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July 29, 2014

Y'ALL ARE KIDDING, RIGHT?

Oak Ridge cancels class to reduce Southern accents

(Thanks to Rick Day)

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Just leave the accent of The Day My Wife Met Girlfriend ALONE.

You knew nothing good would come of it when they hired Paula Deen as the teacher.

For ANYONE who feels their 'accent' is a detriment, find a Toastmasters group in your area. I have seen this organization help both people who get tongue-tied and those whose heavily-accented English hurt their chances in oral exams. Some even came to the point of considering public speaking 'fun,' which I still think is crazy.

"Put... the bunny... back... in the box."

I was fixin to sign up.

As a newly-qualified Yorkshire lass from a hard-working family (the majority of whom were coal miners) who excitedly moved to London (my first time in 'The Smoke'), I was puzzled/upset/offended when my northern accent was treated by my 'colleagues' with contempt. Tried to change the way I spoke, thinking I'd gain some respect, but after not too long I decided f^#k 'em. Never looked back. This lovely man sounds just like my Grandad did.

I have a Southern accent and I'm okay with it. It's part of who I am. For some reason though when I'm around a bunch of Yankees people from up north, it becomes much more prounced. In fact there are times when I can barely understand what I'm trying to say.

Maybe they'd stand on line to learn to tawk New Yawk.

Same here cindy. My hubby says as I'm yacking on the phone to the family, my Yorkshire accent gets more pronounced by the minute. When we go for a visit, after a couple of days he has the baffled look.

cindy, when my parents moved to L.A. my sisters were 13 and 16. Within six months they sounded like Valley Girls. Of course, this was in the '70s.

My late father in law had the classic Brooklyn toidy-toid-and-toid accent of William Bendix.

We don't have no stinkin' akksent - Y'all all have an akksent!

Something I have never understood is why speakers of the 'standard' dialect of a given language pick on those who speak otherwise. I especially don't understand why the 2nd person plural comes in for special attention. 2nd person plural in standard
English is of singular form: 'you'='you'. In Jersey dialect, since there are more of the you's, the 2nd person plural is 'youse'. In the Southern dialect it is 'you-all'. Standard comes across as a bunch of conceited goddam Yankees who should f**king go back to

This sort of regional bigotry makes me want to start saying things like "War of Northern Aggression" instead of "Civil War."

And I was born in Kansas.

In the Southern dialect it is 'you-all'.

Actually, I believe "y'all" is a contraction of "ye all", and is quite old.

Speaking in my best southern accent, which I sometimes confuse with my best Filipino accent, I will say this subject is in Da Doilet.

All ya'll, a little south in the mouth is a good thing.

As a mid-Atlantic kind of Virginian, we don't have an accent around Warshinton. "Crooked" is the official dialect. 30 miles south of here everyone sounds like Robert Duvall. I can hold my own in GA, but it's wicked haad to unnarstaand Baaastan. Now, they need a class.

And to be linguistically correct, the plural of "y'all" is "all y'all".

I actually studied NYSL (New York as a Second Language) in my college days.

It is possibly unwise to mock a Southern accent.
It is ungracious to mock a Northern accent.
And it is fairly common to hear a northerner say "You-all" or a variant, nowdays. Not always correctly, but we'd never mention that.

I worked in an office with two Texans, a Bostonian, a Yorkshireman, an Aussie (Ozzie), a Kiwi, and a bunch of ESL Arabs. Our meetings were a sort of bizzaro world linguistic symphony.

I know enough Chicagoan to understand that "Throop Street" has two pronunciations -- one for those from the north side and one for those from the sout side.

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