Patricia: Thanks for your comments. Accents are a fascinating topic, aren’t they? American English in general preserves some features of Shakespearian English that British English has lost — for example, Americans consistently pronounce their “r”’s, as Shakespeare did, while most other English dialects drop them in certain contexts. On the other hand, American English does some things that Shakespeare didn’t: we tend to pronounce “t” like “d” when it appears between vowels, e.g. “water”, while other English dialects do not.

My husband and I both grew up in northwest Louisiana. I have been told that I don’t have an accent. My husband passed himself off to college girls as Scandanavian back when we were young and in college. They believed him because of his accent. He is the only person in his family that sounds the way he does. I attribute it to a hearing loss that he got as a child.

When I hear myself talk on the answering machine, I think it is my sister talking. Odd, how we sound differently to ourselves. Have a glorious day.

Although I have heard the children belt out something strongly Southern every once in a while. I can only assume that I slip back into Suthun when I get angry or something.

Does your wife speak with an accent? How about your kids?

Having said that: this is a statistical generalization, and won’t hold true for every word you say.

I look forward to the reasons you don’t have the accent. I know you explained it to me, but that was a million years ago. And I want to remember it.

Slade, this may sound like a stupid question: do you have a Southern accent? Is it strong?

Not everyone who grows up in the South has an accent.

I grew up in the South, just like you, and you’ve heard me speak: my accent is almost nonexistent. This wasn’t a conscious decision on my part; my accent has always been very weak. I never knew why until I took sociolinguistics in college. (The reason is very long — I don’t have time to lay it out now…)

I love the personal attention — but wouldn’t want to meet you on a YouTube debate!

PS - especially digging the illustration on this one!

You’re absolutely right — the Southeast has any number of dialects, ranging from the broad, low, slow, almost r-less Mississippian to the high, fast, clipped brogue of the Carolina Tidewater; and the range is spread socially as well as geographically. In one county in North Carolina that I studied in graduate school, there are three quite distinct dialects — one spoken by the whites, one by the blacks, and one by the Lumbee Indians.

Nevertheless — and you saw this coming — almost all of these dialects have certain features in common, due to their common shared history and extensive contact; and one of those features is the flattening of the dipthong in “I”. Standard English “I” is pronounced as two vowels in one: starting with “ah” and tightening and rising up to “ee” in one quick, fluid tongue movement. Southeastern US English has dropped the “ee”, leaving just the “ah”. They may pronounce it fast or slow, nasal or oral, maybe a little more like the “a” in bat, maybe a little more like the “au” in caught, but always as a single pure vowel sound, rather than a dipthong.

So yeah, I was simplifying — you caught me! But the essentials were correct.