Real Southerners don’t drop Rs

Listening to This American Life, as I often do while I work on design projects, I came across this episode, entitled “The Real Thing.” One section of the episode, “Drawl,” tackles one of my biggest pet peeves: the complete inability of the American film and television industry to create plausibly an accent that a very large portion of its audience speaks with every day.

It’s a well done piece—it points out the subtleties of a southern accent that the movies always fail to get (and has clips of several otherwise good actors making fools of themselves). The section starts about 28 minutes into the episode; click on the speaker button on the page that I linked to, wait for the episode to load, and slide over to that time to hear it.

The first time the issue of Southern accents really got me going was about six years ago, after my junior year of high school, when I spent the summer at Exeter, in New Hampshire. I was taking an acting class, and in one scene I and another girl were playing sisters from the South. This won’t be hard, I thought, seeing as I was actually from Alabama. I ramped up my own (very light) accent, and sounded, I thought, pretty realistically southern. My counterpart (a girl from northern Ohio), on the other hand, had the most stereotypically hillbilly accent she could come up with, and sounded neither southern nor real. After our piece was done, when we were being critiqued by our classmates and our teacher, I expected that she’d be told to tone things down. On the contrary, her accent was praised, and I was told that I needed to work harder to sound “more southern.” I’m still annoyed about that.