I grew up in the 90s in rural Georgia. To me, everyone spoke the same way. Everyone sounded the same way. People in real life sounded just like people in the movies. The only debate was whether “ain’t” was a proper word to use or not. Hint: while it may have been in the 1700s, it is not today. As a kid whose exposure to other ways of speaking was limited solely to my parents, grandparents, church members, and schoolmates (who also only heard their parents, grandparents, church members, and schoolmates), accents did not exist.
As I grew older, things changed. Thanks to an over-zealous lingual frenulum (the thin strip of skin connecting your tongue to the floor of the mouth), I had to attend speech therapy for a few sounds. Not only did this draw the ire of my classmates, but it changed the way I spoke just enough to make me a target. For several years, kids accused me of having an Australian accent—a silly insult, but to a ten-year-old, absolutely devastating.
Thankfully, the teasing would end when I went home. The living room was my place of refuge, a respite from the cruelty of children. It remained that way until I discovered online gaming.
Cletus and Hick
Trash talking is as much a part of Xbox Live as the games themselves, and it’s something most come to expect when they engage with others over voice chat. But when you’re just a kid hoping to play multiplayer against someone other than your friends for the first time in your life, you do not expect to be attacked immediately as strangers mock the way you speak.
Capture the Flag games in Halo 2 were the first time I realized I had a different accent than a lot of people. Rarely would a game pass that someone didn’t call me a “hick” or refer to me as “Cletus” at some point throughout the game. My friends faced the same issue but handled it better than I did. As a younger kid, I could not understand why the way I sounded on the microphone mattered.
Eventually, I stopped speaking online. If I was not in a group with friends, I didn’t say a word.
Accents Are Hard to Lose
After realizing I sounded different than most people—and realizing that a southern accent carried with it connotations of low intelligence, low class, and other less-than-pleasant assumptions—I set out to lose my accent. If you’ve never searched the methods for getting rid of a learned way of speaking, some of the techniques are weird. Some guides even suggest speaking with rocks in your mouth.
Losing an accent felt impossible. It’s not—after all, people do so all the time for roles in movies, when learning to speak a new language, and in many other instances. I succeeded, mostly. To those I grew up around, I have a neutral accent. To people from New York or California, the southern hints are still strong.
But now, twenty years later, I no longer care that I sound like someone from central Georgia. Because I am.
An accent says a lot about where you came from. It’s part of your identity. When I speak, my accent immediately tells people that I like sweet tea and apple pie. It tells people that I spent my Saturdays mowing the lawn and my Sundays in church. It practically screams that camping and fishing were parts of my childhood, and whispers that my first car was actually a Ford F-150 with a six-inch lift kit.
And, twenty years later, I realize that most people don’t care where someone is from. A person’s worth isn’t defined by their accent, clothing, or place of origin, but their actions. I no longer worry that someone might think less of me for my accent, because it says more about their outlook on the world than mine. And the fact is, I’m proud to be from the south, where things move a little bit slower and the sun shines through the pines in just the right way.
Image credit: Yingnan Lu