Amanda from Diboll, Texas

Amanda is a girl who comes from a place that she calls “Deep East Texas”. She says that everyone from her home town speaks the same way she does, with a heavy Texan timbre. I asked Amanda what kind of first impression her accent made people have of her; she responded, saying that it made people “tend to perceive [her] intelligence as lower than theirs”. This contributes to our claim that to have a Texan accent is to be associated to a group that is of lower intelligence.

However, when asked if she would ever hide or emphasize her accent based on the people she was with, Amanda said that she would not do either; she claimed that there was no point for her to try to cover up her accent because it “can never be hidden completely” so people will still make comments on it asking where she is from or what kind of horse she rides. Her willingness to carry her sound as part of herself, regardless of the people she is coming into contact with indicates a certain level of pride in her heritage. In addition to this, Amanda said that she feels a certain connection to people who have an accent that is similar to hers. The pride and camaraderie that Amanda feels in relation to her accent is important because one of the latent functions of language and pronunciation is to bring people together due to commonality.

Amanda views her accent as a mode of self-expression. She does not attempt to make her heritage a backstage secret about herself but instead displays her variation on the script on the front stage for everyone to hear. As mentioned before, this up-front show of association to a particular region automatically places Amanda in association with the stereotypes that are inherent to the region. She has recognized that her accent may give off an unintended message of ignorance, yet she does not experience nay role conflict between her college student self and her East Texan self because she is open to answering the questions of strangers about the horses they think she has or the tractors she must ride.