“I was also a Tar Heel,” drawls Victoria Ratliff, Parker Posey’s dull-eyed, pill-popping character, talking to a bewildered resort staffer in the first episode of The White Lotus this season. “But Timothy went to Dewk, Saxon graduated Dewk, Lochlan, our youngest, just got accepted to both so you can imagine it’s a whole thang.”
That heavy Southern accent has gotten some attention around town, lately: In this third season of the HBO comedy-drama, Posey and co-star Jason Isaacs play the parents of a wealthy Durham family (with—and this is important—a divided Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill household) that gets into various financial, spiritual, and lustful shenanigans against the backdrop of a luxury resort in Thailand.
To help judge their drawls, we called up Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University and author of two dozen books including Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina.
Turns out, just last week Wolfram lectured his undergraduate social linguistics course on the White Lotus accents. He cautions that he hasn’t done a real computer analysis in which he would, say, measure the length and volume of vowel sounds, but his ear for North Carolina accents is still pretty good.
For the most part, he agrees that Isaacs, the British actor playing the businessman patriarch of White Lotus’s Ratliff family, makes a good effort but misses the mark on the accent.
“Most people who are speakers of that dialect would say he’s not a good speaker of it,” Wolfram says, perhaps diplomatically.
Isaacs defended his Southern chops in a recent Esquire profile, arguing that the accent is distinct.
“It’s Durham,” Isaacs told the interviewer.” It’s not just North Carolina. It’s very specific.”
In an earlier interview, he called out “two vowel sounds” that are specific to the Durham accent.
Sorry, Isaacs, but Professor Wolfram, who is also the director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project, isn’t quite convinced.
“We’ve done over 3,500 interviews everywhere in North Carolina over the last 30 years. And no one has ever said that there is anything unique about a couple of vowels in Durham,” says the expert. He adds that a dialect coach likely told Isaacs to focus on a few key sounds, since it would be impossible to nail down an entire dialect in a short.
“Nobody after puberty can just step in and learn a dialect like that,” says Wolfram.
Wolfram feels that Posey’s accent is a bit more convincing, though.
“She actually does not do a bad job, she does have pretty good Southern vowels,” says Wolfram. “The problem is that she accentuates everything too much.”
He points out an early scene in the show, when Posey says that she flew over “the Nawrth Poewhl” to get to Thailand.
“She overdoes it a little,” says Wolfram. He says that perhaps the actress—known for playing zany characters in independent films—is trying to develop a caricature of the region and that some people may sound like that, but only in cases of “strange personalities.”
For Posey’s character, that may be intentional. Her slack-jawed way of speaking may point to her character’s use (or overuse?) of the little pill bottles she seems to be rooting through in all of her scenes. In episode two, she even pops a pill before laying down for a massage (“Sometimes with massages I can get very stressed out, these help me to really relax”). Wolfram also notes that the actress spent her childhood in the deep South, where that “more Louisianian” accent may come from.
Isaac’s and Posey’s TV children, played by Sarah Catherine Hook, Sam Nivola, and Patrick Schwarzenegger, do not have distinct Southern accents. All three of them sound like they could be from any northeastern American city, which Wolfram says is accurate for most children in the Triangle these days.
“The kids are not very Southern these days because they’ve been inundated by people from elsewhere,” says Wolfram. “I have grandkids, for example, who have grown up here and are now in their 20s, and they don’t sound Southern at all even though this is where they were raised. That’s just the norm for cities like Durham and Raleigh.”
So is the Southern accent disappearing?
“Yes and no,” says Wolfram. “Yes, in the sense that most of the salient things are receding—” (for instance, pronouncing “pen” like “pin”)—“but the fact of the matter is, there are some subtle things about being Southern that people aren’t conscious of. So when these kids who think they aren’t Southern at all go elsewhere, people say, ‘Oh, you’re from the South,’ and the kids can’t believe that people would notice that.”
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.