In Chattanooga: How Not to Talk like a Southerner

In the hilly precincts of Chattanooga these days, a lot of get-ahead people are doing combat against the peril of forward tongue carry. They are running through word lists, striving to keep their monosyllables crisp: “What kind of boy is George? Mean. Mean-mean-mean-mean-mean.”

They are smoothing out the twang their daddies taught them and nipping off Mamma’s drawl, learning to talk, in the words of the Chattanooga Times, “so folks won’t think you’re eating grits.”

In the chronicles of self-improvement, what’s going on here is not wholly new. Speech coaches in New York City have built careers battling Brooklynese, and in Boston there are Kennedy clones who have lately learned to talk like television anchors (for whom Cuba never rhymes with tuber). Why shouldn’t they do it in Chattanooga too? This is the market niche an intrepid speech pathologist named Beverly Inman-Ebel spotted several years back when she set herself up in practice teaching “speech perfection,” or how not to talk like a Southerner.

The idea naturally has not gone down like mint juleps, especially since Inman-Ebel grew up in the North. In the current hate mail, a genteel adversary writes, “Dear Madam: I note that you are from Ohio. Have you never noticed the Midwestern twang? Like cats meowing . . . “

In truth, Inman-Ebel speaks perfect television-anchor talk, one of those serviceable voices from nowhere. She is a slim, freckled redhead with blue eyes and tight little muscles at the corners of a big smile. She dresses for success, has two kids at home, and holds a yellow belt with green tips in Taekwondo. The license plate on her car says I CAN, and she is inclined to say things like “Y’all can too.” (She notes that her parents originally came from east Tennessee, and the occasional Southernism makes clients more comfortable.)

Inman-Ebel is careful to say there is nothing wrong with sounding Southern — just that it may not be the most suitable sound for the business world. “You dress well to go to work, and you put your jeans on when you go home,” she says, and you ought to be able to choose the way you sound as well. The problem with sounding Southern, she says, is that it suggests certain stereotypes. A lot of outsiders have formed their ideas about the South through prolonged contemplation of Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard. These ideas tend to be long on pickup trucks and short on Faulkner.

Steven Brooks, a client of Inman-Ebel’s with his own direct-mail company, says some customers tell him his accent is cute, which is hard for a 28-year- old entrepreneur to stomach. “We have a designer for our ads, and that’s image. We have a WATS line, and that’s image. Then they call up and hear some hillbilly talking.” Speech therapy costs him $45 a session, but Brooks believes it is an investment that will pay off for the rest of his life. He’s been wanting to tone down his accent since high school. “J.R. Ewing or – Matlock on TV has an ideal Southern accent. It’s still there, but it’s not countrified.”

The sessions take place in what looks like a family doctor’s office, but with video cameras and tape recorders as the chief diagnostic tools. Upstairs, in a room decorated with children’s posters of properly placed tongues, Brooks sits in front of a mirror. He puts a button-size plastic ring on the tip of his tongue, draws it into his mouth, and presses it up against the ridge behind the front teeth. It is an exercise against the tongue-lolling tendency that Inman-Ebel says characterizes 70% of Southern speakers. She says many Southerners suffer not just from forward tongue carry but also from unwanted “nasal emissions” (or twang), “restricted mandibles” (“a big phrase for talking with your mouth closed”) and “oral-facial muscular imbalance.”

Inman-Ebel’s clinical tone enrages some people. “What’s wrong with forward tongue carry?” says John Tinkler, who teaches history of the English language at the University of Tennessee. “It doesn’t sound like Indy-goddam-ana.” Tinkler is a vast, round man with silver hair, dark skin and flashing, protuberant eyes. He describes his accent as “educated rural Southern,” the language college graduates in his family have spoken for generations. He wishes Inman-Ebel would attack the stereotypes and the attitudes, instead of the accent. “She’s teaching people how not to talk like folks,” he says. “That offends me.”

In Inman-Ebel’s view, people who talk like folks put stress in the wrong place (cre-ate for cre-ate), mispronounce vowels (rine for rain), draw monosyllables out into diphthongs (hay-ul for hell), and let their pitch glide, usually upward, as in “Y’all come back now, ya hear?” Some of them talk so slowly “you want to get inside and move the tongue yourself to get it over with.” It does not add up to standard American speech.

“There is no standard American pronunciation,” asserts Tinkler. But Inman- Ebel will not be dissuaded by her critics. She says what she and her clients do is nobody’s business: “Why are some people concerned that other people change their accents or their hair or the way they dress? You would think someone were pounding on their door, saying, ‘Hey, you sound funny, I can help you.’ That’s not what’s happening.” Some of Inman-Ebel’s clients are nonetheless uneasy about wanting her help. One man, fretful that people would think he was betraying his heritage, forbid the clinic to leave messages at * his home or office. Others are truculent at first: The boss sent them. Inman- Ebel begins by working on attitude, preparing a personal relaxation tape full of warm thoughts: “I easily keep my pitch down. The tip of my tongue always rests on the spot. I easily speak in short sentences. I can do all of these things without having to be consciously aware of them.”

In conversation with a client, Inman-Ebel picks out target sounds to change: “We identify every single word that labels you as Southern, and you’re going to practice them inside out and upside down till you correct them.”

“What if you’re talking to someone who has a distinct Southern accent?” a client asks. “Does it make a difference?”

“What do you think?”

“I thank . . .” Inman-Ebel snaps her fingers. “I think it does,” the client says, correcting herself. “You don’t want to come across uppity.”

Inman-Ebel punches a keyboard and reports that another client’s pitch rises 78% of the time, suggesting a lack of authority and self-assurance. With a tape recorder between them, they practice troublesome words:

“He looks natural.”

“You went up instead of down,” says Inman-Ebel.

“He looks natural.”

“You said na-achurul.”

“He looks natural. I hate that word.”

“Hite?”

“Hate. Natural-natural-natural.”

Inman-Ebel plays a recording from an earlier session. “Gross. Ugh. I can’t believe I sounded like that,” says the client, a 23-year-old announcer on public television, who says she was turned down for a job at one Chattanooga station because of her accent. They practice another sentence with the recorder on, and Inman-Ebel plays back the tape, exulting in her client’s progress: “If all I had was that sentence, I wouldn’t be able to locate that person anywhere. It was a nonaccent.” Her highest accolade.

John Tinkler sniffs. “Hell,” he says, drawing the word out into two syllables ripe with reluctance and dismay. “If someone really and truly believes that his speech is keeping him from getting along in the world, I suppose he must change it. But he isn’t paying any attention to how John T. Lupton talks. He’s the fellow who sold his Coca-Cola bottling franchise here for a billion and a half.”

The thought warms Tinkler momentarily. “Most of the big folk in Chattanooga,” he reflects, “still talk like Chattanoogans.”