The Texas accent

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easttexasaggie04
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9:36a, 6/27/18
AG
I'm from northeast Texas, Marshall to be exact, and I admittedly have a heavy country (or as I like to call it Texas) accent. I'm a 7th generation Texan and everybody on that side of the family does. When I went to A&M I would get asked all the time where I was from because of my accent. After college when I moved to Dallas I would also get asked (with a laugh) where I was from because of my accent. My answer to both was always, "Texas, I'm from Texas."

Now I've been married to a lady from south Texas (Bandera to be exact) and I still get laughed at from south Texans because of my accent. My question is...why do some parts of Texas have a twang and others don't? I totally understand why folks from Houston and Dallas don't...as they have lost their small town Texas origins. But what about small city Texans, like Marshall and Bandera?

Why didn't the accent spread south? Or is it because east Texas is still considered the "deep south" when the rest of the state isn't?
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Rabid Cougar
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In reply to easttexasaggie04 • 10:08a, 6/27/18
AG
easttexasaggie04 said:
I'm from northeast Texas, Marshall to be exact, and I admittedly have a heavy country (or as I like to call it Texas) accent. I'm a 7th generation Texan and everybody on that side of the family does. When I went to A&M I would get asked all the time where I was from because of my accent. After college when I moved to Dallas I would also get asked (with a laugh) where I was from because of my accent. My answer to both was always, "Texas, I'm from Texas."

Now I've been married to a lady from south Texas (Bandera to be exact) and I still get laughed at from south Texans because of my accent. My question is...why do some parts of Texas have a twang and others don't? I totally understand why folks from Houston and Dallas don't...as they have lost their small town Texas origins. But what about small city Texans, like Marshall and Bandera?

Why didn't the accent spread south? Or is it because east Texas is still considered the "deep south" when the rest of the state isn't?
East Texas accent is more like the old south. I would have trouble separating you from someone from Alabama and Georgia. South Texas has a different accent as does West Texas. They are different than the old south accent. They are "western". All I can think the reason for this is that they are more intermingled with the Spanish language. The pronunciation of the Spanish named geologic features and towns by Spanish speakers and by themselves influences their "Texas accent"

I was born and raised in Central Texas and I don't think I have an accent at all . Yet when I was in Iraq the Iraqi engineers I worked with said "You are from Texas!" I asked how they knew. They said it was the way I talked. I listened to myself on video recordings and sure enough. I have one!
My mother travels to Scotland all the time and surely doesn't have an accent. Yet the locals always get a kick out of hearing her talk "Texas". she told me that they did this and I didn't believe her until I saw it with my own eyes.
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easttexasaggie04
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In reply to Rabid Cougar • 10:16a, 6/27/18
AG
During a trip to NYC once I asked a cop for directions. I said "I'm not from here..." and he said " NO SH***!"
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BQ78
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10:42a, 6/27/18
AG
I find it funny that some people from New Orleans often sound like they just walked off Turdy Turd and Turd in New Yok City.
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huisachel
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10:52a, 6/27/18
Some south Texas cadences are osmotic transfers from Tex-Mex.
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expresswrittenconsent
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12:23p, 6/27/18
west texas/panhandle put an "R" in the middle of the word "wash" and some of them have "awl" money.
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expresswrittenconsent
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In reply to BQ78 • 12:25p, 6/27/18
BQ78 said:
I find it funny that some people from New Orleans often sound like they just walked off Turdy Turd and Turd in New Yok City.
the NOLA accent is definitely different from the run of the mill cajun. i can hear some of the NYC accent you mentioned but also a strong boston accent as well.
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Cen-Tex
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2:07p, 6/27/18
AG
In Central Texas, some accents sound like you are in central & eastern Europe. All depends on the community you're in at the time.
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spud1910
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8:23p, 6/27/18
AG
OP, I am from Henderson, so just down the road from you. I got the same response when I went to TAMU. So many were from Dallas or Houston and were fascinated by the accent I didn't know I had. Growing up, we visited my mom's people from Mississippi. Those people have accents! My wife is from Russia (Moscow) and lived in Boston for about 15 years before she wised up and moved to Texas. She spoke English with a bit of a Boston accent when we first met, but not so noticeable now. But when we go to Boston, I am frequently asked to "say something in Texan."
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Stive
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8:51p, 6/27/18
AG
The east Texas twang kills me (and I was born and raised here). I lost most of my twang when I went to A&M and then finished off what was left of it while I was in Dallas for a decade.

To me the east Texas twang is more like the Arkansas hillbilly than it is the drawl of the Deep South. There's something about the Arkansas/East Texas/northern Louisiana thing that is very different from the long-slow "suthan" accent you here in Georgia, the Carolinas and Alabama.
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MGS
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8:22a, 6/28/18
I was in Europe for work a few years back an met an English guy who thought I had an Australian accent.
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Nagler
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9:13a, 6/28/18
AG
I always heard it has to do with where most of the original settlers came from.

Settlers that stayed in East Texas tends to come more from the deep south while farther west they tended to come from the upper south, Tennessee and what not.

So East Texas tends to keep a lot of that deep south accent.

Not sure how true that's what I was told at one point.

I read somewhere recently that a lot of regional accents are starting to go away due to national TV. People aren't only hearing the people around them, they're hearing a lot of "standard" american English on TV and it's changing the way people talk.
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expresswrittenconsent
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9:29a, 6/28/18
Quote:
I read somewhere recently that a lot of regional accents are starting to go away due to national TV. People aren't only hearing the people around them, they're hearing a lot of "standard" american English on TV and it's changing the way people talk.

That's interesting - did the story say when this started? I would assume it would have started in the 70s when there first was a tv in virtually every home in America. Kids are obviously in front of screens more now with phones/tablets but kids of the 80s were "babysat" by the tv and experienced the explosion of cable.
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Nagler
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In reply to expresswrittenconsent • 9:46a, 6/28/18
AG
If I remember correctly, I've slept since the I read whatever it was that I read, they put a lot of it with the rise of TV but especially cable.

Before TV, you had radio. Most radio is from the same area you would've grown up in. You listened to the radio a little bit but mainly your friends and family talk and that was about it. You spoke like they did because that's all you ever heard.

TV came along but before cable you had your local news and whatever few shows you had to watch but there were a lot fewer choices than there are now. It opened up what you could hear but there wasn't a lot to watch so you didn't have as much of an influence. Still more than before.

With cable there were a lot more shows out there and people on TV started to speak with the generic accent. You hear more of the generic accent versus your grandparents who only heard the local accent. You start picking up words and ways of saying things that they would've never heard.

A lot of it, I think, had to do with the news. They all speak with the same, generic accent. Even on local news these days, you don't hear many local accents, tends to be the same generic- news reporter way of saying things.

Think of Friend's none of them have a New York accent. They speak with a very "normal" way of talking. Tons and tons of shows have no accent at all.

Most shows these days tend to use that generic accent unless they're trying to get across to you that a person is from a specific area.

As we become more connected, accents will become less prominent.
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et98
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12:35p, 6/28/18
AG
I'm from northeast Texas (Rusk County, near Henderson) as well, and one of my best friends is from Corinth, MS (northeast corner of MS). We noticed that many of the nuances unique to the northeast Texas within our state are also unique to the northern Mississippi accent within its state.

After a little research, he found that the construction of the railroad was to blame. I don't remember all the details, but I'll do my best.

A major stage coach line connected Meridian Mississippi (east central edge of MS) to Marshall, TX starting in the early 1800s. The company that owned much of the building & maintenance contracts for the network of rail lines connecting central & northern MS together (Vicksburg-Meridian-Corinth & other smaller offshoots) won the contract to begin building what became a small network of tracks in northeast Texas (what's now Rusk, Harrison, Gregg Counties I think) and eventually to Shreveport. The proposed line wouldn't really connect to the rest of the US yet, but it helped get the cotton & timber to the Sabine. I don't recall if the company itself was hired to build the railroads, or if some of the leadership split from it and came to Texas to start their own.

They brought 100s families from central & northern MS along that stagecoach line that connected Meridian to Marshall in order to build the tracks. Because of that familial & cultural connection along with the availability of land, even more families came from that area on the stage and especially once the railroad was connected all the way. At first, that connecting line went up through Tennessee & then down through Arkansas to get to Texas, but eventually a more straight shot was constructed that went through Louisiana (which is basically the same route of what I-20 is now).

There's a LOT more detail that I don't remember, and some of this info is a little fuzzy in my memory, but this is the general gist of what happened and why the northeast Texas accent is different from everyone else.
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expresswrittenconsent
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3:29p, 6/28/18
thx
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FTACo88-FDT24dad
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8:21p, 6/29/18
AG
Golden Triangle accents are also unique with the influence of deep East Texas and Cajun accents. I was born in Nederland, raised around Houston. My grandparents were French speaking Cajuns who moved to Port Arthur in the 30s and 50s. I grew up hearing Cajun French all the time. When I would go to Mamou, LA during the summer to visit my coo-zans and ride horses and shoot guns and catch fish with them, my cajun, French speaking Dad would get a big kick at how my SE Tx accent quickly morphed into an Evangeline Parish coona$$ voice.

Many of my elementary school classmates had surnames like Doucet, Fontenot, Duhon, Hebert, LeBlanc, Prejean....

But we all sounded like east Tx rednecks who knew how to properly pronounce etouffe' and boudain..
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Rabid Cougar
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9:20a, 6/30/18
AG
When I was in Afghanistan I had a National Guard unit from Boston with fill ins from Georgia and Tennessee that I ran around with. I literally had to translate between them on the radios. Had the thick Boston accents and the southern drawl going at the same time. Conversations were freaking awesome.
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Neches21
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10:12p, 6/30/18
The eastern side of the state was the first to be settled by anglos. Many of those settlers came from the Deep South. They were expanding plantations into Texas. The piney woods of the region was familiar geography to those pioneers and they tended to stay put.
As the central region of the state began to open up, it attracted other settlers, notably German and Czech immigrants, but also those from other mid-western and northern states.
I recommend reading "Gone to Texas".

There is no one southern accent although they are all similar. The sound of a coastal Carolina accent is very different than the country drawl of an Alabama accent which is also different than the piney woods twamg.
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BigJim49 AustinNowDallas
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In reply to expresswrittenconsent • 2:32p, 7/1/18
AG
expresswrittenconsent said:
west texas/panhandle put an "R" in the middle of the word "wash" and some of them have "awl" money.
I'm from Austin - family one side from Bastrop ! We talk like that . Similar to Mass. Accent. From England maybe ?
BigJim49AustinnowDallas
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expresswrittenconsent
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In reply to BigJim49 AustinNowDallas • 2:49p, 7/1/18
BigJim49 AustinNowDallas said:
expresswrittenconsent said:
west texas/panhandle put an "R" in the middle of the word "wash" and some of them have "awl" money.
I'm from Austin - family one side from Bastrop ! We talk like that . Similar to Mass. Accent. From England maybe ?

England origins would make sense for the area of the panhandle I was thinking of. I don't know about the Massachusetts accent part, though. To me I think of the exaggerated mass accent as kind of removing the r sound from words - "Pahk the cahr at haa-vahd yaaahd" . Comparatively, the panhandle accent I was referring to would pronounce the word "wash" to rhyme with the word "marsh", so they are adding a hard r sound into a word with no r.
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FTACo88-FDT24dad
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6:39p, 7/1/18
AG
I have also heard panhandle accents that eliminate or dramatically soften the L at the end of words like cool and pool ...
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WestAustinAg
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In reply to et98 • 5:20p, 7/2/18
AG
et98 said:
I'm from northeast Texas (Rusk County, near Henderson) as well, and one of my best friends is from Corinth, MS (northeast corner of MS). We noticed that many of the nuances unique to the northeast Texas within our state are also unique to the northern Mississippi accent within its state.

After a little research, he found that the construction of the railroad was to blame. I don't remember all the details, but I'll do my best.

A major stage coach line connected Meridian Mississippi (east central edge of MS) to Marshall, TX starting in the early 1800s. The company that owned much of the building & maintenance contracts for the network of rail lines connecting central & northern MS together (Vicksburg-Meridian-Corinth & other smaller offshoots) won the contract to begin building what became a small network of tracks in northeast Texas (what's now Rusk, Harrison, Gregg Counties I think) and eventually to Shreveport. The proposed line wouldn't really connect to the rest of the US yet, but it helped get the cotton & timber to the Sabine. I don't recall if the company itself was hired to build the railroads, or if some of the leadership split from it and came to Texas to start their own.

They brought 100s families from central & northern MS along that stagecoach line that connected Meridian to Marshall in order to build the tracks. Because of that familial & cultural connection along with the availability of land, even more families came from that area on the stage and especially once the railroad was connected all the way. At first, that connecting line went up through Tennessee & then down through Arkansas to get to Texas, but eventually a more straight shot was constructed that went through Louisiana (which is basically the same route of what I-20 is now).

There's a LOT more detail that I don't remember, and some of this info is a little fuzzy in my memory, but this is the general gist of what happened and why the northeast Texas accent is different from everyone else.
I wonder why companies with cotton and timber holdings in Ms would build a railroad across the Mississippi river and the Red/Atchafalaya Rivers to reach the Sabine? Maybe they werent suitable in some way. The Red River in Louisiana was blocked up until the 1830's so maybe that's why.

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jickyjack1
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In reply to Nagler • 7:29p, 7/2/18
Nagler said:
I always heard it has to do with where most of the original settlers came from.

Settlers that stayed in East Texas tends to come more from the deep south while farther west they tended to come from the upper south, Tennessee and what not.

So East Texas tends to keep a lot of that deep south accent.

Not sure how true that's what I was told at one point.

I read somewhere recently that a lot of regional accents are starting to go away due to national TV. People aren't only hearing the people around them, they're hearing a lot of "standard" american English on TV and it's changing the way people talk.

I read that many years ago, and it's undoubtedly true. Just another of the casualties of "progress".
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BQ78
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In reply to WestAustinAg • 8:17a, 7/3/18
AG
The Great Raft had been cleared by Shreve long before the the railroad came to east Texas.
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Rabid Cougar
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9:49a, 7/3/18
AG
Appalachia is about as close to Old English as you can get in the US. The hillbillies could speak to Shakespear and they would somewhat understand each other.

Native Virginians also have a very different dialect than the deep south. Listen to them when they say "out", "house" and "about" . Sounds like "oot", "hoose", and aboot".
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expresswrittenconsent
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In reply to Rabid Cougar • 10:43a, 7/3/18
Rabid Cougar said:
Appalachia is about as close to Old English as you can get in the US. The hillbillies could speak to Shakespear and they would somewhat understand each other.

Native Virginians also have a very different dialect than the deep south. Listen to them when they say "out", "house" and "about" . Sounds like "oot", "hoose", and aboot".
i believe there is an island off north carolina or virginia where they've been relatively isolated for a couple hundred years and they still speak what is considered the closest to shakespeare's english. i am positive it has been posted here before, but maybe under a discussion about a current play in england where they present shakespeare in the old words and accents.
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who?mikejones
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In reply to expresswrittenconsent • 10:54a, 7/3/18
AG
expresswrittenconsent said:
Rabid Cougar said:
Appalachia is about as close to Old English as you can get in the US. The hillbillies could speak to Shakespear and they would somewhat understand each other.

Native Virginians also have a very different dialect than the deep south. Listen to them when they say "out", "house" and "about" . Sounds like "oot", "hoose", and aboot".
i believe there is an island off north carolina or virginia where they've been relatively isolated for a couple hundred years and they still speak what is considered the closest to shakespeare's english. i am positive it has been posted here before, but maybe under a discussion about a current play in england where they present shakespeare in the old words and accents.


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Tumble Weed
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2:38p, 7/3/18
I had a coworker tell me that I sound like an old, southern, civil war general.

When I travel, people always ask where I am from. I tell them 'New York City' in my thick, West Texas accent.

My wife (also from West Texas) believes that there are 5 distinct accents in Texas. East, West, South, Dallas, and Panhandle. I personally think Amarillo sounds like West Texas and can't tell the difference between those two.
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MD1993
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3:20p, 7/3/18
AG
I read OP in an East Texas draw.

I was raised in South Texas till 6 yo, then moved to Texarkana (East Texas). In the 8th grade my family moved down south of Houston. I was made fun of with my East Texas draw. I lost the accent after a couple of years in Houston. Now, when I travel, my wife makes fun of me as I speak more Texan when out of state. The ol accent creeps back up.

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Noble07
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In reply to expresswrittenconsent • 5:40p, 7/3/18
AG
I worked with a guy from Harkers Island, NC. They also have a very unique old English style.
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CenterHillAg
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8:30p, 7/3/18
AG
I was born and raised behind the pine curtain, and as such have the accent. I've spent a good amount of time in the Mississippi Delta and Deep South, and their accent is similar to mine. What I find interesting living in Wharton County now, is the thick Czech accent of people around my age (late 20/early 30's). Many of their grandparents and some parents are fluent in Czech, but I know none of the youngest generation that speak it. Yet some of them have an accent that would make you think English is their second language.
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Vestal_Flame
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4:27p, 7/5/18
AG
East Texas = slowed down Irish. My father's mother's people are from Lovelady.
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Wildman15
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In reply to easttexasaggie04 • 7:17p, 7/10/18
AG
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Quito
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9:23a, 7/26/18
AG
My oldest (now 6) still has a hint of British accent from watching too much Peppa Pig.

I'm Texan (DALLAS) and my wife a Razorback from Rogers, AR. We have 3 kids who grow up in KS with slightly British accent from Peppa Pig.
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