Daily Dose of English 144
The Southern Accent
Daily Dose of English 144
Intermediate
Hey everyone! My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the Southern accent. which is actually a group of accents. It's not just one. And you heard a version, my version of a light Southern accent there in the beginning. The southern accent like I said, is it actually a whole bunch of different accents that are spoken in a lot of the southern states? primarily by white communities there's other accents for different ethnic groups you can say because because of the messed up history of the US, we can say. There are pretty distinct ethnolects, which is a dialect that is pretty much kept within a group, like a group of people based on their, ethnology's not a word, basically based on their, what is the word? Oh my God. Ethnicity, that's the word, that I'm trying to think of. So yeah, I'm probably not going to get into that too much, but just to go through some accents is all that I'm trying to do instead of trying to open a can of worms, we can say. But I want to talk about the more generic southern accent that you can find in a whole bunch of different states. From Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Carolinas, what, Tennessee, Kentucky, like everything. Everywhere, rather. in the South. So let's talk a little bit about the sounds. Cause again, like as we've learned, the vowels are the things that change most. Um, and there are a lot of changes here that make, make this accent quite, um, uh, distinct. So starting at the top, we have the a sound in my dialect and the words like act and, um, pal. And those often can change to ay, ay-ect, ay-ect and pal, or trap, something like that, ay-uh, ay-uh. It's like a bit of a, almost like your tongue comes forward a little bit during it. And then they have a similar ay-uh, like in ham and land and yay-uh. But it can also come down to be sort of the same, ay-uh, ham, land, and yay-uh. They can all sound like that. So there's a lot more movement in the vowel. And there's actually, that's what we're gonna see in a lot of these, a lot of the sounds. There can be a lot of this movement, right? Dress can become dress, dress, right? Where it almost like has an ay-uh, ay-uh sound to it. Same with pan, pan. Jam and tent can become like that instead of jam, pan, and tent. which is a pretty different sound than you'd hear in my accent. Um, so going back up to the, the all sounds, they, there usually is a split. Uh, I think it depends on age actually. So, um, there's this, uh, what, what's called the caught caught merger, uh, that I have. So words, the word caught C-A-U-G-H-T, like I caught the ball and C-O-T, like a little bed is a cot. I would say that it's the same, but some older Southern speakers might say, um, caught for the bed and then caught or something like that or or ought caught bought off something like that. It can also just become a little bit rounded become caught. There's a lot of different splits that can happen in depending on where you're from and all these different things. Let's see, let's keep going though. Then we have the a sound that I mentioned, right? Dress can become dress and met can become met, met, something like that. And then there's another merger called the pin pen merger. This is where words... So the eh sound before an N or an M can become exactly the same as an I like sound, like an ih. So my name, for example, would become Bin. bin or people might say eight, nine, 10, eight, nine, 10 is how a lot of people count in the U S. Um, and that merger is only before ends and Ms, I think. So, uh, listen for it. Maybe you'll hear it. Um, but that can also become a, so just like the a pan jam and tent or pin, um, hit, hit him, him, The same thing that happens with movement in this E sound like in beam or cheese can sort of start a little bit lower and become BAME or chase BAME BAME instead of beam beam Bus and flood, this sort of back uh sound, can become a little bit more centralized. Really hard to notice, but bus and flood can happen. Book and put can actually become a little bit more forward. Book and put, but again, these are very subtle things that you probably wouldn't even notice or care about. I don't really, they're not the characteristic things that happen. um and then same thing with ooh can become food and glue right there's a lot of different changes that can happen there lots of extra movement happening in this ooh sound going to the diphthongs though there's at least in some of them there's an interesting or I guess it's probably just one, I think, right? Yeah, the I sound can become a single sound, like rad instead of ride, rad, raz and shine, for example, instead of rise and shine. So it actually loses the diphthong-ness for some people. So I can become, I can become ah. I, I think the other, like, it doesn't always happen though, and there are, Some splits, I believe, but I'm not really sure. I don't know that much about the accent, so, yeah. I think the aeow stays sort of more like that, aeow, naeow, and aeouch, scout, instead of just naow, aeouch, and scout. Similar thing that's happening with the sounds, the regular monophthongs that are more aeow, there's more movement to them. And this is actually why people often say that there's a twang to a southern accent, a southern twang, a southern drawl. A twang is like a sound that kind of goes boing, boing, boing, and usually is like a string of some kind, like an instrument, like the twang of a banjo. If you've ever heard a banjo, there's sort of a twanging sound to it. And so that ay-ay-ay-ay, that movement in the vowels does sort of lend itself to sounding a bit more Southern. And so that's why we say that they might speak with a bit of a Southern drawl or a Southern twang, because there's a bit more movement in the tone, you know? A, I think it's pretty similar, oy, boy and choice. I think it's a little bit lighter, instead of boy and choice, it could be boy and choice. And then I think that's really all the main differences. for those vowels rather, because then we have to talk about the R vowels because there are plenty of rhotic and non-rhotic dialects. Like depending on where you go, some are going to say barn and car, some are going to say barn and car, barn and car, barn and car. Yeah, how does that sound? Sounds weird to me. Bear, bear, burn, burn, burn, burn. Sorry, I'm trying to hear what it sounds like, because these, it's sort of hard to, shoal, shoal, yeah, that's more close to it. There's sort of a lack of an R instead of a true shoal. which sounds a lot more British, when you say shore thing, north, rather than north, north and shore, born, horse, poor, poor. I think there is actually the split of poor and poor though, so be careful with that. So actually there's a three-way split, poor, poor, and pure. So I have a split between pure and poor, but then poor as in like without money and poor as in too poor water, I say the same, but not everybody does. So you can hear poor and poor as different pronunciations in some parts of the South. Again, I think that's primarily older speakers of Southern English. And younger generations are losing that split between poor and poor. Some people from other parts of the country cannot produce the difference. And cure and pure, pure, pure and poor, poor, there's like the splits there. It's a little hard to do. I'm not exactly confident because I'm not Southern, but yeah, that's the overview that I'd give on the Southern accent, I guess. It's, there's a lot of, it's because it's a fairly old part of the US comparatively, there's a lot of variety. Like I didn't even get into things like y'all and other words that are used down there. Because yawl is a very, very frequent thing to do. There's also a bunch of interesting, I guess it is vocabulary, right? Like yinz, no, yinz is... um urines is is what it is yeah urines is it can come in there's like these words that come in that i literally wouldn't understand in maybe in context i could but like there's different words that are used especially in rural areas because things have sort of, there's been more grammatical things that come up or whatever it is. There's also some very interesting pronunciations that can happen with words like creek becoming crick, just completely changing the pronunciation of them. So I definitely recommend you look into maybe some longer YouTube videos from an actual Southern English speaker if you're interested, because I can't really give that to you. Um, I do want to mention one of my favorite movies of all time, uh, Forrest Gump, where they, there's a lot of different Southern accents that you can hear. Um, so if you want to get a fantastic movie and hear some good Southern accents, that's definitely something to look to look at a movie to watch. But yeah, that's all that I'm going to do for today. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to listen to me, um, talk about something that I'm not a hundred percent positive on, but I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned something and might do a little more research on your own. See you again tomorrow. Bye.
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