming in. I also hear "I'm fixin' to", "big ole truck" and "dunna it".

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by colleeng47

I work for the Department of Libraries right in the middle of OKC, and I hear a sufficient amount of y'alls during the course of the day, both from co-workers and the general public coming in. I also hear "I'm fixin' to", "big ole truck" and "dunna it".

sounds like you have been talking to our granddaughter who was born in the Dallas area and graduated from the University of AR last year...

btw, did you see my comment about the Olive bar?

Nita

[Saintmarks]

This is just my opinion, my observances of being a Georgia native, colleged in Alabama, a 3 year stint in Fort Worth in the 80s, back to Georgia for 15 now in Tx for 5 with a mother-in-law that lived in OKC for five years.

I feel Oklahoma is more southern than TX. Perhaps it is because my years in TX are in the DFW metroplex that has many transplants from all over, but the Okie natives I meet feel more like Georgians and Alabamians than the native Texans I know. More of it is due to the cultural things mentioned earlier, cuisine, religious backgrounds, speech patterns, etc. Perhaps I know more Okies from rural small towns than I know Texans from rural backgrounds.

Perhaps the rural experience in America is as much of a common bond as regional bonds. I knew a girl from Iowa that did not have a bit of a southern accent, but speech patterns and grammar was similar. She was fairly well educated (or came across as such) until she said statements like "I seen them yesterday" instead of "I have seen" or "I saw." You hear that kind of grammar and you almost automatically attach a drawl to it, lol, even if there isn't one.

[Goodpasture]

any of ya'll enjoy one of the new fusion type restaurants? Where they have really creative dishes that are blends of alien cultures? I had one once that was a blend of Thai, Greek, Chinese and New Mexican (not tex-mex). Absolutely incredible.......but trying to describe it by traditional terms or through regional references was not possible. Incredibly good, the flavors and ingredients from the various cultures was blended exquisitly, but it wasn't Thai, it wasn't Greek, it wasn't Chinese, it wasn't New Mexican, although every culture contributed.

That is Oklahoma. An exquisite blend of south, southwest, midwest, native american cultures with a splash of California and Pacific northwest thrown in, followed by a nice levening of cowboy culture.

So instead of calling it all those, and being wrong, why not just recognize that it is Oklahoma........nothing else quite like it, similar in aspects to everywhere else in the country, but with a unique blend of each that creates it's own definition.