You Want TEN PENS DJ Skuggs?

According to this informative and well researched article from PBS, all people with Southern accents are actually stupider than they sound, contrary to popular belief that they were simply just as stupid as they sound. Now don't go gittin' all ya'll's britches in a bunch DJ Skuggs, I made that up. The article is actually a very intersting discussion about the origin and spread of SAE (Southern American English) and various reactions to it across the country. An appropriate excerpt:

The most widely recognized phonological features of SAE are the merger of the vowels in words like pen and pin or ten and tin (the vowel in both words has the sound of the second member of the pair) and the loss of the offglide of the /ai/ diphthong in words like hide (so that it sounds like hahd). SAE is also characterized by a series of vowel rotations that William Labov (1993) has called the “Southern Shift.” Describing the shift would require an extensive technical phonetic descriptions of SAE vowels, but people can hear its most important feature simply by listening to Bill Clinton’s pronunciation of the vowel in way or stayed. The beginning of the vowel (which is a diphthong in SAE) will sound something like the vowel in father. Vowel differences such as these are hard to describe in non-technical terms, but they are what makes people immediately recognizable as speakers of SAE -- long before a might could, fixin to, or yall crops up in their speech.

Anyway, its an interesting read. I'm still searching for a study on the proper pronunciation of Harrisburg by Harrisburgers. . . .