The southern drawl

I would like to preface this with a disclaimer: All my friends and family who live down south should not take this post personally. I know that is asking a lot (and you will see why), but keep an open mind.

The other night I was walking home from the corner store after getting some milk (I drink so much milk that I have to go every few days and get a gallon) and it occurred to me that many people labor under the impression that having a southern drawl or accent makes you stupid. I do not disagree, but I would like to explain myself in that regard.

As you may know, I grew up in a small town in South Carolina (<3). Everyone around me (virtually of course, there are always exceptions) spoke with a southern accent. No surprise there, I hope. I, however, have always labored (mostly unconsciously, but I will get to that later) to suppress this accent. For one, it comes with a certain stigma of being unintelligent. As we all know, this is poppycock because there have been many great minds from the confederate states.

How does this all fit together to make something worthy of a blog post? I played devil's advocate when I was thinking about this assumption and said to myself: Ok, so southern people are stupid. If this is true, why do we think this and is there any truth in it? It is difficult to define intelligence of course, but I will leave it up to the reader to define it in their own words. I see intelligence as a multi-faceted quality which is honed throughout one's life and contains things such as knowledge (general and specific), reaction time, problem-solving, visualization (being able to rotate objects in your mind) and many many other things that are not really the point.

So southern people almost all have one thing in common: their accent. So maybe the southern stupidity hypothesis is explained by this (partly or wholly). But certainly we cannot judge someone based on their saying words slightly differently than other people right? Well, that is what I am here to address.

Whatever your stance on the topic, you will undoubtedly agree that some people think this is true. My thinking on this subject is that there are certain types of intelligence that some people just do not care about. One being social rules for conversation and speech. Do you stand up everytime a woman comes to join your dinner table? I doubt it, and I would never do that sort of thing, but some people see it as a courtesy due to women. Some people also believe that conversing in an articulate and courteous way is of utmost intelligence.

Ok ok, I see I am getting off on a tangent here. Are southern people stupid and is this because of their accent? I think, not all of them and yes, respectively. An accent is certainly something you can control (I am living proof, though I do slip into a different speech pattern when I am at home. A topic for another post), so with so much stigma around the accent, why not just pay attention to your speech and stop it? Most southerners do not realize they are speaking in this way, especially since everyone around them is doing the same.

So, why does this make them stupid? Language is our most valuable possession as humans. We can do things that no other species can. We can lie and cheat and swindle and hood-wink and all sorts of other terrible things that are impossible without detailed communication. Though many species do steal and lie, it is nowhere near as sophisticated. The point I am trying to get across is that language is of utmost importance when deciding how intelligent a species is. Language is the gateway to someone's thought processes.

If you know someone who is always saying like and uhm and thing in their speech, it means either they do not have much information about which they are speaking (or just dont put the mental strength into trying) or their brains just do not work fast enough. One measure of intelligence is processing speed. So since southern people slur words and push words together or create new words altogether, does this mean their brains work differently than other people's? My view on this matter is painfully obvious.

So what do you think? Is language a gateway to the inner workings of a person's brain, or is it just a random process that gives you no information at all? To me, I do not see how you could argue that language gives NO insight into how smart someone is. The fluidity and clarity with which you speak has great reprocussions on many aspects of one's life. If you cannot speak clearly, you cannot expect to ever get a job where one of your primary duties is to communicate information. Though as I said earlier, most people with accents do not realize they have accents. An accent is a deviation from the normal. If the normal IS the accent, then it technically is not an accent to them.

I will leave it off here, but feel free to comment or email me with reponses.