Accents:
I called the movie theater yesterday to get my hours for the weekend (my last weekend working there, thank God. I'm just so tired all the time) and started thinking about accents becuase of the two people to whom I spoke.
We Americans are not supposed to be hung up on accents. Not like the Brits, who can use an accent to tell where you went to school and to the year how old yor family is (or something) or like the Irish, who can use an accent to place you to the neighborhood you were born in (and in the North, your religion). I'm not even sure what an upper-class, old money American accent should sound like. Maybe the rich Bostonian of the Kennedys? Some sort of New England accent like the Rockefellers or the Fords? New money, of course, can sound like whatever it wants. Sam Walton's Arkansas drawl or Bill Gates' flat Midwestern or anything in between. It doesn't matter.
But still we think about accents. In the south, we can tell on the phone if the caller is black or white from some timbre of the voice, even if the person is well-educated and lacks a stereotypical accent. When I call my friend Terra, her mother always tells her: "Phone's for you. Sounds like a white girl."
To make it in a lot of professions you need my accent, an upper-middle-class suburban-white-girl accent. Not as suburban as the Valley accent, much less upspeak and fewer "likes" and "you knows," but an accent that cannot be placed geographically beyond "the middle class suburbs of some medium-sized or larger city." There are certain accents that are OK to have too, though most people won't try to acquire them. A Boston accent is acceptable in Boston and barely so in other large cities, particularly along the Eastern Seaboard. A New York accent is OK in most major cities.
But we are we so careful with accents? I didn't always have a carefully neutral accent. I had some southernisms and Irishisms as a child, nothing too major, but I didn't sound like I could broadcast the evening news. When I was about 13, I realised that my accent (particularly the Southern part, would always make people think I was dumb, ill-educated, and racist. So I worked to get rid of it, listening to the news, my parents (midwesterners both), whatever I could. And I succeeded.
But I knid of regret that now. I lost something of my identity when I lost that accent. With an accent, I sounded like I belonged in a specific part of the world. Without, I belong everywhere, and nowhere.
People won't laugh at me about my accent any more. I'm not disqualified from any jobs for it. But in Atlanta, I'll always sound like a Yankee, and outside the South, when people find out where I'm from, they will always either think I'm a redneck or say in that pitying voice "Oh-- but you didn't live there very long, did you?"
Of course a southern accent isn't even the worst accent one can have. A rural, true redneck accent is far worse, as is a "ghetto" black accent. But why do we care? An accent is far more a symbol of who our parents were than who we are, and in America, we're not supposed to care about that. If I have a rural accent, it's because my parents choose to raise me in the country, not because I myself made that choice. It shouldn't hurt my future if I choose to move to a city to raise my children.
Language is powerful, and in a way obiterating an accent is obliterating a language. Northerners seem to believe that if they can discredit the southern accent enough, they can discredit the southern way of life and remove everything southern about the south. The British stopped at destroying the Irish language, not the accent, but in London, how welcome do you believe an Irish accent is even now?
We're all losing our accents. TV and fast and efficient travel are seeing to that. But are we losing our regional identity too? In 100 years will America be one big Midwest?
