Refugee thread!

[Aliza]

Mine is a Carolina girl twang.  As soon as people hear the grits flying, in their minds my IQ drops several dozen points.  I was born in South Carolina, raised in North Carolina, have a B.A. from a respected (and expensive) private college and have a respectable IQ.  Graduated cum laude and was a member of Phi Theta Kappa, Kappa Nu Sigma, Psi Chi and Delta Psi Omega.  I was the department's official tutor for one of the two most difficult psychology courses.  But the accent is never going away, so I suspect I will always be viewed as "less than."  

Of course all that pales by comparison to how much my value as a human being (in the bible-belt) dropped in the minds of the people in Tinytown upon revealing my atheism.

  

My husband is from South Carolina.  He was raised in Columbia SC and his family still lives there.  He's an actor so he had to lose his accent.  It helped that  he went to  University of Southern California and came out talking like a Californian. But when he travels back to see his family and if he's there for more than a week he comes back with a full-on South Carolina accent.  

Kinda reminds me of the actress Ava Gardner who was from Grabtown,  North Carolina.  When she did her screen test at the age of 17 in New York city  her accent was so heavy the director had no idea at all what she was saying. It may as well been a different language.  So he did a silent screen test.  When he saw the results of the film he was dumb struck because the camera just  loved her. She was stunningly beautiful. He sent a wire back to MGM "She can't sing, she can't act. She's terrific!"   Here's a little  gif of her screen test.  Annnnnnnnnd I went off in a totally direction with this thread. Sorry! 

I have a standard American accent, but I mix in southern words and phrases. If you put me around a bunch of southerners, that southern flair can come out a little more.