{"id":26531,"date":"2021-08-28T23:40:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-28T23:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=26531"},"modified":"2021-09-01T08:27:41","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T08:27:41","slug":"tiktok-bamarush-and-the-irresistible-allure-of-mocking-southern-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/tiktok-bamarush-and-the-irresistible-allure-of-mocking-southern-accents\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok, #BamaRush and the irresistible allure of mocking Southern accents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kathryn Cunningham<\/a>, University of Tennessee<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As college students across the country return to campuses grappling with the COVID-19 delta variant, Greek letters of a different variety have captivated social media feeds with stunning virality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The #BamaRush trend on TikTok introduced followers to the annual recruitment process for National Panhellenic Conference<\/a> sororities at the University of Alabama. The popular videos offer a firsthand perspective on the recruitment process, showcasing the various events and the women\u2019s corresponding fashion choices \u2013 the \u201coutfit of the day,\u201d or #OOTD \u2013 for each stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When this phenomenon<\/a> came to my attention, I noticed that TikTok\u2019s algorithm fed me not only the posts of women participating in #BamaRush but also parody videos<\/a> made by people glued to the unfolding events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these videos, I immediately observed a fixation on the women\u2019s accents, which one reporter<\/a> described as \u201cthick\u201d and \u201cheavy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having been born and raised in northeast Georgia and educated in North Carolina, I was quite young when I intuited that, if I were to be taken seriously as an actor, a scholar and a human, my accent would have to go. By the time I arrived in New York in 2006, I had successfully erased most markers of my Southernness from my speech. What remained I was able to surgically remove after receiving notes and feedback from directors and coaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I teach voice and speech<\/a> to actors in a theater program in the South, and I think a lot about how people perceive the native speech varieties of this region. What\u2019s behind this enduring fascination with \u2013 and thinly veiled disdain for \u2013 some Southern American accents?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorority culture rife with issues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I speak from personal experience about sorority culture because, for a short time, I was a member of one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I experienced recruitment from within and witnessed some of the problematic aspects of this system. My sophomore year, I formally withdrew \u2013 what\u2019s called \u201cde-sistering<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the flood of media coverage of the #BamaRush trend, Slate\u2019s ICYMI podcast did an explainer episode<\/a> addressing all the \u201c-isms\u201d inherent to certain Greek organizations, including racism, sexism, classism and weight discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the University of Alabama\u2019s own student newspaper, The Crimson White, published an article<\/a> in 2013 that investigated racism in sorority recruitment, spurring a process of integration<\/a>. (Yes, in 2013!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be clear: There are plenty of things to criticize about the National Panhellenic Conference\u2019s sorority culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accents, however, aren\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside the #BamaRush accents<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Among the #BamaRush vloggers, one who garnered intense attention during the unfolding recruitment process was Makayla Culpepper, whose pronunciation of \u201cphilanthropy\u201d<\/a> in an early round was the subject of much mockery. In fact, she credits<\/a> this pronunciation as the genesis of her newfound internet stardom. Culpepper, who is biracial, was subsequently dropped<\/a> from recruitment under dubious circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other pronunciations that have piqued the interest<\/a> of onlookers include words in what linguists and accent coaches call the PRICE lexical set<\/a>, a category of words that are generally pronounced with the same vowel sound in their stressed syllable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several of the #BamaRush TikTokkers pronounce words in the PRICE set \u2013 such as \u201cbite,\u201d \u201crice,\u201d \u201cmy\u201d and \u201cright\u201d \u2013 with a single vowel that sounds something like \u201cah.\u201d This differs from the way these words are pronounced in a so-called General American<\/a> accent, in which a speaker glides through two different vowel sounds, resulting in something like \u201caight\u201d in \u201cright.\u201d Some of the women\u2019s pronunciations of \u201con\u201d and \u201cown\u201d are nearly indistinguishable, another marker of some dialects of Southern American English<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quality described as Southern drawl<\/a> may be related to the way some speakers vocalize words like \u201cdress\u201d and \u201chair\u201d with a lengthened glide between vowels and syllable break: \u201cdray-ess\u201d and \u201chay-ur.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is questionable to connect the undeniably performative aspects of these videos \u2013 the fashion shows, the bid day envelope opening videos<\/a>, the choreographed dorm room introductions<\/a> \u2013 with the mistaken idea that these accents are part of the performance. When investigating the #BamaRush trend, I heard these women described more than once as \u201ccharacters<\/a>\u201d in an unfolding \u201cdrama.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is not a scripted series with characters or a reality show with contestants. They are not playing at sounding like this. It\u2019s just their speech. And speech is essential to identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost of satirizing Southern accents<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, an episode of the podcast series Dolly Parton\u2019s America<\/a> included interviews with students at my institution, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In it, they shared their encounters with the realities of linguistic bias. As one interviewee noted, her own mother cautioned her: \u201cIf you want people to take you seriously, we\u2019re going to have to work on the way you talk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One cost of scoffing at Southern accents is the ceaseless perpetuation of negative stereotypes about Southern people. A 2013 study<\/a> found that by the age of 9 or 10, all children \u2013 including Southern children \u2013 identified Northern-accented speakers as sounding \u201csmarter,\u201d which indicates that they\u2019re internalizing stereotypes about speech at a young age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psycholinguist Katherine Kinzler<\/a> has also shown that accent-based biases may be tied to the mistaken assumption that speakers should be able to adjust their speech to conform to societal norms. Kinzler argues that this \u201cperception of controllability\u201d is at the root of weight- and mental health-based stigmas as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, most mockery of Southern accents underestimates the linguistic diversity<\/a> of the South and creates the false perception that Southern accents are all the same. In addition, research shows<\/a> that most accent imitations are not especially accurate. There is a reason accent and dialect coaches are specially trained to help actors do this work respectfully and convincingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The harm of stereotypical accent imitations is one familiar to many whose speech exists outside the accepted \u201cstandard,\u201d like speakers of African American English<\/a> and those for whom English is a second language. The same forces that reduce Southern speech to a uniform monolith also run the risk of reducing the idea of \u201cSouthernness\u201d to a single stereotype: white, unintelligent, bigoted. This discounts the diversity of the South, and the significant cultural and political power of Black Southerners, who make up large shares of the populations of many Southern states \u2013 including Alabama<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why should people care about Southern accents being the butt of viral jokes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ignoring the way that speech and identity are so inextricably linked erases the people behind the voices. Going after these women\u2019s accents when there is much about the institutions themselves to legitimately critique feels like punching down. This is especially true when the accent is played only for laughs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathryn Cunningham<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Theatre, University of Tennessee<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kathryn Cunningham, University of Tennessee As college students across the country return to campuses grappling with the COVID-19 delta variant, Greek letters of a different variety have captivated social media feeds with stunning virality. The #BamaRush trend on TikTok introduced followers to the annual recruitment process for National Panhellenic Conference sororities at the University of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":26532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,8025],"tags":[7824,3237,787,3124,2805,695,9986],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26533,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26531\/revisions\/26533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}