Southern Dialect Quotes

You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.

When I was 5 years old, I moved with my mother and brother from Philadelphia to a small town in Florida. People talked more slowly there and said words I had never heard before, like 'ain't' and 'y'all' and 'ma'am.' Everybody knew everybody else. Even if they didn't, they acted like they did.

My Southern heritage is a big part of who I am. I grew up around people who seemed like characters but are actual, real people. My grandmother made sure I had manners and all that stuff.

Uncle Cornpone

I am proud of being a Southerner. I wasn't about to let Southerners on my show be stupid or aw-shuckses who just sit on the front porch and spit in the yard. I wasn't about to do that, and I made that very clear from the start. I was kind of the gate-keeper on that stuff.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I had someone correct my grammar once on a blind date, and within the first 10 minutes the date was over. You just don't correct somebody's grammar. That's just not okay. I'm from Tennessee, so I probably say everything wrong. I might have said 'ain't,' or something like that.

In the south there's a difference between 'Naked' and 'Nekkid.' 'Naked' means you don't have any clothes on. 'Nekkid' means you don't have any clothes on and you're up to somethin'.

I'm really drawn to comedy. I grew up in the South, so I'm drawn to all things southern, so my role in 'Getting On' has been fun for me to play something southern - I always feel like I understand those characters more because of where I was raised.

Why, der language down dar in de far South is jus' as different from ours in Maryland, as you can think. Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an' I could not understand 'dem, no how.

Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent.

I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.

Aw, come on. I barely speak English, unless we're talking about the Lowcountry kind.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

I was just a girl from Alabama.

Licker talks mighty loud w'en it git loose fum de jug.

I'd spent summers growing up in Mississippi, so I had an idea of what the South is like.

Y'all are so cute and y'all talk so proper over here. I love England.

To the newcomer to the south, hearing that a coworker plans a weekend visit to 'mama and them's' (the correct plural possessive, don'tchaknow), might make him think that mama has been left alone either throught an act of scoundreldom involving the town's resident hoochie-mama (an altogether different kind of mama) or Daddy's untimely demise.

Y'all have no idea how many times I say, 'Yes, ma'am.'

I bring a lot of 'y'all' up to New York with me.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.

My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.