The third season of “The White Lotus” began with gunfire bursting through a lush resort in Thailand. But viewers with affection for a certain region of the United States perked up a little later in the episode, as a privileged, preppy family from North Carolina arrived by boat.

“We flew over the North Pole!”

Right then, Victoria sent an unmistakable signal: “The White Lotus” was taking on the Southern accent.

Or at least that’s what many viewers assumed, judging by the intense response — including many, many memes on social media — that has only grown with each episode. The commentary has focused on whether the accents concocted by Ms. Posey and the actor playing her husband, Jason Isaacs, credibly passed as those of well-to-do (and entirely self-absorbed) tourists from Durham, N.C. — or whether this was yet another atrocious attempt by Hollywood to replicate a Southern dialect.

A torturous track record of accents in movies and television has fostered a reflexive skepticism. Some viewers from the South have said that, at least initially, “The White Lotus” had just that effect on them. But it largely didn’t last, especially when it came to Ms. Posey’s performance. Viewers delighted over her pronunciations — “tsunami,”

“What was that?” her character asks. “That was a convention for con men and tax cheats.”

Was her accent a knowing and loving tribute to colorful Southern women? Perhaps. Campy? Undoubtedly. The performance was nevertheless hailed as a work of modern art. “Hang her accent in the Louvre!” one person suggested on social media. Another said Ms. Posey’s ties to Laurel, Miss., came shining through.

“If you were to put a bunch of lorazepam in the food at the country club in Laurel at lunch, that’s exactly what everybody would sound like an hour later,” said Landon Bryant, a resident of Laurel who has sought to demystify the South on Instagram and in a book, “Bless Your Heart: A Field Guide to All Things Southern,” released this week.

Accuracy and authenticity are very much judged by the ear of the beholder and are difficult, if not impossible, to rate by an objective standard. Even so, plenty of Southerners have been eager to give it a shot.

“Everybody has a right to be an expert about how they speak,” said Elisa Carlson, a dialect coach in Atlanta. “Your speech is personal. It’s intellectual. It’s social.”

The discussion around “The White Lotus” has brought out how accents are quite malleable, reflecting how new generations and new residents can bend dialects in unexpected ways. It has also been a reminder of how hard it can be to hear how you sound — or how others think you sound — played back at you. Southerners are painfully aware that the way they speak often conjures negative connotations in pop culture, like ignorance or prejudice.

“It’s not about the Southern dialect, per se — it’s what the Southern dialect represents for Southerners,” said Walt Wolfram, a linguistics professor at North Carolina State University.

Of course, Southerners do not have a monopoly on feeling sensitive and even defensive about how their accents are portrayed (People from Bah-ston, for instance, have been known to have similar reactions).

But portrayals of Southerners have a particularly long and gnarled track record. Many from the region can instantly name a performance they remember as especially egregious.

In promotional interviews, actors on “The White Lotus” said that Mike White, the writer and director of the series, had encouraged them to draw inspiration from “Southern Charm,” a long-running Bravo reality series based in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Isaacs has said he had studied Thomas Ravenel, who appeared on the show for five seasons, as the actor shaped his character, Timothy Ratliff, a scion of a prominent political family who unravels while vacationing with his wife and children.

Timothy dips into his wife’s lorazepam supply, unable to face the potential fallout from financial misdeeds that his family apparently knows nothing about.

“I am a pillar of the community,” he tells two strangers, wallowing in self-pity. “My grandfather was the governor of North Carolina. My father was a very, very, very successful businessman.”

Mr. Ravenel said in an interview that he was unaware of this when he started watching the third season.

“This sounds very familiar,” he said, recalling watching Mr. Isaacs’s performance. “But once everyone started making a big to-do about it, then I said, ‘That’s not me.’”

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Jason Isaacs as Timothy Ratliffe

Oh just – just a few months in prison?

Thomas Ravenel

As a part of the plea agreement, I had to resign from office.

He said he thought Ms. Posey’s muse was much clearer: “More so she sounds like Pat than he sounds like me.”

Pat is Patricia Altschul, a socialite who is the soul, if not the star, of “Southern Charm.”

She was not entirely thrilled by the comparison to Ms. Posey’s Victoria.

“I was flattered at first,” said Ms. Altschul, who credits her own lilt to an upbringing in Virginia. “But now, you know, she’s on pills and he’s a sketchy businessman with a gun. So, I’m not quite sure to what extent we should be flattered.”

Parker Posey as Victoria Ratliffe

You’re all gorgeous and you come from money.

Patricia Altschul

… well educated, charming, attractive …

Ms. Posey has talked about why the accents of Southern women are irresistible to her as an actress. An “emphasis on feeling,” she has said. A musicality. An ability to make the mundane sound dramatic.

“It has this power,” she said in a recent television interview, “and you can’t knock it down.”

In truth, there is no single Southern accent, but rather a regionwide buffet of twangs and drawls. In an interview, Mr. Isaacs said he went for a precise accent from Durham — “It’s not just North Carolina,” he told Esquire — which stumped quite a few people in the city who weren’t aware there even was a Durham accent. (Dr. Wolfram, the linguistics professor at N.C. State, said there was not.)

Some in Durham pointed out they are as likely to hear Spanglish or Hindi as a classic Southern drawl.

“Hell, half your neighbors are from Ohio or New York or New Jersey,” said Garrett Dixon, a native North Carolinian who lives in Durham and works in sales.

Yet some argue that “The White Lotus” has not simply repurposed a tired, clichéd perception of Southerners. Instead, they say, it has captured what in many ways feels like a real Southern family in 2025, one confronted by the tensions between past and present that grip the region as a whole.

The fact that the Ratliffs’ three children don’t seem to have accents rings true, for example, as in-migration and the connectedness brought by technology have diminished accents across the South and in other parts of the country, too.

Ms. Altschul thinks the show has exquisitely nailed Southerners of a “certain elevation” — “the way they look, the way they talk, what they talk about,” she said.

The swagger, the shorts, the sunglasses with the Croakies worn by the oldest son, Saxon, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger: That all checks out. Then, there’s the conniption that Victoria has over her daughter, Piper, announcing her plan to move to Thailand to study Buddhism, during which she refers to Thailand as Taiwan and fears her daughter is joining a cult.

“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy!” she said. “It happens all the time — sheltered girls like you are constantly getting brainwashed and turned out!”

That felt real, too, Mr. Bryant said.

“Very small town, very ‘all that matters is where we are,’” he said. “That’s an attitude you see and feel.”

As the finale nears and viewers spin all sorts of predictions about how it will end, Ms. Altschul doesn’t have a theory so much as a wish: that Victoria turns out to be a villain, but a brilliant one.

“I’m hoping that she ends up being kind of savvy,” Ms. Altschul said. “Sometimes there’s the equation that if you sound Southern, you sound stupid. I would like to think that that’s not the case.”