@JazGalaxy said:
@TruthTellah said:
@JazGalaxy said:
Here's my pet peeve:
I'm black and I grew up in Ohio. My mom was really into reading and teaching us to read as we grew up and as a result, I have extremely good diction and a regional accent that's considered pretty standard. I get told I sound like a newsman pretty frequently.
I moved to Texas about halfway through my life, and down here, everyone has the worst diction imaginable. They draw out their words, they add syllables that shouldn't exist and take away ones that are necessary. They "drawl" out most words until their almost unintelligble. This is all, one would say, an "accent". A way of speaking that's regional and nonstandard.
The double standard comes in when these people, who are frequently white, talk about how urban people, who are usually black, speak with ignorant comments like "why don't they just learn english". Or any number of other variations to the effect that they believe they speak english "right" and people of other ethnicities speak it "poorly" and this is an effect of their being "stupid".
I even got into a debate one time about the concept that a lot of text books and whatnot are written by white people, for white people. He couldn't understand how, if the book was actually written in "proper" english, it would look a lot less like what he was familiar with and a lot more like Canterbury tales or something.
Everything is an accent.
What part of Texas are you in? West Texas? I live in the Dallas area, and you hardly ever hear too much "drawl".
Though, isn't it a tad ironic that you're mocking how they talk while your point is that everything is an accent? I mean, what is wrong is close-mindedness, not having a local accent or dialect. I've met plenty of people with a "Southern drawl" who are fine people, just as I have met decent people who speak any number of ways. People have their accents, and that's okay. There's no reason for us to make fun of them or stereotype them. While it is wrong that some people you have met hypocritically consider an alternative accent as a bad thing, that doesn't absolve you from doing a similar thing toward them. If you are truly pursuing a path that is better than theirs, you should watch out for such stereotyping and negative generalizing showing up in your own words. It is far too easy to see a double standard and construct your own.
This is certainly a common problem that you have described, and I share your consternation with its prevalence. Yet, even the best among us can fall prey to this way of defining others by their accents or dialects. Don't let close-minded people ruin things further by dragging you down with them. A person is a person whether they have a "Southern drawl", an "urban flair", or a "Northern twang". An individual's character is what ultimately defines them, not the color of their skin or the flow of their speech.
I'm not mocking the way they speak, I'm just attempting to point out how "incorrect" it is. The underlaying point they make, and this is just a flat out human prejudice and logical bias, is that they way they do it, or accept it, is correct and the way other people do it is incorrect. They would take a deep georgian accent as just a quirky bit of local color whereas they would take an urban accent as being the slovenly distructon of our country's language and heritage. One would never tell the most souther fried accent, or hard boiled new yorker to "learn to talk properly".
I dated a caucasian Mississipi girl who would pronounce "hired" as "haard", "fired" as "faard" and tired as "taard". She would always be like "yahl know yew thaank mah aksen is kewt". And indeed a lot of people said they did. I wasn't one of htem, but, different strokes.
The point isn't to make fun of anyone, I'm just saying there's a double standard for urban accents that black people tend to have and other accents that white people tend to have wherein they think the ones they accept are fine and the ones they dislike are an abonation of the english language brought about by stupid people who refuse to learn to speak properly.
The issue is that you have also seemed to be characterizing this as a specific problem for people with such accents. "Those white people with Southern accents are intolerant of urban accents." And, heh, your representations of how they sound are unnecessary. You could just say "They had a Southern accent". Frankly, I'm still not quite sure what your ex-girlfriend has to do with anything. If your point was to note that Caucasians also have accents, that isn't really much of a story. They certainly do, as do most people, and I'm familiar with how a certain kind of "drawl" sounds.
And, unfortunately, you actually -have- had people say for people with Southern accents to "learn to talk properly". It's a common issue between more Northern and Southern Americans. It has been around for generations. It's a rather common perception of "more refined" people to look down on those with any kind of "drawl" as uneducated. Hear a guy with a Southern accent in a business, and there's often a perception that they're a "good ol boy". This has been played upon in media for as long as I can remember. The uppity Northerner with their New York accent and the uneducated Southerner with their Georgia accent. And then, as you have pointed out, people have complained about an "urban" accent. It's simply the common ways in which our social divisions allow local accents and dialects to become reasons for projecting negative preconceptions on others.
I had a language-based learning disability when I was a child, and it meant that I didn't pick up on language naturally. While I understood English, I did not speak it or adapt my speech to fit the patterns of those around me. So, I had to get speech training to speak English. That led to me having a very professorial style of speech which has maintained a decent bit to this day. Thus, I had issues with other children regarding me as a "snob" because I lacked a more local accent. The difference itself was the issue. As I grew up, I hardly ever saw -specific- differences in accents to be more bothersome than others; the primary issue was that they were different at all. For example, a businessman from Maine not respecting that I used the socially-acquired "yall" in my speech, or a young African American student who thought I was patronizing him by trying to befriend him in my usual, longer-form speaking style. It's more of a wider issue of difference than a specific double standard. People have their differences in acquired accents and dialects, and unfortunately, many will very often project upon others based on their preconceptions connected to those styles of speech.
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