Dialects & Accents (Was Re: Subject-Verb agreement with compound subjects)

[Carol]

Potioncat:
> I can vouch for Southern accents. That is, there isn't just one
Southern accent, there are several. My Mom and I made a trip from 
Upstate South Carolina to Charlestown, SC when I was a teenager. We 
asked a question about Charlestown and the person actually corrected 
our pronuciation! (There's no such thing as an 'r' in Lowland accents.)
> 
> I have to say, I like the genteel Southern (sometimes Lowland)
accent very much, although that's not the one I grew up with. Rickman
come  close, but not quite, in 'Something the Lord Made.'

Carol responds:

Right. The distinctions in Southern accents appear to be partly
regional and partly cultural. (Dare I mention the educational level of
the speakers without being called elitist? Not by you, of course. :-)
) Robert E. Lee's cultivated Virginia dialect was quite different from
that spoken by, say, Aunt Polly in "Tom Sawyer."

And, of course, it's not just accent but vocabulary that distinguishes
"Southern" from the more standard Middle American. I remember being
asked when I lived (briefly) in North Carolina what kind of "co-cola"
I wanted. As far as I was concerned, there was only one kind of Coca
Cola. I think I asked the person whether she meant Coke vs. Pepsi (or
RC, which, IIRC, was the cola of choice in NC at that time), and she
explained that she was asking whether I wanted an orange "co-cola" or
a grape. I ended up with a "rootbeer cocola." I also discovered that
"bobacue" was "poke." No barbecued chicken or beef on the menu. And
then there's Southern food that doesn't even exist in other regions,
such as grits and "chitlins."

'Scuse me. I need to borra some fatback from a neighbor so we all can
have some chitlins and punkin' pah. (Sorry, Potioncat. I'm probably
remembering it all inaccurately. I do clearly remember, though, my
bank manager boss, Miz (Mrs.) Page, informing me that "we all lives
within hollerin'distance of the old homeplace."

Carol, who felt throughout her year in NC that she had somehow stepped
inside the pages of "to Kill a Mockingbird"