I'm sure there is some tension between generations about the accent/no-accent issue, but I've never gotten any crap for it. Compared to the rest of my family, I have a very faint accent. I've gotten some light teasing for sounding "country/Southern" when I've said certain phrases I don't generally use, and I've been jokingly accused of being "proper" or a grammar Nazi because I won't use other phrases. (I'm an English major. Certain things just bug me.) If anyone in my family ever had a problem with it, the battle was fought and won by my accent-less mother before I was old enough to speak.
I'm sure that some people, especially my grandparents' age, would have massive issues with younger people trying to tone down their accents. But it is really hard to be taken seriously if you sound Southern--and here I mean accent, not phrasing. If you use a Southern-style sentence construction or regionalism and you don't have an obvious accent, someone might ask you what you mean, but they won't assume you're an idiot hick. If you use perfectly normal standard U.S. English, not a y'all or ain't in sight, and have a thick accent, people automatically assume you're an idiot hick. This insight comes from my sister, who has a thick accent and spent nearly a year working in a call center.
Incidentally, I think she was more offended by the people who asked her to keep talking because her accent was "cute" than by the people who thought she was stupid. If she kept talking, she could prove she wasn't stupid, but there was nothing she could do to stop the "You sound so cute!" people from acting like she was a toddler or pet that had learned a new trick. I assume the trick was "acting like an intelligent, civilized human being."
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Date: 14 Jan 2011 12:35 am (UTC)I'm sure that some people, especially my grandparents' age, would have massive issues with younger people trying to tone down their accents. But it is really hard to be taken seriously if you sound Southern--and here I mean accent, not phrasing. If you use a Southern-style sentence construction or regionalism and you don't have an obvious accent, someone might ask you what you mean, but they won't assume you're an idiot hick. If you use perfectly normal standard U.S. English, not a y'all or ain't in sight, and have a thick accent, people automatically assume you're an idiot hick. This insight comes from my sister, who has a thick accent and spent nearly a year working in a call center.
Incidentally, I think she was more offended by the people who asked her to keep talking because her accent was "cute" than by the people who thought she was stupid. If she kept talking, she could prove she wasn't stupid, but there was nothing she could do to stop the "You sound so cute!" people from acting like she was a toddler or pet that had learned a new trick. I assume the trick was "acting like an intelligent, civilized human being."