[SoFloFreeper]

The very fact that this was ATTEMPTED ought to raise alarms.

Can you imagine..."Lose your Boston accent"? "Black"? "New York"? "Spanish"?

[SoFloFreeper]

By the way, WHY is this kind of thing part of a federal government nuclear lab, anyway?????

Talk about frivolous spending.

[Sacajaweau]

Lived in Virginia for a year. Asked them if they actually learned y'all in school.

Being from Upstate NY, they weren't too happy about the question.

And there was a Bubba in our office. ROFLMAO

The Secretary asked me if I wanted to go with her to see her brother who was in jail in Roanoke. Yeh...right

This was a high class engineering office.

I said that the blacks down there were wonderful to me. The secretary said "They know their place". Unbelievable.

[AU72]

So what accent were they going to replace it with?

[dforest]

Maybe they wanted all Southerners to talk like our glorious _resident. /sarc

um, ers, uhs and duhs sound alike all over the globe.

[Smokin' Joe]

No...but I have found learning to talk like Johnny Carson got me over the first major obstacle in dealing with Yankees—the language barrier.

[Wage Slave]

The Southern accent is music to my ears. It is the most beautiful of the English language accents, followed by Scottish and Jamaican.

[Resettozero]

The very fact that this was ATTEMPTED ought to raise alarms.

Alarms about D.C. have been going off continuously down here for many years. We've noticed, long before this silly event happened.

[Einherjar]

I don`t have an accent. Y`all do.

[knarf]

I AM a native Bostonian, and I struggle sometimes because I adopt subconsciously, the language mannerism(s) of SW Pa., and I will always cherish my cah, my bahth, and my ahnt.

This has got to be the stupidest suggestion ... wait ... an American university ?

figgers.

[Roman_War_Criminal]

American White Southerners have been under attack for decades.
I’m stunned they finally took a stand to be honest.

[FrankR]

In the late 60’s, after getting out of the Air Force, I went to the Atlanta School of Radio & TV Broadcasting to prepare for a career in radio. Being a Georgia boy, I had to work on my accent a little for the job. I had to learn to say “ahn” for word “on”, as opposed to “own”. Work was needed on my word endINGs, and words like “oil”, “foil” and such.

While commuting I would speak into a portable tape recorder, and listen back to it for self-critique.

I didn’t get it perfect, but it was good enough to get me through 20 years of daily air time.

However, I found that when not on the air, I reverted to my southern accent, bu as soon as the mic came on, I was as accent-neutral as I could be.

It was like learning a foreign language in a way, and reverting back to your native tongue when you didn’t need it.

But, I wasn’t trying to sound like a Yankee, replacing all my “R’s” with “H’s”, and saying “youse” instead of “you”.

In the service I was around people from all over, and heard just about every accent you could imagine. I am not a trained linguist, but I take a great interest in the way people talk. Bad grammar irks me more than any accent does.

I spent 10 years trying to get my ex-wife (a German) to say “this, that ot them”, and not “dis, dat, and dem”. The “th” sound is a lisp in the German language and she was naturally resistant to doing. She’s been in America since 1968 and still says “dis, dat and dem”.

But I love the southern accent. Around Atlanta - with the influx of northerners in the past 20 years, finding a genuine southern accent is getting more difficult. The advent of TV, cable, movies, etc, has also influenced the accent to a degree.

But for the Feds to declare jihad on southern talk is outrageous. No one is working on the black accent, which is usually unintelligible even to southerners. Many of them still asy “dis, dat, and dem”, and they were born here.

Accents that need work are everywhere, from illegal aliens to tech support people in India.

I’m retired, no longer on the air, and I speak southern. 20 years in broadcasting followed by 20 years in corporate management have no changed that fact one iota. If I need to speak accent-neutral, I can, otherwise my native tongue is southern English.

The Yankee elites in government who are tring to make it a one-size-fts-all world can bite me.

I hope y’all understand!

[IronJack]

The worst accent to me is the “Joisy.” Not quite Brroklyn, not quite Bronx, not quite English.

Although a heavy Philly accent is grating too.

Fortunately, I’m from the Midwest, where we have no accent. [/s]

[Jonah Hex]

"You know I mean some of the, the most intelligent people I've ever known talk like I do. In fact I used to do a joke about that, about you know the Southern accent, I said nobody wants to hear their brain surgeon say, 'Al’ight now what we're gonna do is, saw the top of your head off, root around in there with a stick and see if we can't find that dad burn clot.’"

- Jeff Foxworthy

[GailA]

You can try and take the regional accent out of a person, it does not work to well for most.

My husband is a Niagara Falls, NY born he still after 20 yrs in the Navy and 20 yrs as a Jr Col Prof can’t shake the total NY speak. No more than I can my mix of Southern/Yankee. My mom was a TN Knoxville area, my dad born and bred in E. Chicago Ind. So I have both to over come. And I get told I talk to fast. Northern trait. Southern is more laid back. Then you have black ghetto speak.And those you can’t change, as they don’t want to change.

[vetvetdoug]

Outsiders of the US have long stated that the ethnicity of Southerners (the original Confederate States) pose a problem to the defeat of the entire US. Southerners are unique as they are fairly cohesive and share many mores and traditions, as well as a strong faith in God. Speech is just one of the items that make Southerners unique and changing that one facet will go a long way in destroying the cohesiveness of the South.

I'd like to know who proposed and tried to implement this class and for what reason.

[Coldwater Creek]

I was born to Texan’s, pretty much raised in So. California and have lived 43 years in Tennessee, I get accused of being from the North all the time. I loved to listen to President Bush 43 speak. I could understand exactly what he was saying. Texans have their own language.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

I thought America was all about DIVERSITY. A regional accent is a fundamental part of a person’s culture. I have always found the rich diversity of language use in this country to be fascinating. We lose something important when we become homogenized. All real culture is local.

[blam]

And, we have this phony Vocal Fry BS.

I've read that it has its original roots in the children of the people who migrated from Oklahoma in the 30's.

Vocal Fry Register

[MrB]

Yeah, “How to talk like a white guy” class was cancelled earlier... :)

[trisham]

I find the southern accent to be beautiful.