Country Accents5/1/2020 What is a "country accent"? Is it different in Oklahoma? After I moved to Oklahoma, I started wondering what people mean when they say -- either proudly or apologetically -- that Oklahoma has a "country accent" or that Oklahomans "are country" even if they're not from a rural area. In a related project on Oklahoma English, Oklahomans' imitations of Country and Southern accents were similar (the Accent Copy Cat study), and other Oklahomans couldn't tell them apart (the Name that Accent experiment), but people still don't think of Oklahoma (or its people or accents) as Southern. Even if their descriptions and attitudes -- both positive and negative -- about Oklahoma, "countryness," and Southernness are similar, Oklahomans seem to feel that "country" is a better fit. Up to this point, I had just been asking people what they thought whenever it came up, and I heard from colleagues in other states that "country" didn't quite mean the same thing where they lived -- it might be more negative, like "redneck," or something people in a city would say to call rural areas unworldly, like "provincial." But no matter where they were, the description was never simple. So, during the pandemic, I asked people from all over America to weigh in through self-directed focus groups over Zoom. What does "country" mean where you're from? Presentations
(*student author)
People & Related Work
Student Corner
Data and materials:
Comments are closed.
|