I, as an international student, have been living only in the southern area of America for the last 5 years, so I haven’t got many chances to compare Southerners’ English with non-Southerners’ English. In fact, I have just a few times of feeling some differences between the two, even though I couldn’t explain what they were. When I was in high school in South Carolina, I got a friend from a northern area, who once pointed out that Southerners say in a different way even on TV. I nodded at that time but I do not seem to have noticed it clearly. I also felt that some of the teachers did use some unique accents, tone, and rhythms, but I couldn’t say how different they are and what they come from. Actually it is in this course that I realized that there are clearly some differences in pronunciations: for example, they pronounce ‘fight’ like ‘faat’ and ‘came’ like ‘keem’. In the following video clip, Senator Hillary Clinton shows us good examples of southern accents by pretending to say like a Southerner, even though she is from the North. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaDQ1vIuvZI)
Reflecting on my experience, I come to think that my English might sound like southerners’. It is because I have not experienced so much that my English is different from the English I hear from English native speakers around me. Rather, my English may be close to so-called Standard English (used by mass media). If the latter is right, most of the teachers and professors in schools and colleges might also speak Standard English, rather than southern accents, even though some of them may use more southern accents. I do not have much experience of finding big differences among these groups. If this is true, the future of southern accents is unlikely to be positive in academic situations, at least in terms of vocabulary and grammar. As seen in Clinton’s video, in contrast, southern accents in terms of pronunciation might have a different future, because some of them are observed to be alive even in academia.
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