Canoerebel
Posts: 21100
Joined: 12/14/2002 From: Northwestern Georgia, USA Status: offline
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As most Americans know, southerners have a distinctive accent. I grew up in Miami, which does not have an accent. I always found the southern accent charming and pleasing. Now that I've lived in Georgia for 37 years, I no longer recognize the accent. IE, it just sounds "normal" to me. My family in Miami thinks I've picked up a bit of the southern accent, though I don't realize it conciously. Ten years ago, me and my family (at the time, we had three children under ten) made our first foray out of the Confederate States on a long camping trip to New England. We found the people charming, especially the small town folks. Even the big city folks were uniformly nice; in part this is because they were struck by my wife's strong southern accent. I remember sitting on the subway in Washington, D.C., with the entire compartment listening to my wife when somebody asked her a question. After we'd been gone for two weeks, we happened to be hiking to "The Bubbles" in Maine's Acadia National Park. It was late afternoon and we had the mountain to ourselves. Then we heard what seemed to be an older couple talking on their way up the mountain. As they got closer, I told my wife, "Hey, they sound like they're from home." By "home," I didn't mean Savannah or Macon or Birmingham. Those are southern towns with southern accents, but just a bit different from ours. When the couple reached the top, I asked them where they were from. He replied, "Centre, Alabama." Yeah, that's home - just 25 miles west of my town. Boy, they sounded good. It was then we realized that we missed home even while enjoying our first trip outside the Confederacy.
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