Thanks for this post (says the New Englander currently living in the Mid-Atlantic). A lot of stuff I wasn't aware of. I like Southern accents, and I'm sorry you got so much shit for having one that you had to erase yours and that you choose to keep your geographic & cultural origins a secret to avoid others' bigotry.
Living in other countries (Italy, Israel, & England)* has made me sympathetic to people who speak differently or who are speaking in a language that isn't their native language and also I just like language generally and enjoy variations in vocabulary and pronunciation and so on. But I sure as hell have stereotypes about the South, and for that matter the Midwest.
Among other things, I'm embarrassed that so many Northerners seem to think that slavery didn't happen in the North and racism has been negligible or something, and that people don't move around. I was born in California and grew up in Connecticut, but I know for a fact that some of my ancestors owned slaves in Virginia, and there are tombstones in an 18th/19th c. graveyard in my hometown in CT that were pointed out to me as belonging to slaves. The attempts to lay the blame elsewhere are (sadly) not surprising, but certainly discouraging.
I've heard that Northern accents in England receive the same sorts of attitudes that Southern accents do in the US - don't know much about what the attendant stereotypes are, but I know that stupidity is one of them. My impression is that accents and regionalism and classism and so on in the UK are pretty complicated ...
Oh, and if you haven't watched Supernatural fyi there's at least one episode where they take all the negative Southern stereotypes to the max - there may be others but obviously I'm less likely to notice offensive things than you are.
*Though in Italy and England I had people tell me how much they like US accents (i.e. the "standard" US English I speak). Which was unexpected and sort of weirdly Othering - probably my only experience being exoticized in any way, actually. I did get laughed at for some of my US vocabulary and pronunciation in England - I learned to say "trousers" instead of "pants" really fast.
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Date: 11 Jan 2011 02:36 pm (UTC)Living in other countries (Italy, Israel, & England)* has made me sympathetic to people who speak differently or who are speaking in a language that isn't their native language and also I just like language generally and enjoy variations in vocabulary and pronunciation and so on. But I sure as hell have stereotypes about the South, and for that matter the Midwest.
Among other things, I'm embarrassed that so many Northerners seem to think that slavery didn't happen in the North and racism has been negligible or something, and that people don't move around. I was born in California and grew up in Connecticut, but I know for a fact that some of my ancestors owned slaves in Virginia, and there are tombstones in an 18th/19th c. graveyard in my hometown in CT that were pointed out to me as belonging to slaves. The attempts to lay the blame elsewhere are (sadly) not surprising, but certainly discouraging.
I've heard that Northern accents in England receive the same sorts of attitudes that Southern accents do in the US - don't know much about what the attendant stereotypes are, but I know that stupidity is one of them. My impression is that accents and regionalism and classism and so on in the UK are pretty complicated ...
Oh, and if you haven't watched Supernatural fyi there's at least one episode where they take all the negative Southern stereotypes to the max - there may be others but obviously I'm less likely to notice offensive things than you are.
*Though in Italy and England I had people tell me how much they like US accents (i.e. the "standard" US English I speak). Which was unexpected and sort of weirdly Othering - probably my only experience being exoticized in any way, actually. I did get laughed at for some of my US vocabulary and pronunciation in England - I learned to say "trousers" instead of "pants" really fast.