Various thoughts attached to this thread:
Foghorn Leghorn totally sounds like an old-school Southern televangelist! It's the bombast, I think.
I'm from Long Island, NY. I lost most of my accent through circumstances similar to Tante's, although mine happened in Provo, Utah: "Say 'talk!' Say 'hot dog!' " I remember reading a verse in a Sunday school class the first Sunday I was there and the immediate response had nothing to do with the verse, it was, "Where are you from?"
Not too many people pin me down as a New Yorker anymore, although I don't sound like I'm from Georgia, where I now live. They know I'm not from around here, and generally say I sound like a Yankee. I tell people that if they listen to Jerry Seinfeld, that was my accent. I'm a little sad that I can't reproduce it naturally any longer.
A couple of stories: After having lived away from NY for many years, I returned for a visit and was with a friend I knew in DC, where I'd been living at the time. We were sightseeing together around Manhattan and I got us lost. All of a sudden I looked up and said, "Oh I know where we are, this is Rockafelluh Centuh!" We both burst out laughing -- it had just popped out of me the way I would have said it when I was a kid.
I served a mission in Portugal and for about 6 months had Portuguese companions and spoke Portuguese exclusively. During this time I went to a meeting at the mission office and was chatting in English w/ one of the elders I knew from the MTC. He laughed at me because apparently my English was coming out all New Yorkish--way more than it had when he knew me in Provo, even though I'd been living in NY for about 8 months prior to my mission.
