Country. Born and Raised, but tryin' to change.

     I grew up in a rural town about an hour away from anything worth talking about. My high school had a week dedicated to the Future Farmers of America, and a day on which students were even allowed to drive their tractor to school. I think it is safe to say my educational upbringing was into what I assume people would refer to as 'country talk'. 'Country talk' could be indicated by several differences in the spoken language from the speed at which people seem to speak to the tone they speak with. 'Country' slang may consist grammatical errors such as the use of double negatives.  Words such as ain't,  yonder, and y'all come into use often. Speakers often leave the g off of a verb for example "talkin" as opposed to "talking", which is seen in other accents as well, but not as often in the formal speech of the language. The language has what some describe as a "twang", I believe this refers mostly to the way some speakers draw out the vowel sounds in some words.      Having a mother from the north, but not the "Yankee north" (no offense) as well as advanced classes in school had given me a pretty good balance of what proper English was supposed to sound like. With all those things in my favor, I still ended up sounding as if I were raised on a farm.      I do not remember the moment at which it happened, but at some point during my life I realized that it was imperative that I get away from having an accent that indicated that I was from the south. As proud as I am of where I was born and raised, it is undeniable that people associate and most likely always will associate the rural south with uneducated people. I feel that as I get older and continue to travel throughout the United States and the world I feel that I do not want people to mistake me for someone that is not well educated. I aim to be and sound like an intelligent, professional person when I converse and conduct business with others and in order to do this I have to work on how well I speak.       Over the past few years I have been trying to distance myself from and remove the 'country' from my speech. This has been a difficult task as I had been exposed to and surrounded by nothing but this way of speaking for the majority of my childhood. I feel that being at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has made it easier to drop the accent as I have been surrounded by such a culturally diverse group of people, all with unique accents and dialects of their own, many of which more proper than what I had been exposed to for a majority of my learning career. One thing I cannot drop with the accent, has been my use of the words Sir and Mam. In my travels I have come to realize that people in different parts of the US do not use or hear these words frequently if ever.  Where I am from, regardless of your age or position in society a gentleman will use sir and mam when speaking to a elder or authority figure. I do realize that this may link me to my southern, country upbringing, but in that case, I would rather be mistaken as dumb and respectful, than disrespectful.