A Southern accent is like a toothache, no matter how hard you try to get it out of your mouth it throbs and affects your words in a syrupy fashion that gives away your linage every time.
Tommy Lee Jones, Holly Hunter, Reece Witherspoon, Sissy Spacik, Billy Bob Thorton – we’ve heard them try but they can never really spit out the grits. Everything else in our lives can change – our location, job, finances, whatever, but the dead giveaway is our Southern accent.
Southerners can scrape some of it off. They can concentrate really hard and think about every syllable and practice diction until dawg becomes dog. I have tried. If you are from below the Mason-Dixon line and move to a midwest, northern, upper east coast or far western city, and you are honest, you have tried as well. Southerners can carve the Elvis edges off their words and pretend that no one notices, but it never really works completely. Inevitably a word will drag itself into four syllables when there should only be two. Conversely, I can spot a fake Southern accent in any movie where an actor has tried to affect one. That may be even worse.
When Southerners try to disguise a terminal case of Magnolia Mouth – which is a diagnosable medical condition, by the way – they end up sounding as if they are practicing a foreign language. If you are born in the South – especially the Deep South – your tongue is dipped in soul food, biscuits and ham gravy at an early age. Your body and your brain may change, but your tongue remembers. Southern tongues are the greased pigs of language.
I thought I had harnessed my Southern accent when I worked in New York and Los Angeles. Usually, by the end of the first conversation, the person I was talking with would ask, “So, you’re from the South.”
You can’t hide your lyin tongue.
I have done hundreds of voiceovers for countless products and services, yet when verb comes to noun, my cheating tongue will tell on me. When I go back down home, I warp words with the best of the drawlers. It sometimes makes me feel like a scammer – my lame attempts to deSouthernize my accent. Southerners who never considered un-yalling their sentences think you are trying to “git above yer raisins.” Translated: “Yer too big fer yer britches.” Translated: “Yer an aisehoel.”