The third season of The White Lotus, a fictional Max dramedy that drops a group of uber-wealthy characters into an all-inclusive but ill-fated paradise, has made headlines not for its scandalous character tropes or thrilling whodunit premise, but rather for two of the characters’ Southern accents.
Parker Posey and Lucius Malfoy (ahem, Jason Isaacs) play Victoria and Timothy Ratliff, a wealthy couple from Durham, North Carolina, on vacation with their three kids in Thailand, and from the moment they opened their mouths, the internet had things to say: “We need to have a deep discussion about why Parker Posey’s attempt at a Southern accent has infiltrated something as revered as White Lotus,” one user wrote on X. “British people doing southern accents is a crime against humanity,” said another.
But could the trouble actually be in the ear of the beholder? “Actually, Parker Posey is pretty good in her dialect,” contends Walt Wolfram, a sociolinguist and the director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University. “I found her speech pretty authentic; she just tends to overdo it a little.”
Born in Maryland and raised in Monroe, Louisiana, and then Laurel, Mississippi, Posey ought to nail a Southern accent. In the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman, she employs another version of the region’s dialect with much success. Isaacs, on the other hand, hails from Liverpool, England, and allegedly based his character on Southern Charm’s Thomas Ravenel and a local Durham politician. (“I don’t want to say his name,” Isaacs quipped in an interview. “He might sue me.”)
“The problem with all actors is that you really can’t learn a complete dialect after puberty,” Wolfram says. “Every time I open my mouth, for instance, people know I’m not from the South, even though I’ve lived here for thirty-three years and only lived in Philadelphia for eighteen. It’s my vowels.”
We sat down with Wolfram to dissect where the actors got it right and where they got it wrong.
1. Vowels
“We flew over the North Pohhhwl,” Posey says in her first line of dialogue in the show, dragging out each vowel in a honeyed drawl, with her nostrils pinched and her mouth downturned—a facial expression just as exaggerated as the sounds coming out. A common characteristic of a general Southern dialect is “fronted u’s and o’s,” which Posey employs heavily in the show, projecting them from the front of her mouth like she’s holding her nose (though that may be more an allusion to her character’s snootiness than anything else).
You can see it in the way she says Duke, for example. One of the (many, many) conflicts among the fictional Ratliff family is whether the youngest son will attend Duke University or UNC Chapel Hill next year. According to Wolfram, her pronunciation actually nods to a common stereotype about the two schools. “Chapel Hill is a regional university, and lots of kids come into Chapel Hill speaking with Southern dialects,” he says. Currently at Duke, about 85 percent of the students are out of state. “At one point there was a chant the Chapel Hill kids would say, in which they would pronounce the word Duke as a Northerner. Dook rather than Dewk. It was a subtle parody insinuating that Duke is really a Northern school. So when Parker Posey says ‘Duke,’ she has that nice front vowel.” Just like a born and bred Tarheel would.
2. Regionalism
For Isaacs, the fronted vowel should also come naturally, as it’s something British English shares with Southern English. Wolfram thinks he generally has it down (though his accent sometimes leans a little Aussie to viewers’ ears, drifting more towards Sydney than Charlotte). “There are five or six different Southern dialects in North Carolina,” Wolfram says, and nearly endless variations within each, and he admits Isaacs hasn’t quite nailed the specificity of Durham.
Stick with us if you’re into this sort of thing: A stereotypical Southern accent involves “unglided” vowels—when a diphthong (a combination of two vowels in a single syllable) becomes a monophthong (one vowel). It’s why in Southern Appalachia, for instance, time may be pronounced tahm. “The problem is that in the Piedmont, where Durham is situated, they have a different version of the ‘I’ rule than they do elsewhere,” Wolfram says. “So for example, in Durham they say tahm for time, but they say white for white. But Isaacs uses unglided vowels for all words, which is not the historic way it’s done.”
3. “R-lessness”
A defining trait of Posey’s character’s speech is her use of what Wolfram calls “r-lessness.” (She might say something like togethah, for instance.) Though not in vogue today, for a wealthy, Southern, urban, white woman, it’s not entirely far-fetched. “In an urban context, r-lessness has a connotation of upper class,” Wolfram says. “Though most people from these areas who would talk like this would be at least in their later seventies—a bit older than Posey.” (But why would the show evah let such a technicality get in the way of good fun?)
Take Martha Pearl Villas, for instance, an upper-class Charlottean who was born in 1916, whom Wolfram and his team have studied as an example of how many aristocratic women spoke in Southern cities in the late twentieth century:
Wolfram also points to the clip as an example of generational trends in speech. “Younger people in urban areas are now using their r’s, and it’s actually Southern rural people who don’t say their r’s,” he says. “If [Posey’s character was from] a rural area, she would be socially stigmatized. It shows you it’s not ever about the dialects, it’s about the people who represent the dialects.”
4. Character Acting
For Posey and Isaacs, the people they’re trying to represent are parodies of egregiously behaving, unrelatable socialites. Posey’s character pops Lorazepam like they’re breath mints—which, now that you mention it, may contribute to her slurred drawl. “As an actor, what you’re going for is not to get everything right, but you’re going for salient features that people will notice,” Wolfram says. “Posey does come across as privileged, so the effect of her accent projects what she’s trying to do.”
Still not convinced? That’s okay. Just as her Guffman co-star Catherine O’Hara elevated Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose into a larger-than-life caricature, Posey in particular might just be employing elongated, unglided vowels and saccharine r-lessness to transcend time, place—and perhaps logic.
One X user summed it up perfectly: “Parker Posey’s accent in #WhiteLotus is beyond good or bad. It is a character unto itself. It’s like modern art. You may not fully understand what’s happening, but you respect that some things in the universe are meant to remain a mystery.”
Parker Posey’s accent in #WhiteLotus is beyond good or bad. It is a character unto itself. It’s like modern art. You may not fully understand what’s happening, but you respect that that some things in the universe are meant to remain a mystery. pic.twitter.com/uSdNiEc1f1
— mktoon (@mktoon) February 17, 2025
