On Why Georgians aren't "Southern"
- Kira Tucker
- Jan 1, 2017
- 3 min read
Last semester, I often received taunts about being too “country” with my Memphis twang and colloquial dialect. People stood astonished at the way I could draw out vowels without a glance or code switch on a phone call with family in a matter of seconds. I remember shocking the friend who accompanied me to the drugstore as I called my mom to ask about medicine. “When you told her you were sick it legit sounded like Ahm see-yuck,” she said. But I, too, was shocked that this came from the same friend who tells stories about trekking to the annual Texas rodeo for her yearly fix of Tim McGraw and bull riding.
When I tell outsiders I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, their two immediate associations are usually country music and Jack Daniels, maybe Big Orange if they follow football. Yikes. When I finally found my group of real Tennessee friends, I felt strangely more at home hundreds of miles away, something like the comfort of seeing my roommate’s Bless Your Heart placard hanging proudly on our wall. I’ve always known I was Southern, but compared to the majority of accents I’ve heard throughout the Mid-South over the course of my life, I still believe mine is relatively mild. So when people would taunt me with jokes about Mason-Dixon diction and take jabs at how Blake Shelton and I are equally unintelligible, I tell them one thing: come to Memphis.
Once, after a day of volunteering at Sugar Creek Farms, I shared in our group discussion that my family grows greens in our own backyard. Two girls looked at me in astonishment and asked, “woah, where is that? Really, what kind?!”
“You know, like collards? Sometimes turnip greens,” I replied, perplexed at their sudden excitement.
Their bemused gazes twisted into instant snickers as they said, “ohhhh greeeeeens! We thought you said graaaaaains, haha!”
I simply did not expect to find Georgians, residents of a place that we’ve always considered the Deep South, marveling at something I’d been exposed to my entire life in much thicker, more concentrated doses. Everything from reading the literature of Alice Walker and Flannery O’Connor to hearing the music of Future and Lil Jon had solidified cultural notions in my head that were shattered when my Atlantan peers told me they “don’t consider themselves part of the South.” I never thought I’d have to explain to a friend that, yes, she does have an accent, because we all do. To someone speaking Yorkshire English, Jamaican English, Aussie English or anything in between—of course you may sound different to them, as do they to you!
This reminded me of a linguistics class map experiment in which all twelve of my classmates looked to me to confirm “coke” as the universal Southern term for soda, and how I disappointed them by explaining that, even in the South, you’d probably confuse (and upset) a server by requesting a “coke” yet expecting some other soda, such as Sprite or Fanta. On another occasion, some classmates were stunned when I was the only person in my poetry seminar who understood my professor’s connection between sunshowers and an idiom about the devil beating his wife. These experiences showed me that, while people may hold expectations of how others conceptualize the world through speech, reality often says something different.
Having such conversations blew my mind, but they also made me appreciate my ability to understand the complexities of spoken language. Of course, some people still think that all Tennesseans, all Mississippians, or even all Georgians, sound the same, but I appreciate being exposed to the beauty of literally hundreds of accents and dialects along our very own regional continuum. These experiences have reinforced two goals I’ve strived an entire semester to master: 1) releasing preconceived expectations about others based on my own experience and, 2) continuing to love and express myself no matter what people have to say.
