We speakers of American English are quick to claim that we are not class-conscious of accent. We snigger democratically at horror stories of how the English look down on non-standard speech, and our Jeffersonian hackles really stiffen when we hear that one Englishman can tell what school(!) another Englishman went to just from his accent. We are amused by the British term “Received Pronunciation,” made even more hoity-toity by membership in the exclusive Initials-Only Club. We imagine RP sitting around over brandy and cigars with the likes of the YMCA and the UN, all of them “ahem”-ing to one another and growing stodgier by the minute.

RP? Received? Not so much by whom, we ask, but from whom? Was there a Southern English Moses on a Southern English Mt. Sinai to receive all those proper vowels from –well, “the Lawd,” I suppose? (You know, same sound as “laud”). Are the relevant stone tablets stored with the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London?

The idea implicit in the term RP is completely foreign to us. A phrase such as “so-and-so has a working class accent” is meaningless to an American. At best, you may hear American references to “Standard English,” by which is meant the kind of avuncular newscaster delivery still fondly referred to in the industry as “Walter Cronkitese”. “Standard English” is, at most, a description of acceptable grammar. It is devoid of connotations that certain accents are somehow socially inferior. That’s the theory, anyway.

Democratization of accent was thought to be at work in Britain, as well. A recent poll, however, indicates that the majority of Britons still regard RP as the desired mode of speech. Speakers of RP are judged (on the basis on their accent only) to be not only more intelligent, but taller, better looking and cleaner! Well, that’s their problem; surely, it could never happen in the United States of America.

As it turns out, we may not say  RP, but Americans are --and probably always have been-- judgmental about accent. How else, for example, to account for all those British secretaries in America –women who at home would be judged the “before”version of Eliza Doolittle?! To American managers, of course, who don’t know dropped h’s and glottalized t’s from holes in the ground, it all sounds simply English and, hence, just what the doctor ordered for impressing clients over the phone. The sociolinguistics of judging accents (and people) is a jungle. It may not be as well-charted in the US as it is in Britain, but it’s out there, nonetheless. This is clear to anyone who pays any attention at all to the way Americans react to the speech of other Americans.

What a sigh of relief went up when President Carter left office! –and it had nothing to do with his politics. Plain and simple, he was from Georgia and he sounded like it. His accent has been heard thousands of times in American films. It almost never comes out of the mouths of scientists or statesmen or honest judges. It belongs to the likes of Rod Steiger in The Heat of Night. Those who speak “Southern” are bigoted “good ol' boys” and racist redneck cops who roar home from work in their pick-ups, stopping just long enough to pick up clean sheets for the Klan meeting tonight.

There was a similar reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s Texas speech. It sounded so dumb and southern after the refined speech of JFK. Comedians had a field day making fun of both of them, but making fun of JFK’s accent was –well, good fun. Kennedy went to “Hahvad,” and no matter how you spell or pronounce it, it still comes out rich, elegant and enviable.

The current (2002) US president's nickname is, in fact, his Texas pronunciation of his own middle initial; that is, George Walker Bush is referred to not as "Double-You" but "Dubya". Although not necessaily a disparaging usage --in theory, it might even be a term of endearment-- it generally seems to be used by those who don't like the president. To drive the point home, they may add the adjective "ol'" --not "old", mind you, but "ol'" --dropped 'g'-- as in "good ol' boy" (above) --thus, Ol' Dubya.

Johnson, Carter and Bush share the accent of a stigmatized part of the United States, one branded as hopelessly resistant to progress (which, by definition, comes from the north) since well before the days of the US Civil War. It is interesting to note that the majority of non-southerners are about as good at telling a Georgia accent from a Texas accent as they are at distinguishing RP from Cockney, which is to say, not at all. But they have invented a general “ignorant Southern” accent to serve the needs of caricature.

This has nothing to do with attempts to accurately transcribe accent for literature –Mark Twain, for example, or G.W. Harris, or Joel Chandler Harris, or recent Southern Fiction. Here we’re talking about the use of accent to ridicule. More than a century after the Civil War, the North is still rubbing it in, conveniently forgetting that Washington and Jefferson, among other Founding Fathers, were from Virginia and undoubtedly sounded dumb and southern, too.

American popular culture has underscored this stereotyped language of the South. Inevitably, brewing “moonshine” and pursuing incest are the domain of southern mountain folk in comic strips. Husbands and wives call each other “maw” and “paw” (alternately, “mammy” and “pappy”); they say “git” instead of “get”; “ah” instead of “I”; “sez” instead of “says” (interestingly, those two both sound the same, but Southerners can’t spell right even when they talk!); and they retain the Middle English prefix ‘a-‘  for the progressive aspect of verbs, as in “Ah’m a-fixin’ to  go” and the old Hillbilly popular song, “A-feudin,’ a-fussin’ and a-fightin’.” Comic dialogue runs to the likes of (from the comic strip "Snuffy Smith"):

“You wuz the meanest young-un in school, paw.”
“Ah shore tried to be! Ah ‘member the time ah tripped the school marm an’ she fell over back’ards –smack dab in the well. An’ when she come out, thar’s this big ol’ bullfrog raht on top of her punkin’ haid!”

Two of the most popular American TV shows in the last forty years have been The Beverly Hillbillies (get it?) and The Dukes of Hazard. Both use accent to caricature white southerners as dumb hicks. In this regard they are as inaccurate as Amos and Andy (on radio in the 1930s and 40s and TV in the 1950s), a show ostensibly about everyday black people in America, which started out on radio with an all-white (!) cast rendering their grotesque version of black speech. Minstrel Shows started out a century earlier in the American South in the same way –white actors putting on “blackface” and shuffling around saying things like “Sho’ ‘nuf, honey chile” and “Yowzuh, yowzuh, massuh!”

In Britain a certain downmarket trend has been noted in RP. It is now fashionable for RP speakers to affect language mannerisms of popular London speech –the glottal stop, for instance. It is not quite clear what this means. A case can be made –if you’re an optimist- that it’s a manifestation of solidarity with the working class. On the other hand, there might be a complicated kind of snobbish in-group humor at work, something on the order of “We’re making fun of these upstarts by talking the way they do, and it’s sooooo droll the way they don’t even get it.”

Interestingly, through a similar phenomenon in the United States, the South is exacting revenge. The Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith comic-strip caricature of white “Southern-Speak” has been made by and large irrelevant in the face of the emergence of the new American South. Some of the most desirable and crime-free places to live in the US are in the so-called “Sun Belt. Some of America’s most popular entertainers are Country and Western singers and they all sound just like what one didn’t used to want to sound like. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolf credits the great test pilot, Chuck Yeager, with virtually single-voicedly making his West Virginia drawl the accent of choice among pilots and all would-be daredevils everywhere. It is now the accent of the open road. That’s truck-drivin’ (drop them g’s!) citizen-band white southern speech comin’ atcha, good buddy! Also, the largest cable TV network  in the US is in the heart of Dixie – Atlanta, Georgia, and some of the announcers pronounce the call letters for their own Cable News Network as “See-In-In”. Indeed, “nixt Winsday” even on the national airwaves no longer attracts much attention except from people who write articles like this one.

Thus, these days, many who have never been south of Staaten Island put a little drawl in their voices and go out of their way occasionally to drop in a second person plural, “y’all”  and the demonstrative pronoun “this here,” confusing language register as effectively as Rhett Butler sipping mint juleps in a coal mine. What it all means is anyone’s guess. It may be our version of the downmarket RP trend noted above, or a kind of faux naïf reverse snobbery. If language change holds true to form, it’s probably a diabolical combination of all of these, plus something else we haven’t thought of yet.

“Y’all come back, now –heah?!”