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I've heard a theory that the slow southern accent was due to a hookworm outbreak. So maybe historically at least there was some validity in the assumption. htt

• cosmiccartel 8y ago
  You have the theory reversed. It's that hookworms caused lethargy, which was perceived as laziness. As a result, the southern accent has become associated with laziness. Personally, I think it's more related to negative opinions about the South following the Civil War, which is why even upper-class southern accents face the same stigma.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I'm not going to look up citations, but I will suggest that the South lagged behind the rest of the nation educationally and in other ways in part because much of the Civil War was fought on Southern turf and they burned Atlanta to the ground because it was an important manufacturing center that was probably way ahead of most Northern cities and it was keeping the Southern army resupplied. Burning Atlanta to the ground left behind a legacy of reduced infrastructure and the South was very bitter about it. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of the book, which was very well documented, but I read a history of the Deep South at one time. It is unfortunate I can't remember the name because it documented something that flies in the face of what most people apparently believe about the Federal minimum wage law. This book asserted that it was an anti-racist policy intended to end the practice in the Deep South of paying Blacks half of what Whites made. Many Blacks were fired after it was passed because Southerners often were simply unwilling to pay Blacks "a White man's wage." World War 2 was instrumental in making the Federal minimum wage law stick. Before that, it was proving to be a failed and unenforceable policy. Up to half the population in the South is Black (it no doubt varies, but it is about half in the city I grew up in) and under slavery they were forbidden from learning to read and write. It was one of the ways they were controlled. So when you suddenly have something like half your population made up of freed slaves, most of whom are illiterate and who carry a lot of baggage about being forbidden from learning, yes, the area as a whole is going to lag behind the rest of the nation educationally. It will take a long time to start remedying such a deficit. Many hot places have a reputation for being lackadaisical. In Mexico, they have a tradition of taking siestas -- naps -- during the hottest part of the day. In the Middle East, they have the expression "Only mad dogs and Englishman" to refer to who would be going about their business out of doors during the hottest part of the day. The Deep South in the US is not only hot, it is also humid. I grew up in Georgia and I have lived in Southern California and Texas, among other places. When it is humid, you can't just drink more and sweat it out. It won't evaporate. It's like a sauna. So the only thing that makes sense is to sit your ass down on the front porch in the shade in a rocking chair and make chit chat until it isn't so hot that doing stuff threatens to cause fainting. As a wild ass guess, this is the origin of the slow Southern drawl -- getting through the heat of the day without heat stroke, pre-AC, by slowing down and sitting a spell, during which time you didn't want to do anything too energetically, not even talk. And then it is completely and totally normal for people to make associations that run both ways, where the Southern drawl becomes a signifier for poverty, lack of education, etc since those things were common there, though it really had nothing to do with inherent stupidity of the locals.
  • cafard 8y ago
    The South lagged considerably behind the rest of the union in education, and for that matter prosperity,before the Civil War: see de Tocqueville writing in the 1830s or Olmsted in the 1850s. Slavery did have something to do with the latter anyway.
• ethn 8y ago
  Heh no, linguists are sure it's the most similar dialect to Old English, the only difference is maybe the tempo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=mNqY6ftqGq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=mNqY6ftqGq0
  • hug 8y ago
    Not "Old English", but the British English accent prevalent around the time of the founding of the United States. Old English is ~500AD, Beowulf, and a completely different language to anything ever spoken in the United States.
    • ethn 8y ago
      Correct, sorry for any confusion.
  • jklinger410 8y ago
    You see, what you might not realize...