Learning to Lose, Love, and Leave My Accent Behind

I always thought that I sounded pretty neutral, geographically-undefined. It was something I was proud of. Of course, I shouted “y’all” to address a group of people, said “I reckon” every now and then, and even used the oh-so-Southern “the devil is beating his wife” whenever the sun shined in the rain.

But I took pride (sometimes to the point of arrogance) in the fact that I spoke without the accent. No one would be able to tell I was from the South. Well, no one should be able to tell. At least, that’s what I thought.

I had always hated the accent. To me, it was the accent of hillbillies, hicks, and rednecks; people who drove jacked-up pickup trucks and made moonshine in their backyards, everything and everybody I wanted to stay as far away from as possible. For me, the accent symbolized something much more than just a way of speaking. It wasn’t just one of the perhaps thousands of regional linguistic quirks in the English language. The accent symbolized a way of thinking, and that way of thinking was opposite to everything in which I believed.

My lack of the accent wasn’t the only trait that I thought set me apart in my Southern town. I felt like an outsider in every sense of the word. I lean left while Greenville, South Carolina leans the exact opposite. I had mostly left competitive sports behind while athletics defined the lives of many of my Southern peers. I don’t even own a single piece of camouflage clothing (a mortal sin). The accent symbolized everything I wasn’t. And it certainly didn’t help that the only result that shows up when you search “governor with Southern accent” on Google is South Carolina’s very own Henry McMaster.

It seemed I had only one option for a place so equivocally unlike myself: leave.

Imagine my horror, then, when I came to Visitas in April and heard words that still haunt me to this day. “You’re from the South, aren’t you?” I had the accent.

I felt like I had been exposed even though I had no secret to hide. I was going to introduce myself as “Mac from South Carolina” anyways, but the way people said “the South” has stuck with me since then. For the first time in my life, I had been forced to reconcile with the idea that I was indeed from the South. I couldn’t pretend to be a neutral-accented, progressive-minded, geographically-undefined person anymore. I had to be from “the South.”

Over the summer I decided to learn how to speak “neutrally” — though I now use that word with great reservation after my supposedly neutral accent was effortlessly detected. I spent weeks reading about tongue placement and cadence, even watching Youtube videos making fun of the accent so that I could banish every detectable aspect of it from my speech patterns. And for the most part, I was successful. To quote my friends down South, I sounded like a “damn yank.” I still turn heads when I drop an “ain’t” or have a “hankerin’” for something, but I take it as a great compliment whenever someone can’t tell that I’m from below the Mason-Dixon Line.

For 18 years I hated what the accent stood for. I hated that other people viewed it so negatively. To me and the rest of the country, the accent was synonymous with a lack of education, my greatest fear. Even a person like me, born and raised in the South to parents born and raised in the South, had a deep internalized bias towards the accent. I held such great contempt for the negative perception of the accent that I didn’t realize I was partially responsible for this negative perception.

Attempting to drop the accent and engaging in my “Cantabrigian Code-Switching” (as I have come to call it), an action that occurs even in professional academia and research, only emphasizes the perspective that the accent is the mark of ignorance. When Southerners in the world of academia don’t speak with the accent, they are perpetuating the mainstream view because it demonstrates to those without the accent that “smart” Southerners truly don’t have the accent.

Indeed, in a perfect world, the accent would be seen as just that: an accent. But right now, it isn’t. While I know that I am doing nothing but harm to the South’s image (an image which already has plenty of negativity), I still don’t use the accent in Cambridge. “If I heard you with an accent, I would have thought of you completely differently,” joked one of my friends as I was explaining this concept to her, but unfortunately, I agree with her. While I now understand the damage that suppressing my accent does, the internalized bias is still there, and I’m not sure if it ever won’t be.

I truly do love to talk about the South, both the good and the bad. I love reminiscing about the refreshing chill of sweet tea, or the unmatched atmosphere of an SEC football game, or even why the South Carolina Statehouse has cannonball holes in it (think William Tecumseh Sherman).

And whenever I talk about my sometimes-beloved sometimes-hated home, it's always with an accent. But the accent I use here in Cambridge isn’t “the accent.” I use my painstakingly-researched “neutral” accent. That isn’t “my accent.”

Mac M. Mertens ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Weld Hall.