Whither the southern accent?

[Kephart, Ronald]

At 10:02 AM -0500 11/28/05, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:
>Whither the Southern Accent?
>
>By JEFFREY COLLINS and KRISTEN WYATT,
>Associated Press Writers
>Wed Nov 23, 6:20 PM ET
>
>"Y'all" isn't welcome in Erica Tobolski's class in voice and diction 
>at the University of South Carolina. And forget about "fixin'," as 
>in getting ready to do something, or "pin" when talking about the 
>writing instrument. Tobolski's class is all about getting rid of 
>accents, mostly Southern ones...

Why is second dialect learning nearly always framed as "getting rid" 
of the first dialect? When we take Spanish in school, nobody talked 
about "getting rid" of our English....

>...and replacing them with Standard American Dialect, the 
>uninflected tone of...

"Uninflected"? When do you suppose general knowledge of languages and 
linguistics will progress to the point where educated people, as a 
matter of course, will understand that "standard" is just another 
dialect, albeit an important one?

Ron