Northern and Southern English

^*^ the_mystic_dude ^*^

Thankx alot for your subject

but !!! i don't now what's the diffrent :S

anyway i hope to found ur answer

Thankx again

RegardZzZ

Southern American english varies widely in difficulty to comprehend. The deep south accents (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi) are more difficult for me to understand when people speak. Then again, I live in Texas, so I am exposed to horrible drawling all the time (though my accent is not very obvious, as verified by third parties ).

The nature of the southern accent is difficult to explain. It is characterized by slow speech which distorts some syllables and avoidance of sharp pronunciation. Sounds normally pronounced on the tip of the tongue in standard American english are usually avoided unless they begin a word. Examples:

gowyn => going

pardner => partner (the "t" sound has been softened by replacement with "d")

Vowels (especially long "a" and "ou") are sometimes pronounced through the nose.

Northern accents vary greatly, even from state to state. And although I'm exposed to them at work, I'm hardly qualified to quantify their rules. Maybe someone else can make a stab at it.

By the way, you are correct in that speakers like the President take great pains to moderate their speech. Bush still has a strong southern accent to my ear, which, unfortunately, is associated in the lay public with poor education. And while you may disagree strongly with some of his policies, as I do, he's no idiot.

I would group the major english American accents thusly:

SOUTHWESTERN: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico

SPANISH: everywhere!

WEST COAST: California, Oregon. Probably closest to "standard" American accent, although Californians have several different accents depending on location

MIDWESTERN: from Montana east to the great lakes, including Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana (watch the movie "Fargo" for this one! William H. Macy is one of my favorite actors...)

DEEP SOUTH: Louisiana non-Cajun, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia

CAJUN: rural / French influenced Louisiana

NEW ENGLAND: New York (like California, VAST differences based on neighborhood), New Jersey, etc.

I have a question that constantly troubles me. I hope that you will be able to answer it. How does one find out how to pronounce the letter "s" in the middle of words? For example in the word "listen" it is a /s/ and in the word "music" it is a /z/ - are there any rules one can follow?

Thank you if you can answer my query.

Latha

I always have to laugh when I hear references to George W. Bush as if he were really a "Texan". George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut to parents who were from wealthy Connecticut and New York families. The family didn't establish any residency in Texas until George was two years old. Like most billionaires, they have always had several residences, including the family's "summer home" in Kennebunkport, Maine (of Kennedy fame) a center of family life for the Bush's for at least 3 generations.
Like most scions of super wealthy families, George attended posh boarding schools. One of these was Andover in Massachusetts, to be followed by Yale and Harvard, also in Massachusetts, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps.
His "Texas" accent is mild because it wasn't acquired in the home. He's a "Yankee", from the North East of the United States, not a "Southerner". The whole "down-home" persona was carefully created to make him seem like a "good old boy". I believe his wife, Laura is actually a Texan and she also speaks with a fairly mild accent, like most wealthy, upper-class, educated Texans.
There are definitely several variants of what is called a Southern accent. All but the most "countrified" Texans speak a fairly mild version of a southern accent. People from what could be called the Deep South, like Georgia and Alabama, speak a broader version of that kind of accent which actually arose from the variety of dialects the original inhabitants of their states spoke with, such as Scottish, Irish, English and in the case of Louisiana, French, of course.
People in movies and on TV speak with a neutralized version of Standard American English. If they are supposed to be upper class, they speak with what is sometimes called a "Mid-Atlantic" accent (as if they were halfway to England!) Otherwise they have what could be called a "Hollywood" accent, which was, essentially, created by the movie studio culture of Southern California to make it clearly understandable for the widest possible American audience. Markedly clear enunciation is a hallmark of it. The Southern California surfing culture took that clear enunciation and drew it out to an extreme degree for emphasis. The spoiled Hollywood community's children, raised over the hill from Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, brought that to a zenith with what is called a "Valley" accent, caricatured by Moon Unit Zappa in the movie, "Valley Girl".