ABSTRACT
A great deal of work in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and elsewhere has highlighted the ‘friendly but stupid’ stereotype of the Southern accent. The tradition of revealing a perceived Southern region continues in perceptual dialectology work carried out and with Americans from various regions and backgrounds. The Culture, Personality, and Language categories, however, were more intriguing for the Southern dialect area. Only the Mid-Atlantic and Southern regions garnered labels that can be outwardly described as positive. These include ‘Proper’ for the Mid-Atlantic region and ‘Southern Belle’ for the South. While these data feature no outwardly hostile labels, words like ‘hick’, ‘drawl’, and even ‘country’ are described in ways that reveal they were selected because they potentially carry the negative connotations associated with the region and its language variety. The Ethnicity category was primarily reserved for discussions of the Cajun or Creole language variety that participants connected to Louisiana.
