Hey Y'all! I have a Southern Drawl!

I use to practice speeches while holding a pencil in my mouth.  No, I didn't have a speech impediment - I was a Southern teenager competing in national speech competitions. The goal of the pencil holding technique is to have clear, proper diction that is accent free. Supposedly, if you can be clearly understood while the pencil is between your teeth then you are articulating enough. A Northern ear may still have detected my Southern drawl but Mississippians at that time always wanted to know where I was from, because according to them I did not have an accent.

As a competitive speech and debate team, we had to rid ourselves of our accents because of the stereotype that a Southern drawl is synonymous with unintelligent.  Of course, we all know that is not true. However, when you are competing on the national level you want to reduce bias against you.

We just enjoy our words more

After high school, I would use the pencil technique occasionally but then I put my pencil box up when I decided that I am taking away something beautiful from myself. I love my Southern accent! Us Southerners are not less intelligent because we speak slower, we just enjoy our words more than our Northern friends! Like a good meal that you savor, it just feels good to the soul to lengthen the syllables in a word.

Now I have a soft Southern accent but it does get more pronounced with I get tired. More syllables are inserted into words. I once easily put three syllables in my boyfriend's one syllable name.  His name is Ed.  Yeah, you are trying to figure out how I put three syllables in that too, huh?  I still haven't figured it out.


I really enjoy my Southern words and phrases.  I have been known to open a formal speech with a genuine, smiley, "Hi, Y'all!"  As soon as that phrase came out though, I thought there was probably a better way I should have started but oh well.  I have even substituted a y'all for you in thank you.  Thank y'all really is more appropriate for thanking several people at once anyway!   And I do tend to overuse the famous, "Bless your heart." But there are so many occasions to use it as it is such a flexible phrase. You can use it any time you want to show genuine empathy or when you want to gossip about somebody without being "ugly." Because y'all know all our Southern mamas told us "not to be ugly."


And I do have to admit, that I thoroughly enjoy indulging myself into a full blown Scarlett O'Hara style accent sometimes. It is almost like letting my true self come out by allowing my speech to sound exactly how God intended it to be! But just like a rich desert you let dissolve in your mouth, you can only talk that slow for so long then you need to get back to regular chewing.  And if I allow myself to indulge too long, it could become the way I always speak and even in the South that could be a problem.

Blandness of the same

The real question is why as a  region do we sometimes get self conscious of our accents at various times in our lives and try to melt ourselves into the blandness of the same?  If all of the regions tried to be nondescript we would lose cultural differences that make traveling so interesting.  Going to Wisconsin would sound the same as traveling to New Mexico.  We already have the same chain restaurants and stores in all of these places.  Accents, while they may seem to be a small detail, are one of many elements of a culture that make a group of people interesting. And, "LAWD (translation: Lord) knows the South is interesting!"  Happy slow and savory talking y'all!