Jackie Hand
Dr. Hughes
10/16/09
Eng 1101

After reading a few of these websites, I have come to the conclusion that it is things like this that give southerners a bad name. In expressing things in the way that they did, the various authors put all of the south into one category. In Ron Collins’ “Southern Dialect Converter” he degrades the south as a whole. He acts as if the entire southern United States has the same accent, slang, and sayings for everything. This is in no way accurate. Collins uses a lot of the same conversions as Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might Be a Redneck If…” That just goes to show how accurate his “findings” are. However, the quiz “Are You a Yankee or a Rebel” is somewhat accurate. Me, personally, got an 88% Dixie. It is funny, because since I have lived in so many places and have family everywhere, I recognized almost all of the “slang.” “Northerners tend to think of the South as a homogenous and somewhat mysterious monolith, where English has an indiscriminate “twang” or “drawl” and is peppered with pan-regional idioms,” as said by Rosina-Lippi Green says in her passage “Hillbillies, Rednecks, and Southern Belles.” Even just the title sums up the South. There is a definite difference in say a Hillbilly and a Southern Belle. The way that Collins portrays his conversions of words makes it out like a Southern Belle would use all the same slang as a Hillbilly. This is in no way true. In my opinion, a Hillbilly is like Jethro Clampette and a Southern Belle is like Scarlet O’Hara. Two very different types of Southern, but Southern none the less. However, the Wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English sums it up very well. This site describes each region of the south and how they speak, and why their accent sounds the way they do. To me, this site was the most "legit" when it comes to describing the south. I think that this website helped to redeem the others that were very ignorant. The South is a part of the United States as well as any northern, western, or eastern state. It is unfair that we are categorized as one thing.