Bein' from Los Angeles, in Southern California, my family tended toward the flat mid-western, urban sound that was favored by radio and TV announcers and newsmen (but not 'puker' DJ's).
I was the one big exception to this. As a young boy, I loved cowboys and imitated everything about them, including their lazy speech pattern. I was also raised in my most formative years by my Grandmother who came from the Inter-Mountain States. This also gave her that twangy Western way of speech. Much of my Western accent was suppressed when I was in school, but it just naturally came back as I began to travel for work, mostly in the Midwest, Southwest and the South. Elements of these regions easily blended into my accent and speech patterns. I still tended to front load my accents though. This applied to living in the Northeast later on, as subtle elements the regional phraseology crept into my language, but thankfully, little of the regional accents.
This was a long way of getting to the point. During the 2008 election, a Democrat friend of was asking me what I thought of Sarah Palin. I thought she was fine, I actually preferred her to McCain. My friend argued, "How can you like her, with the way she speaks and drops her G's at the end of words?"
"You mean the Western way I speak and drop my G's?" I replied. End of argument.
Regional dialects are funnier thing in America, even than they are in England. The are less stratified, more blended and, because of more mobility, regionally blurred.
This became even more acutely apparent to me as my niece notice, with some amusement, wondered where I had come from since I didn't sound or speak like the rest of the family. She said I sounded like no one else, with low voice that is a mix of Southwestern, Southern and Northeastern accents. m/r
Southerners and Gs - Charles C. W. Cooke - National Review Online
Surprisin’ twists in the history of English pronunciation.
AUGUST 25, 2012 bt Charles C. W. Cooke
Americans are not infatuated with class in the manner that the British are, but accents remain consequential nonetheless. How else to explain the Amazing Disappearing G, a trick of pronunciation that, whereabouts permitting, politicians on the campaign trail and beyond are keen to perform? Vice President Joe Biden, during his ignoble allegation that the Republican party has a secret plan to put black Americans “back in chains,” avoided the participial G as if he were fatally allergic.
Were we in the Southern states, Biden’s trick would instead be called the Amazin’ Disappearin’ G, and this has not been lost on any of this year’s presidential contenders. While Mitt Romney has much less of a tendency toward dropping his Gs than does Barack Obama, the Republican candidate is not wholly innocent: Touring the South during the primaries, Romney wished supporters a “fine Alabama good mornin’” and took to asking, rhetorically, “Ain’t that somethin’?” This while pretending to like grits, no less.
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, why politicians do this is self-evident. But more interesting is why Southerners do it in the first place. The answer is surprising: Actually, Southerners are truer to “original” English voicing than are their G-happy Northern counterparts. Chalk one up there for Biden. Historically, writes Barbara Strang in A History of English, “the more ‘correct’ pronunciation [i.e., the pronunciation of Gs], as it was considered, was in reality an innovation, based upon the spelling.” That is to say that Southerners who are speakin’ instead of speaking are “correct” — insofar as anybody can be right or wrong linguistically — and, by contrast, educated types who disparage the loss of the G are “incorrect” to do so, their admonishments serving only as invitations further to change the very language that they are attempting to preserve.
-more of this interestin' stuff at link-
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