Sounds of the South

Northern Democrat: I like the man, but I have trouble with his accent.

Southern Democrat: What accent?

Jokes aside, the fact is that not since Lyndon Johnson--who liked to go to the well, nail coonskins to walls and keep the creeks from rising--has the nation harked to a presidential candidate whose voice tintinnabulates with the sound of the South. Compared with Jimmy Carter's soft Georgia drawl, however, L.B.J.'s Pedernales twang was absolutely abrasive.

Singsong Effect. Northerners were startled when Carter referred in his acceptance speech at New York's Madison Square Garden to "Eye-talians." Some Eye-talians might have been ruffled, but a number of Georgians and other Southerners did not even blink. Why should they, in a region where a porch is a "pye-azzuh" and the capital of Austria--as well as a Georgia town by the same name--is "Vy-anna"? Vienna, Ga., incidentally, is the home town of Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell (see THE PRESS). Campaign Director Hamilton Jordan--or, as it is pronounced down home, "Jer-dan"--is from Albany, which, unlike New York's capital, is accented on the second syllable.

According to Linguist Lee A. Pederson of Atlanta's Emory University, who specializes in Southern dialects, Carter's speech pattern is not merely Southern, not simply Georgian, but Gulf coastal plain. It is one of at least seven distinct regional dialects that are discernible in what Pederson considers to be one of the nation's most linguistically complicated states.* What is more, it differs markedly from dialects in other Southern states. Thus an Alabaman's drawn-out "you all" becomes "yawl" in the more rapid South Georgian speech, and "Ah wouldn't" becomes "Ah woon."

Some listeners are convinced that Carter's accent has been considerably --and quite consciously--modified by his schooling in the North, his Navy travels and even by campaign-speech consultants. Not so, insists Pederson. "He does not seem to have messed around with his language very much," says the linguist. "That's the sign of a person who's got his head on straight."

Thus Carter routinely modulates his pitch, employing a delicate rising and falling of his voice that results in an almost singsong effect. Another Gulf coastal plain element: he drops what linguists call postvocalic rs in such words as go-phuh (gopher) and Cot-tuh. According to Pederson, however, the younger generation of Gulf coastal plains people, who have been exposed to accentless network television and modern speech courses, pronounce it "Car-tuh."

Of course, Carter (Cot-tuh? Car-tuh?) simply does not use the "good ole boy" phraseology; his speech is far too aristocratic for that. Even in casual conversation, he is not likely to fall into what linguists call the double modal--"might could" or "might ought." Nor can he be expected to employ another familiar Deep South form, the perfective done, as in "he done did it." Between now and November, moreover, his audiences are not apt to hear him describe his opponent, as some Plains folk might, as "a sorry piece of plunder" or threaten to "knock the bark off' him or talk of getting "mad as a puffed toad."

Natchul English. Some South Georgians respond to questions about--or criticism of--such accents by protesting, "It's the closest thang on God's green earth to the King's natchul English." Linguist Pederson agrees that the claim does have a certain validity. The North was largely settled by immigrants who learned English as a second language and were heavily dependent on the written word, he notes. Southerners, on the other hand, have always relied on the spoken word. "In that respect, Southern speech is closer to the native speech of England," concludes Pederson, and often to Elizabethan England. "It is a much more sensitive and effective medium of communication than Northern speech, for the most part, because it is so rooted in the spoken word."

That may be why, as one Atlantan observes, Britons Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard were able to affect such convincing Southern accents for their roles in Gone With the Wind.

*Six other dialects: Carolina mountain, Alabama-Tennessee, low country, northern and southern Piedmont. Atlantic coastal plain and Thomaston-Valdosta.

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