On accents

Maggie says:
So in the midst of an insane week where I've barely looked at news of any kind, I'm sitting here eating lunch and just saw a little news flash that made me really, really happy. And on weeks like this, smiling really big really means something, you know?

But first, I digress...

I am a full-on lover of accents. I love twangs and lilts and drawls and clips and rolls. I love it all. In another lifetime, maybe I was a linguist. Or maybe in another lifetime, I will be one. I was raised in the South, where fans of accents are as close as we might get to heaven. Southern accents aren't like movie accents - you know, everyone sounding like a high-class Georgia peach. My Southern accents are decidedly ocean-sprayed, cultivated in the same fields where my family has grown corn, peanuts, and yes, tobacco (okay fine, "tobacka") for what seems like forever.

For fans of Southern accents like myself, North Carolina is truly hog heaven. For full-fledged linguists, this is also the case. See, North Carolina is a strange place, one with isolated pockets that allowed folks who settled there to remain there, largely unbothered, for generations. What this means today is that the Appalachian accent in the NC mountains is the purest modern sound of Scottish settlers in the U.S. But there's more:

My family is from northeastern North Carolina, a swampy mess of farmland en route to the Outer Banks, nearly unreachable by travelers with any sense for hundreds of years. The swamps of northeastern NC are so... swampy, in fact, that they lay claim to a rich history of freed slave towns (runaway slaves could easily hide out in the swamps, and did, without much risk of being caught), native American culture, strange misfits, and absolutely independent and stubborn sensibilities. Those same swamps and the island chains where no rich planter from Raleigh - and certainly no Chahlston gentlemen - dared navigate are now home to an absolutely fascinating accent that's part North Carolina Southern, part Old English settler, and part pirate brogue. Really.


In this great selection of linguist clips, you can check out the many and varied dialects of North Carolina. Want to know what my grandma Jessie Mae sounds like? Listen to North Carolina One and Two for an accent that at first listen is pure South... until you start hearing a British lilt, that is. The famous Outer Banks accent even has a catchy saying (our version of "pahk the cah in Havahd Yahd," perhaps): "It's hoi toide on the sound soide." (Bonus: On saving the "hoi toide" accent.) That's "high tide on the sound side," folks, in case your ears are too landlocked to figure it out.

The real tragedy here, of course, is that I am virtually accent-less myself. With a family full of Hoi Toiders, it's a bit of a wonder that I don't sound like they do. For a while my parents blamed Virginia, where I went to elementary school. But later, my dad fantasized that my non-accented self might become an NPR anchor some day. Sorry, Dad.

Anyway, all of this was a long rambling preface to avoid getting back to work and to explain the news story that made me so happy earlier. Here it is:

CNN.com: Cows moo with a twang. That's right, folks: cows have regional accents, too.

As well they should.