This past weekend I attended a party where I met a couple from my hometown of Greeneville, Tenn. In the course of the small talk that followed, we exchanged tales of familiar Greeneville haunts, places and people that we might know, and the growth and development of the town. After 20 or 30 minutes of conversation, the husband asked me where I was from originally. “Greeneville,” I replied. “But you don’t sound like you’re from Greeneville,” he returned. I took a deep breath and grinned. “It’s been learned out of me,” I twanged in my best Greeneville accent. He nodded smiling.

I’m the kind of person who winces when I hear my voice on the answering machine or on a videotape. Something about it is all too familiar, and then something is all too different. Of course, I can recognize my own voice, but it’s always a little higher and whinier than I would like, and it’s sometimes downright painful to hear. The only times I can remember liking my voice are when I’m physically sick and my throat is hoarse. Katharine Hepburn sounds a bit easier on the ears than Minnie Mouse.

There are other ways which I have never gained control of my voice. Though I love to sing when alone in my house or in my car, I’ve never learned to hit notes on key, and this produces an effect not unlike Chinese opera for the listening public, a fact which has been called to my attention by various people who love me enough to be brutally honest. So I grew up lip-syncing the words to songs at church and birthday parties and always excused myself from Christmas caroling. My only way to make my singing voice sound pretty has been to keep it silent.

Perhaps this sad truth is also true for my speaking voice, but since I never managed to learn sign language, I’ve had to adapt the best I can. And I have, becoming a linguistic chameleon as the occasion necessitates. Though I still sound like Minnie Mouse, it’s no longer an East-Tennessee country version. From California valley girl to highbrow Northern intellectual, I’ve assimilated again and again. My accents come on and off like changing costumes, and I’m suddenly, voila, well — whatever fits the occasion at hand.

A friend was at my house one day last winter when I received a call from my neighbor, who worked nights, complaining about my dogs’ daytime barking. My neighbor, a lady from Georgia whom I had never met, had already registered a complaint with the sheriff, and I realized that I needed to accommodate and befriend my neighbor to avoid going to court. We talked for quite a while until the situation was peacefully resolved. I hung up the phone very relieved.

My friend Wayne stared at me in wonder. “Where did you get that accent?” he asked incredulously. “What are you talking about?” I retorted. He explained that my voice had grown increasingly Southern as the conversation went on until he began to wonder which was my true way of talking — Southern dialect or Midwestern newscaster. Was I pretending to be Southern while on the phone with a lady with a Southern accent, or am I pretending the other 99 percent of the time? These were all good questions for a changeling like myself who hadn’t even been conscious of the shift.

Southerners like myself have long been aware of the national, even international, prejudices against the Southern dialect. We have been lampooned in popular media from “The Dukes of Hazard” to “Deliverance.” I have witnessed first-hand how individuals with thick Appalachian accents have suffered in the academic and business worlds. I have heard how people in power positions talk, and I have, however consciously or unconsciously, tried to make myself sound the same.

I know that I’m not alone in this cultural phenomenon of conformity. Though I think it has special meaning to Southerners, I’ve seen it all over. When I went to school in England, I watched a number of Americans adapt subtle British accents to disguise their uncouth Americanisms. I’ve also had friends who mimicked the speech patterns of whatever crowds they were in at the time. I have known people from New York who dance in and out of nasally Jewish coffee talk and into “normal” English when the need arises. I even know a professor who can “talk the talk” of Black English, and in the next minute sound like a Harvard scholar. And furthermore, I have seen my mother try to minimize her Chinese accent for almost 30 years, though she has been largely unsuccessful. What I have seen is language as a social tool, a linguistic key to unlock different cultures.

Do these forays into and out of various dialects mean something? I think they do. They suggest the power of a linguistic cultural norm and also the way numerous individuals accept and simultaneously subvert that norm. Accents become cultural passports, means of accessing otherwise alienated groups of people. For that reason, I like being a linguistic chameleon, and rather than seeing my lapses into Southern speech as something dishonest, I see them as ways of validating various forms of language.

I was worried when my daughter came home from daycare pronouncing “gym” as a two-syllable word. Say “gym,” I prodded, trying emphatically to clip the word into one syllable. She eventually honed the word down, though the next day she returned to her longer pronunciation of “gee-yum.” Annoyed at myself rather than at her, I gave up on my lessons in cultural elitism, knowing sadly that she’ll have plenty of time to have Southern speech “learned out” of her as her life goes on.

Do I wish that there wasn’t a prejudice against Southern speech? Of course I do. Do I wish that no one cared that I sing off-key? Yes again.

Perhaps the best way to undermine the standards of normalcy would be for me talk country all the time and to sing as loudly as I want, wherever I want. But it seems as if this ever accent-changing, ever silent lip-syncing voice is more truly my own than any other. So I think I’ll keep passing as country when I feel like being country, like city when I feel like being city, and I’ll confine my singing to my home and car. To thine own self be true.

(Godfrey lives in Swain County and is in a doctorate program at the University of Tennessee. She can be reached at egodfrey@utk.edu)

 

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