I get no less than 3 comments a week regarding the way I talk, coming in the form of “you are not from here” or “where is that accent from” or “I like your accent”. In fact, the accent of native Hoosiers is so homogeneous that I can now hear my own accent, which is more annoying than I expected. I have never enjoyed hearing myself recorded and I really do not like hearing my own accent when I talk. It is strange.
The good news is that no one has called me a hick, redneck, hillbilly (not an insult, by the way), or moron, yet. Unfortunately, in northeastern and some mid-atlantic states (I shall not name names to protect the guilty) I have endured rather cutting and insulting comments about my accent. I was once told by a dude in a NYC diner that I “must be a bigot based solely on how I talk”. Needless to say, our conversation was cut very short. Even worse, a store clerk in a town 3 hours from my hometown once sneered at my accent and insisted that “it could not come from a place that close”. It is sad, but in some quarters of the country, a southern accent is considered dumb, ignorant, and/or backward. Luckily, NE Indiana and the Midwest so far is not part of that contingent. And, for that, I am very thankful because I plan on keeping this accent.
I hope you do, darlin’.
One thing you learn pretty quickly in the aerospace industry, because of Lyndon Johnson’s determination to use NASA as a Marshall Plan for the south (literally, in the case of Marshall Space Flight Center) is that just because someone speaks slow, doesn’t mean they are slow…
And I actually never learned growing up to be prejudiced against southern accents, in southeast Michigan. It might be because in an auto town like Flint, you grew up with a lot of people who migrated up from the south to work there. A lot of the people I went to school with were from a poorer east-side neighborhood, whose parents were from Kentucky and Tennessee, and worked in the shop. Some of them might could have had better home lives, but most were damned good people, and not afraid to work, or fix things, and would give you the shirt off their back. And I noticed that they got along with the blacks a lot better than many of the native-born. Because they knew how to.