The sound of home

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Accents can and are mocked, exaggerated, or smoothed away—but they also tell a story.

By some counts, there are dozens of distinct ways of speaking in the United States, and WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney reflects on the Southern drawl and what our voices say about who we are.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: My father was born in Mississippi and grew up in rural Alabama between two wars. During the second of those wars, in which he served as an MP, he was first stationed in Wheaton, Illinois – the coldest he’d ever been in his life. But one advantage of the frozen north was that he had no trouble getting dates. 

Daddy was an attractive man, but it wasn’t that. As he put it, “The gulls loved to heah me tauk.”

I grew up heahin’ him tauk, and occasionally had to ask him to clarify. By then, he and his whole family had settled in Dallas, Texas. At get-togethers, such as Thanksgivin’, the air swelled with lazy “r’s” and drawun-out vowels. I can still hear my grandmother saying, “Oh, I wish you would look!” at a tasty spread or a sparkling new appliance. As for me, in her opinion I was “The smahtest gull in the wuhld” – probably for no other reason than that I was named for her (That’s what for the “B” stands for: Bess).

It’s an easy accent to imitate, but hard to do well. English actors Vivian Leigh and Leslie Howard laid it on thick in Gone with the Wind:

AUDIO: But you love me! / How could I help loving you? You have all the passion for life that I lack. 

… and more recently, Daniel Craig as the celebrated detective Benoit Blanc.

AUDIO: A little bird has told me you have a regurgitative reaction to mistruthin'. 

Craig’s southern is a caricature, but it does recall my Alabama relatives with some nostalgia, for even as a teenager I recognized the old deep-south drawl was dying out, and I was going to miss it.

I’m not the only one. Writing in The Atlantic, Annie Joy Williams laments “The Last Days of the Southern Drawl” she remembers from her Tennessee childhood. Shifting migration patterns have poured clipped northern consonants and nasal midwestern vowels and west-coast upward inflections into the southern melting pot. It can work both ways: when one of my Texas cousins moved to California in the 70’s she was mocked for “fixin’ to leave, y’all.” Now, “y’all” as a plural pronoun has conquered the nation. (Unlike the Ozarks variation “y’uns,” which is rapidly dropping out of my Missouri in-laws’ lingo.)

In the movies and TV, a southern accent often signals an ignorant or bigoted person. It’s true the region held on to a reactionary – and frankly, racist - posture much longer than it should have. But any strong accent, whether Charleston or Brooklyn or Valley Girl, speaks of a particular home and place and family. We can’t control those factors, but we can make the best of them.

As Paul preached in Acts 17, it’s God who made all nations from one man and determined each person’s time and dwelling place and cultural heritage. I suspect he enjoys the variations. In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Dr. Elwin Ransom observes (no doubt in cultured Oxford tones), “He didn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels?” 

Variety is more than the spice of life; it’s also color and glory. In heaven we will all praise him in the same language, but each in our way – and maybe even in our own accent.

I’m Janie Bess Cheaney.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.