At ~4:25AM (EST, I do believe) Sat. Jan 28
I'm thinking one guy was using a fake Southern accent. (Not that I'm great at knowing Southern accents.)
Maybe a Southerner out there could tell.
I'm guessing that you're talking about the guy who claimed to be with a crew who went around to prep race tracks, and seemed to be suggesting that they were somehow preventing rainfall...?
As an Alabama native and ex- Linguistics student, I'll accept that challenge.
Yes, there was something weird about that voice. First-- I think the whole call was a goof. And that would fit with the idea that the guy was faking a voice, but not too well.
The guy sounded actually "Southern," but he definitely wasn't "natural." It's just remotely possible that he might have a speech impairment. It's more likely that he was faking, and if so, I can't quite say
what he might have been
trying to sound like. If he was trying to mimic someone he knows who he perceives as speaking that way, he was probably "drifting" either toward caricature, or toward dialects/accents he's more comfortable mimicking. Either way, he seemed to be somewhat aimlessly mixing dialects/accents: I thought I heard elements of North Carolina piedmont, Virginia Tidewater, old-time "coastal city," and just plain "low-country genteel." Someone could incorporate --or even synthesize-- those pronunciations and mannerisms without even consciously knowing what they were.
So, instead of "guy using a fake Southern accent," I'd call him a "Southern guy doing an
ad hoc fake character voice."
