I took a quiz that attempts to discern which American accent a person has. Not surprisingly, I got this:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Southern People used to hate Southern accents but now everyone wants one.

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As singers, particularly opera singers, our ears have to know how to hear different languages and reproduce them correctly. Italian, French, German, (The King's) English, Russian, or Ogalala Sioux, it shouldn't matter. Unless you've spent years studying all these other languages, it is often difficult to understand what you're singing word-for-word, so we are reduced to reproducing the appropriate string of sounds--technical name, "phonemes"--and hope for the best. If the particular phoneme doesn't exist in our native tongue, e.g., the French "u"/German "ü," we have to be extra diligent in our practice and attentive in our performance to make our bodies conform themselves to produce that sound. After awhile, it becomes a lot easier. Our brains have linked the symbol with the sound. Even though we don't use it in our everyday language, it sits ready to be used, regardless (with some polishing, ya know). We take pride in that fact. I take pride in that fact.

The thing is, when I speak, I don't hear myself as having a Southern accent. Huh? I'm an opera singer! I'm supposed to hear things like that! What's going on? I don't have a Southern accent! I'd know it if I did... right?

Now, before you go yapping that I do have an accent, I know that. When I was an undergrad doing student teaching, we had to record ourselves in class and then listen to see what we did right, what we did wrong, did we stick to our lesson plan, blah-blah. The thing that amazed me when listening to the tapes was how hard a Southern accent I had. It embarrassed me to listen to the tapes. Part of that is just me: I absolutely can't stand to listen to a recording of me, whether I'm singing solo or in a choir, teaching, or lecturing. But why was my accent so much more pronounced when I was student teaching?

Curious, I did a little research. It turns out that when one gets nervous, their accent usually becomes more pronounced. I can't remember the theory behind it, but it kind of makes sense. Stand up in front of 150 middle or high school students that you don't know that well and attempt to bend them to your will. Can you say "stressful"? And it was, for me, at least. It was intimidating. (That turned out to be the least of my problems in my short student teaching career. But that's an unrelated long and sad story.) I became so focused on other things--hundreds of other things--required for teaching, I didn't even give a thought to how I was saying what I was saying. Hence, my brain relied on what it had stored in its speech pattern buffers since birth. So I sounded more like I was from further up "the holler" than I actually was.

Isn't language an amazing thing?! We take bits of sound that our bodies can produce and string them together into a group of sounds that convey an idea. Whether it's Italian, German, French, English, or Swahili for that matter... and the thousands of dialects within them, we all are able to discern meaning from our grunts and yelps. Even small geographical differences make huge differences in the sounds we use.

Example: When my brother (2 years my junior) and I were seven or eight years old, a family from Middle Tennessee, south of Nashville, moved next door to us. There were three daughters, two of which were approximately our ages. The oldest daughter (my brother's age) was named Sarah, which I pronounced "Seh-ra"; however, her mom, having grown up in a certain area of Middle Tennessee, always pronounced it "Say-ra." Sarah, had had the chance to start school at her former home, so she tended to sound more like her mother in speech. One dialectic affectation that always tickled me was how she and her mother pronounced "our." Now, here in East Tennessee, most people would say that word either as a very pirate-like "arrr" or with a lighter "a" sound, "ah-r." Well, Sarah and her mom said it with a long "a" sound, "A-yerr," or a lighter, more short "e" sound, "Ehr." See the pattern? They tended toward the long "a" sounds in their speech.

The middle sister, was named "Mary Beth." You might conjecture that when Sarah and her mother spoke her name, it might be something like "May-ree Bay-eth," but they pronounced it similar to anyone would in East Tennessee: "Merry Beth," though, oddly enough, when they contracted the name to "Beth" it was long "a," "Bay-eth." Now Beth, being younger than Sarah, hadn't had as much socialization in Middle Tennessee as had Sarah, so her accent was much less affected by the long "a" sounds, though she did call her sister "Say-ra." Overall, Mary Beth ended up with an East Tennessee-styled accent, as did the youngest--probably 10 or 11 years behind us--Amy (her mom's, "Ay-mee").

But then y'all know about that kind of thing already, as we see even tighter geographical dialects. Knoxvillians, for the most part, tend to pronounce a small town to the northeast of the city, Maryville, as "Merry-vul" or "Mehri-vul," whereas folks in and around Maryville, Blount County, nestled right against the Great Smoky Mountains, tend more toward the characteristic East Tennessee hard "r"s, "Murr-vul."

But if you want to study accents and dialects, Oak Ridge is the place to do it. You have to understand, everybody knows Oak Ridge today as a part of the Manhattan Project (development of the atomic bomb) during WWII. But, prior to 1939 or so, Oak Ridge was just that: pretty much a ridge covered in oak trees, a name in small type on a georgraphic map. There was little or no town to speak of. It was all farmland: cows, chickens, horses, and backwoods, Appalachian country folk (which we'll stereotype them for argument's sake, even though the area sits against the Cumberland Mountains more north and west of Knoxville). But, along comes the Manhattan Project! Suddenly people from all over the country--all over the world, even--converge on the poor little valleys in and around Oak Ridge. There was a mass of dialects; there was a mass of different cultures, all tossed in together with the farm-folk (many of whom had had their land forcefully purchased by the government).

I really hope that some sociologists are taking a look at Oak Ridge. As it stands today, it's even a more diverse community. The establishment of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the "Y-12" plant, which still produces nuclear weapon parts to this day, and all the high-tech industries and companies that have sprung up around them(even as far as Knoxville and Maryville), have become havens for the best minds in the world from all countries and cultures. So, we have multi-PhD Nobel Prize winners walking into Walmart (yes, the presence of Walmart indicates that Oak Ridge is a real city) with pig farmers and coal miners that dropped out of grade school to feed their families. You have snake-handling, splinter-sect Baptists from up in the highest "hollers" conversing with Hindi and Muslims. I once temped for a very prosperous technology firm that was started in Oak Ridge by a man who began life as a water buffalo herder in Korea!

So, it will be interesting to see what kind of dialect comes out of Oak Ridge in a century or so. Welcome to America, melting pot and land of opportunity. I doubt they'll ever write an opera in that dialect, but who knows? That "dead" language Latin is still around with us. Thanks to the Catholic Church, primarily, those of us who sing in sacred music have an additional set of phonemes to memorize. A thousand years from now, distant relatives of Don Townsend may say, "And please! Look at your Oak Ridgian text and work on it."

So, to bring things back around, dear readers, dear singers, be ever watchful of the tricks our brains and attached "ears" play on us. It's not like the French "u"/German "ü" are going anywhere soon.