{"id":525,"date":"2014-10-25T23:09:27","date_gmt":"2014-10-26T03:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grieve-smith.com\/blog1\/?p=525"},"modified":"2017-08-31T23:29:44","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T03:29:44","slug":"new-orleans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/new-orleans\/","title":{"rendered":"America’s Loveliest Accents: New Orleans"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a stereotypical “Southern” accent you’ll hear in mid-twentieth century movies and television, that owes more to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh’s artificial accents than to anything that ever came out of the mouth of any real-life Southerner. It may bear a passing resemblance to the accents of real Coastal Southern gentry like Fritz Hollings<\/a>, but it’s been used to portray people from all regions and social classes of the South. In the last fifty or so years we’ve heard a new stereotype that’s at least based on real Southerners like Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley, but it’s been applied to rich and poor white characters from Dallas to Knoxville to New Orleans.<\/p>\n

YouTube user Mehrvigne, from Chalmette, Louisiana, wants us to know<\/a> that some people from the New Orleans area don’t talk anything like that. Katie Carmichael, who just finished her dissertation<\/a> on Chalmette accents after Hurricane Katrina, pointed me to Mehvigne’s “accent tag” video on Twitter.<\/p>\n