The present study investigates phonetic variation in two Southern US counties with the goal of untangling how cultural and place-based identities can contribute to linguistic behavior. Clarke and Oconee are two northeastern Georgia counties that are adjacent to each other but have strongly different local cultures. Clarke County is a small urban area which houses the University of Georgia; its culture is heavily influenced by the university, as well as by a historically thriving bohemian arts scene; it is relatively ethnically and economically diverse; and its voters and public policies lean liberal. Oconee County is a historically rural area, increasingly developed in recent years but still distinctly exurban, with a population that is overwhelmingly White, middle-class, and conservative. In this study, 21 residents of Clarke and 20 residents of Oconee, all lifetime residents of Georgia, participated in sociolinguistic interviews designed to focus on local culture and history. These interviews, totaling over 21 hours of audio, were manually transcribed and forced-aligned using DARLA, and all vowels over 0.05s were extracted for analysis. It was hypothesized that speakers from Oconee County would show more extensive use of Southern linguistic features, in line with previous findings that the Southern Vowel Shift is retreating in urban areas, and due to the fact that rurality and conservatism are often conflated with Southernness (Hayes 2013). Clarke residents, who might be expected to value these attributes less, and who are in more frequent contact with people from non-Southern backgrounds, were expected to make less use of Southern variables. Instead, results showed little to no difference between the two counties, despite the content of the interviews suggesting distinct cultural values in line with expectations. This suggests that a regional label like “Southern” can cover a variety of cultures. On the other hand, self-identified ratings on a political scale did predict the extent of features such as FACE lowering and PRIZE monophthongization, providing evidence that the speakers were still using language to communicate or reflect aspects of their cultural identity.