More about House of Cards

Yesterday, I posted about Southern vowels. I wanted to go into a bit more detail here than what appeared in the article I mentioned yesterday. You may want to take a couple minutes and read it before continuing...

Basically, people outside the South have the misconception that all Southerners sound the same. We Southerners have the same misconceptions about regions outside the South. Ever heard a Southern lament the way that 'Yankees' talk? Yankees could be anybody from Maryland northward. Or we'll say 'New Yorkers sound the same' etc. Most of this comes down to experience with the language varieties. A person with lots of experience with particular varieties can detect some differences; those with less experience can't. When we don't have much experience, we rely on the little that we do know - namely stereotypes.

Back to Kevin Spacey's accent in 'House of Cards'...

Ask a non-Southerner with little experience with Southern Englishes to mimic a Southerner and you'll get two things: monophthongization and r-lessness. Monophthongization is when a vowel sound that can be two different sounds becomes one. That's a fancy way of saying that words like I, my, and right sound more like Ah, mah, and raht (phonetically they are [a:, ma:, ɹa:t], though the vowel sound varies). Outside of the South, these words use two vowel sounds, moving from something like the first vowel in father ([a]) to something like the vowel sound in pit ([ɪ]). In the South, these are realized as one sound. r-lessness refers to when an /r/ sound occurs after a vowel. In some varieties, there is no /r/ (think most British accents, Boston, old time Charleston accents, etc.). So, the word car sounds sort of like cah (with different vowels). That type of pronunciation used to be found across parts of the South, but it isn't anymore (I'll touch on this in a later post).

Spacey's accent in HoC is decent, but not perfect. He is supposed to be from Gaffney, a relatively small town in the SC Upstate. It is much closer to Appalachia than Charleston, geographically and linguistically. His accent should sound, as mentioned in the USC Times article, more like Lindsey Graham (here's a video of Graham speaking). However, Spacey doesn't sound like this. He sounds more like someone from the coast of SC (here is Fritz Hollings, Charleston native and SC pol who Page Ivey references in the article). But, this really wouldn't be right either. The Frank Underwood's accent is using is older than his generation. It would be more like someone his father's age, or perhaps older, from Charleston or thereabouts. I am going to guess that Spacey doesn't have very much experience with Southern accents, and probably none with Upstate SC accents. So, what does he do? He relies on what he knows, the stereotypical 'Southern' speech, with monophthongs and no /r/'s.

Now, this is a minor quibble, and, being totally honest, a pretty nerdy one at that. Spacey is a fantastic actor, and he does a passable Southern accent (even if it is a bit off). Frank Underwood is a brilliant character, and his schemes just might not feel the same without that little bit of Southern sweetening brought on by Kevin Spacey's attempt at Southern speech.