Audra McDonald Quotes

The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

I think anything sounds good with a Southern accent.

Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.

Trinidadians love speaking their own English; it's full of poetic forms and can be playful and lyrical and comical. Trinidadians are verbal acrobats, and I love being on the island just to hear the people speak.

I know the cadence of the language and the voice of Atlanta because I've lived here for so long.

What I do onstage, there's maybe .0001 percent of the population that acts like that. I talk like that because it makes me laugh, and because I know a couple of people that talk like that. They're really that Southern. And they do funny things. I love 'em; they're awesome. They're good people.

Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.

There's something about Southern characters.

The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.

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.

I went to NYU drama school, so I was a very serious actress. I used to do monologues with a Southern accent, and I was really into drama and drama school. And then, in my last year of drama school, I did a comedy show, and the show became a big hit on campus.

I had family in Carolina who were very hood and talked differently in this sort of Southern cadence.

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

When you say, 'Southern,' or you speak about a southern accent, there's always that drawl, and usually from white people. That's what people associate with the South. But we're all different. The black southern accent is different.

I was just a girl from Alabama.

I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.

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.

For one, the 'countryness' is pretty much in my blood. I'm from Georgia, down south. That voice just lives in me.

Don't 'honey' me in that southern-fried twang.

I GREW UP IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE AND HAVE ALWAYS HAD A FRIEND OR 2 THAT TALKED WITH THE SOOUTHERN ACCENT.

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

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

You want to go to a place where you work every day, where you get to tell stories that look and feel like the audience in America that are watching. You're really limited, if you walk into a room and you can just tell stories about that. So, we've been really blessed.

The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.