‘Control Your Southern Accent’ Class Draws Flood of Hate Mail, Praise

Stories told in David Pence’s class are often tragedies on a small stage. If they sound comic, you must not be from around here.

The class is called “How to Control Your Southern Accent.”

There was the story of the Southern auto racer, trying to buy clothing in California, who couldn’t make the vendor understand that “rice wire” translated to “race wear.”

There was the pair of travelers, far from their home in the Piedmont, who ordered “ahss tay.” The waitress begged their pardon. “Ahss tay, plaze,” they repeated, meaning the cool drink made from steeped tea leaves. The waitress tapped her pencil on the order pad.

“Finally they said, ‘Can we have a soda?’ ” explained Pence, a speech pathologist by day who has taught the evening course at Greenville Technical College for 3 1/2 years.

He smiled in telling the iced tea saga but said accents are not a laughing matter. A student in his first class burst into tears.

“All these handkerchiefs came out,” he recalled, as the woman sobbed, “I’ve been harassed about my accent so much. . . . You don’t know how upsetting it is.”

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture says Southerners are “often schizophrenic about their speech”--proud of its color and expressiveness, but “insecure” about being heard outside their region. Some parents, it adds, try to expunge Southern features from their children’s speech.

The goal of Pence’s six-week, $65 class is straightforward but hardly simple: to give his students a choice in how they communicate, especially with non-Southerners.

“If people start listening to how you’re saying something, instead of what you’re saying, then you’re losing effectiveness,” he said.

But in a region wary that Yankee influences are already spreading like the unkillable kudzu vine, Pence’s effort sounds to some like “Gomer Pyle Meets Henry Higgins”--and they hear snickers.

“Go home. We’ll never miss you!” declared one of several hate letters he’s received. (“I’m from Arkansas; that’s considered Southern,” Pence protests, his own native twang threading faintly through his speech, like the still-blue seams of jeans bleached to white.)

Another letter writer stormed that he’d rather hear “someone from central Georgia read the phone book than listen to Beethoven. . . . To my mind you are participating in the destruction of a priceless piece of Americana.”

An editorial in The News and Courier of Charleston, S.C., took note of Pence’s class and just chuckled.

“Can y’all stand it?” the newspaper scoffed. Southern speech “has character and resonance that sets it apart from the unaccented, homogenized speech that afflicts most of the nation.”

No argument there from Pence. But what about those who don’t want their accent to set them apart?

One student told his class that she is passed around on the phone whenever she calls her company’s New York office. “It’s the girl from the South,” she hears.

Kathy Young, an executive secretary who’s taking the course for the second time, said, “There’s no room in the professional world for a hillbilly secretary”--a perception she hears reflected in Northerners’ comments and blames on television.

Portrayals of rubes, from “The Beverly Hillbillies” to the “Dukes of Hazzard” and beyond, have stereotyped those who use any of the 25 or so distinct Southern dialects that researchers have counted. Even Yale- and Oxford-educated Bill Clinton didn’t escape the “Bubba” tag in New York.

Pence gave a more positive reason for wanting to control a Southern accent: As major corporations locate in this booming corner of the Sun Belt--BMW, the latest, announced in June it would build a $250-million auto plant outside Greenville--getting and keeping a job depend on being understood.

It was the influx of foreign companies that indirectly led Pence to offer his course.

Typical clients he sees in his private practice are stutterers or stroke patients relearning speech, but a few years ago Pence began offering foreign-born executives help in pronouncing English.

Not long afterward, he said, “I started getting people saying, ‘Can you work on my Southern acce”

One of those was Nancy Humphries. “In 1987, I was crowned Miss South Carolina,” she said, and state pageant officials gave her some advice. “To go to Miss America, they wanted me to have more of a general American accent.”

She didn’t win the national title but did land the broadcasting job she wanted. And her Southern accent?

“I turn it on and turn it off,” she said from her office at the ABC-TV affiliate in Charleston, WCBD, where she’s a reporter and morning news anchor.

“When I’m Nancy I can be Nancy. So I still keep my Southernness. It’s just in my professional world that I lose my accent.”

“It’s ‘How to Control’--not eradicate, destroy, eliminate--’Your Accent,’ ” Pence said. And yet he reflected some of the region’s linguistic schizophrenia when asked if his class wasn’t aiding in the deconstruction of Dixie.

“On a limited basis,” he replied. “It’s allowing someone their choice to become homogenized or not. I can go into it (an anywhere-USA accent) when I need to, get what I need to be done, then I can go back to my Southern lifestyle, who I am. . . .

“I love a Southern accent.”