Random Thoughts Thus Far because that With Drawl piece is sticking to me

I'm thinking about Y'all Quaeda -- how those militant anti-government terrorists are from OREGON and yet they are still tagged with the moniker "y'all quaeda"  It's a hilarious pun but geographically completely inaccurate. So why y'all? Because "y'all" means dumbass white supremacist.  Dialects are signifiers. I've been thinking about how deep the prejudices against Southern dialects go, how they are inextricably tied to provincialism and racism and conservatism in the popular mind.  (And also in my mind, depending on the class associated with the Southern dialect.)  I'm really only just becoming aware of what Wolfram was studying, this notion of dialect being a socially acceptable area of discrimination.

I'm thinking a lot about class, and dialect, and the many different Southern modes of speech that I encountered as a child. How by the time I was sixteen, when that person opened his or her mouth I could quickly make judgments about their intellect, their education, the way their house was furnished, what neighborhood they lived in, whether their parents had grown up in the city or the country, whether they were from Mississippi, Arkansas, or Tennessee; whether their father had a white color or blue color job; in a word, I assessed their class background and made judgments about it.

Add to that the complicated realities of my own class background -- working class pretending to the bourgeousie -- and I feel I may have found a subject I want to write about.  My mother, for instance, speaks with a different dialect than her sisters. She drawls, where they twang a bit more. My father's accent is extremely subtle. But he has cousins who sound, as my mother would put it, "like country come to town."