Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Language Log (a great great site, btw), talks about southern accents:

A few days ago, David Donnell sent a link to an article by Noelle Landers in the Collegiate Times about "Southern accent reduction courses cropping up from Texas to Kentucky". These courses are apparently billed as a service to actors whose "accent might hold them back", but the story's author suggests that they are really aimed at upwardly mobile southerners who want to distance themselves from their regional roots.

We Language Loggers have been appropriately scornful in the past about people who think that people from the American south have "lazy mouths", or "sound as if you just woke [them] up", or signal low status and lack of intelligence by using regional pronunciations, words and syntactic constructions. It's been a while since Shaw had his phonetician Henry Higgins respond to Liza Doolittle's cockney "oh" by saying

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere�no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and dont sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

You know, anyone who thinks English is "the languague of.. The Bible" gets their opinions written off from the get-go, IMHO.