she said it better than I ever could

[kaigou]

Trying to Write the Southern Accent

I believe the number of Southerners with writeable accents is declining. Writing Southernese is as much about the arrangement of words and word choice as it is the sound. You don't have to underscore a character's southern-ness by dropping g's and throwing in a bunch of Populist apostrophes after n's--as in, I'm fixin' to go ridin' with Billy Bob. If the character hasn't earned it, or you aren't masterful, the phonetic hand-holding tortures readers--the economic use of y'all or original word arrangement (like a double modal) will do in most cases.

Reminds me of the fact that most of the Georgia side of my family would use the expression "losing my religion," which became suddenly very popular due to some no-name Georgia band. *cough* Except that when that song came out, I was living in New England, and it seemed no one had the least clue was the phrase meant; they seemed to take the song as some kind of atheist anthem or something.

The phrase actually means "hopping mad," of a level so great you've started cussing. Possibly a blue streak of cussing, even. Though I can't recall any of my father's family ever actually losing their religion; they were more like to say, "I was near to losing my religion," meaning it was only through supreme force of will that they refrained from saying exactly what was on their mind, with colorful extras.

(It doesn't always mean angry, though. My grandfather often came near to losing his religion anytime he slammed his thumb in the workshop. Extreme pain that makes you want to yell out loud suffices, in other words.)

Comments

[dagas_isa]

Within the context of this incredibly obscure song by this no-name Georgia band of yours, I always thought "losing my religion" had something to do with crushing on someone. Though I can see where anger/pain/frustration meaning of the phrase would fit in there.

[kaigou]

Man, that totally rearranges the phrase! Heh. I actually never knew what the phrase really meant, not until the song came out and I thought to ask my mom. I mean, I'd heard it all my life, so in context I knew it meant you were really angry or in a lot of pain, and on the verge of hollering, but I didn't know what it actually meant. So, the incredibly obscure song from Georgia was a learning experience for me, too, since it gave me reason to run all sorts of odd phrases past my Mom, and say, "so just what did they mean when they said ____?"

The one phrase she didn't need to explain by that point, though, was a call-and-return her own parents used to say. My grandmother would be doing something, and my grandfather would walk into the room and ask her, "Whatcha cooking, good-looking?" and my grandmother would say, "chicken, wanna neck?"

(The earliest I recall hearing them do that, I was maybe six, and learning to make pineapple-upside-down-cake. I was one very confused child, for not being able to figure out where the chicken fit into the dessert recipe.)

[nagasvoice]

Great post there, thank you. I have, respectfully, been trying to do my homework before I write characters with radically different backgrounds than the ones I know really well. Among the more interesting resources, I find, are the YouTube cooking shows done by the people who are teaching other folks about their traditional cuisine. They may be standardizing their usage so they can be understood by a wider range of people, but that just makes it a good measure of what they'd consider "standard usage."
thecajunwife, for instance, I found was a younger woman who has a very soft accent, about like what you might hear out in rural areas here on the West Coast (really! for reals!) and there's nothing all that unusual about her word choices. What does make you sit up and notice are the names of things in the traditional cuisine she's explaining.
Smoking garfish (which has more info in subtitles) or making boudin, for instance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REl0XsVpoww

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX_pou64ajY

Similarly, for a Korean-born character, I went looking for Korean cooking demos, both so I could hear the cooks speaking and to see what they thought was important to share. That way I had a better idea of what they thought was important for everyday kitchen use and also for traditional celebrations.

Visiting specialty or import grocery stores can be both awkward and educational in a similar way.

For situations where I do know people in a particular culture, I might ask a question in a general way, and let them tell me in more detail if they feel like it. "What kind of things does your mom cook when you come home for a visit?" only works if I know their mom is in reasonably good health, and it's intrusive unless they're a pretty good friend.

The only problem with all these is that homework makes you hungry...

I wouldn't say any of these methods are definitive enough for many writers, and I know I don't have as precise an ear as many of the really good fanfic writers. I iknwo there's some who can pick up and reproduce a character's spoken style from a tv show within a couple of episodes and reproduce it with uncanny accuracy, including whether different eps was written by different scriptwriters for the same actor.

[kaigou]

To my ears, the Delta (a streak up through Mississippi, and sort of into Louisiana) and the Gulf/Coastal accents are very soft, sort of down in the throat. (My maternal grandmother had a Delta accent, as does my godmother, who's from a bitty town on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana.) It's nothing like an Atlanta accent, which is the one you most often hear in Hollywood movies... it's gentler, more lyrical, but less sing-songy.

Asking what someone cooks/eats when they visit family is good. My version of that is to go out to eat with a friend, and ask them to order (for me) whatever was their favorite food as a child. Granted, there's a world of difference between the flavors and spices of my Chinese friend's favorite childhood food, or Vietnamese or Pakistani or Palestinian friends' favorites childhood foods... and my childhood foods. I mean, mine? It's pretty much the menu at Threadgill's. They even boil the dickins out of the fresh vegetables, just my father's parents did. *snort*

[nagasvoice]

Now that's an interesting menu--yeah, research causing more hunger pangs, wow.

[taithe]

Ohhh that's what that means.

I'm reading The Poisonwood Bible right now and it's interesting how in the beginning I heard clear Georgia accents but later the voices modulated back to generic American. It's not a conscious decision on my part. The author definitely uses Southern phrases at times but none of the "y'all" and dropping "g"s that notoriously signal Southernese. I appreciate the author's point about using phonetic markers sparingly, but I find unless the main identity of the character is being the Southern One chances are I'll end up reading the character's dialogue in general American regardless of the author's intent. I can understand why people (especially non-Southerners) would then overcompensate by writing out Southernese with lots of apostrophes and unusual phrases. Not that this makes for good writing -- it almost always ends up looking forced and unnatural -- but I can see why so many people struggle to write accents. It's hard to make a reader read an accent that they are aren't used to hearing unless you add in some clear signals.

If people want to make the identity of a character Southern, aside from attempting a writeable Southern accent, using tools like setting, interactions with other characters, and character background are good ways to do it.

[kaigou]

Part of the problem with writing an accent is that you don't know what the reader knows. I've been reminded of this watching the horrible, horrible subs where I don't think the person was educated (formally) in Mandarin, having absolutely no idea of pinyin or even Wade-Giles to anglicize Mandarin, but at the same time clearly lacking a lot of English skills as well, with a few Britishisms thrown in (but at the same time, obviously having lived under a rock for the past decade, being clueless about Harry Potter) -- so "xiao" or "hsiao" was turned into "shaou". Is that a dipthong? How can 'aou' sound anything like the eee-a'ow of 'iao'? I was reading 'shaou' as 'show' and that made no sense at all, since wouldn't that just be 'sho'? What the hell, really.

Transliterations, like writing out accents, really only work if there's a clear key-code. Otherwise, is this a transliteration of how a native Mandarin-speaker would think you anglicize (thus using consonants and accents with different intentions) or is it how a native English speaker would transliterate (using assumptions of English spelling as well, like the double-consonant rule or the -e ending rule, and so on).

But this has all reminded me of Joel Chandler Harris...

[umadoshi]

I had no idea that was the phrase's etymology! And that article was a good read. Thanks for both the info and the link. ^^

[kaigou]

My pleasure! I'll be here all week. Try the veal!

[obsession_inc]

Oh, THAT'S what that means. ::headdesk::

[kaigou]

Hehehe. Yep.

[leorising]

D'oh! I had no idea that's what that phrase meant. Now that you explain it, it makes total sense, is very Southern, and very clever besides. This Northerner says, "Bless your little pea-pickin' heart." :D

[kaigou]

It's cotton-picking. And careful, because you only bless hearts if you're trying to soften an insult. Like, "dumb as a box of bricks, bless her heart." And cotton-picking actually has connotations of being good-for-nothing, or worthless. "I wouldn't take your cotton-picking flowers if you were the last man on earth," being one example.

Actually, Southernisms are filled with ways to insult someone without sounding like you're insulting them. It's a very euphemistic manner of speaking, which is probably just one more thing on the list that bothers Yankees about Southerners. Along with saying "yes'm" and "no-sir" which seemed to make every Yankee I met very suspicious, like good manners means you're up to no good. Heh.

[eftychia]

I've also heard, "Well bless his heart," used without an (explicit) accompanying negative comment, as if to say, "I'm thinking of an insult, but I don't need to speak it." Or maybe, "I'm too polite to say, 'what an asshole' aloud." I'm not sure how far into what regions this extends; I've heard it from (a) Virginians, (b) Marylanders from parts of the state that have rather southern-ish accents (we do say "y'all" here, and in some parts of the state that's singular with "all y'all" being the plural), and (c) folks with southern accents that I couldn't place, so I'm not sure which parts of the south they were from.

[kaigou]

as if to say, "I'm thinking of an insult, but I don't need to speak it."

*snort* oh, yeah.

I think it's more like a class thing, to use that phrase. I've heard it all over the South, from mountains of Maryland down to Florida and west into Lousiana... but it's also something I've only ever heard from city/suburb folk. The rural relatives I've known, I can't think of ever hearing any of them soften an insult (or imply an insult) with such a phrase. Especially the Georgia/Tennessee branches of the family (we're getting into Southern Appalachia now), where if he's as dumb as a box of rocks, they're likely to say so*, and then laugh.

They have other ways of softening things, but that phrase isn't really it. Though I do recall every now and then, one of that part of the family calling someone "precious," which was pretty much the highest compliment possible.

My more-city and higher-educated parts of extended family, though, they used "bless his heart" a great deal. And had rules about what glove-colors to where when, and how long gloves must be. Etc.

*this impression may not be helped by the fact that there were at least two nurses in my father's family, and apparently all the younger women of their generation picked up their no-nonsense nursing ways. Lots of great-aunts and great-great-aunts who could bark your name at fifty paces and stop you sharp in your tracks. Strange, they did it to my grandfather and great-uncles, too...

[leorising]

Mom was from Indiana and always said "pea-picking", and the phrase was not unfamiliar to my childhood friends straight from Kentucky. It may not be Deep South (or from the particular region you're acquainted with,) but to someone born & raised in Detroit, it ain't home, either.

As far as the "bless his..." business, I'm acquainted with the Deep South usage, but thanks for pointing it out again. I was using it with you as a joke, which was evidently, well, non-evident. I routinely use the phrase when I mean to actually bless someone, as I did with the LIEAP counselor the other day when she gave me $250 instead of $125 for my energy bills this winter. Since I'm in the Pacific NW the regional meaning is not expected, and it's taken at face value.

I don't think I'd ever try to write a regional character with whom I am not familiar, just for these reasons. I wouldn't be able to make hir talk right and make it sound natural.

Sorry I went so awry. No insult was intended, though, ma'am. (I also routinely use good manners (there's that semi-Southern Indiana mom again,) and in Portland they don't expect sarcasm. I love this town for reasons just like that.)

[kaigou]

No offense taken. I was being mostly tongue-in-cheek myself, since we've corresponded enough that I figured I could be fairly sure where you were coming from. And I have heard pea-picking (and no, I've never heard it as an offensive thing, jsut as a descriptor), but my head was wandering and I realized that I'd never realized before that "cotton-picking" has those connotations. Not that I use the phrase all that much myself, but sheesh, I mean, talk about taking the negative of "who does it" and making the descriptive phrase into a negative as well, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, people outisde the south are amazingly unprepared for Southern types of sarcasm. It's at least some relief with TSA, to smile while telling them what you really think. Sort of.

[leorising]

As a coda, I'm finding the "losing my religion" explanation to be a handy Fun Fact To Know & Tell. Great kaffee klatch material -- no one else around here knows the true facts, either. Thanks! :D

[kathmandu]

Okay, we need to talk. You keep using 'Yankee' as a generic term for Northerners, and it isn't. Yankee is a particular ethnic subtype of New Englander: Anglo with a particular set of cultural values. Those Boston Italians and Portuguese you talked about in a previous post? Not Yankee. Please stop taking my ethnic identity in vain. Thank you.

[kaigou]

No problem, I'll stop. I was just using it as it's used where I grew up, which is basically as a generic term that means "someone who is not from the South." It wasn't meant in offense, nor was it something (least, to the best of my experience) that's used to distinguish between different types of non-Southerners. In other words, just as anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is ostensibly a "southerner" (but not necessarily so), anyone north of it is "yankee" (and as I'm well aware, not necessarily so). I guess you could say it's a geographic shorthand, but I understand if it's something you see as an ethnic shorthand.

I just ask that in return, you understand that as a Southerner, all not-raised-here (or alternately, all raised-up-there) are default as Yankees, regardless of ethnic, religious, or other differentiations. That it's not meant as offense when a Southerner uses it: it's meant to distinguish one's geographic origins. Basically, it's casually synonymous with "northerner". I say that only so you're aware in future that it's not meant as a slander in any way, if you come across it being used elsewhere.

[kathmandu]

I do understand, and thank you for your understanding. It was clear to me you didn't mean it as offense. It's just, two things: one, it grates my nerves to hear all this non-Yankee behavior attributed to my tribe; and two, these comparisons of regional/cultural differences in manners and speech and so on are interesting, but misattributing things only obscures the patterns.

[soukup]

This actually made me laugh aloud at myself. What a fabulous expression.

[kaigou]

It is, isn't it? I rarely lose my temper, too, but when I do, I enjoy being able to whip out the phrase. Throw in a damnedest or two, and you're good to go.