THE LANGUAGE: Sounds of the South

Northern Democrat: I like the man, but I have trouble with his accent.

Southern Democrat: What accent?

Jokes aside, the fact is that not since Lyndon Johnson—who liked to go to the well, nail coonskins to walls and keep the creeks from rising—has the nation harked to a presidential candidate whose voice tintinnabulates with the sound of the South. Compared with Jimmy Carter's soft Georgia drawl, however, L.B.J.'s Pedernales twang was absolutely abrasive.

Singsong Effect. Northerners were startled when Carter referred in his acceptance speech at New York's Madison Square Garden to "Eye-talians." Some Eye-talians might have been ruffled, but a number of Georgians and other Southerners did not even blink. Why should they, in a region where a porch is a "pye-azzuh" and the capital of Austria—as well as a Georgia town by the same name—is "Vy-anna"? Vienna, Ga., incidentally, is the home town of Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell (see THE PRESS). Campaign Director Hamilton Jordan—or, as it is pronounced down home, "Jer-dan"—is from Albany, which, unlike New York's capital, is accented on the second syllable.

According to Linguist Lee A. Pederson of Atlanta's Emory University, who specializes in Southern dialects, Carter's speech pattern is not merely Southern, not simply Georgian, but Gulf coastal plain. It is one of at least seven distinct regional dialects that are discernible in what Pederson considers to be one of the nation's most linguistically complicated states.* What is more, it differs markedly from dialects in other Southern states. Thus an Alabaman's drawn-out "you all" becomes "yawl" in the more rapid South Georgian speech, and "Ah wouldn't" becomes "Ah woon."

Some listeners are convinced that Carter's accent has been considerably —and quite consciously—modified by his schooling in the North, his Navy travels and even by campaign-speech consultants. Not so, insists Pederson. "He does not seem to have messed around with his language very much," says the linguist. "That's the sign of a person who's got his head on straight."

Thus Carter routinely modulates his pitch, employing a delicate rising and falling of his voice that results in an almost singsong effect. Another Gulf coastal plain element: he drops what linguists call postvocalic rs in such words as go-phuh (gopher) and Cot-tuh. According to Pederson, however, the younger generation of Gulf coastal plains people, who have been exposed to accentless network television and modern speech courses, pronounce it "Car-tuh."