This week, we have been watching the film series, Do You Speak American, a PBS special that was broadcast in 2005 and discussing the concept of an Ethnography of Speaking.
For this blog entry, I’d like for you to consider the idiosyncratic things that mark or “index”) you by your own cultural geography. Think about what phrases you are in the habit of saying, and when you find yourself saying them. Do you hear you parents in your voice? Your friends from “back home”? (Where is back home?)
Have you ever been isolated from others due to an accent or style difference between one location and anther? What were the circumstances? How did it make you feel?
I've moved back and forth between New York and Boston throughout my life. Some time in my childhood while living in Boston the word 'wicked' entered my vocabulary. This is a word that is commonly used in the Boston area, but I've also been told that it's used on the west coast as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen I traveled to New York on holiday to visit my family, sometimes the New York accent would rub off on me. I'd come back to Boston and my friends would remark on the strange way I pronounced coffee. I had to make a conscience effort to get rid of the accent.
My father is a foreigner and as a child I didn't always pick up on the subtle differences between the way my dad pronounces certain words and the way everyone else pronounces certain words. For example, I never noticed that you pronounce the 'h' in 'human' until 4th grade. Even once I learned that I was mispronouncing that word wrong my entire life and learned the correct pronunciation, I decided to keep pronouncing it incorrectly because that's what I was accustomed to and it was only a slight difference. Also, the other kids made fun of me for pronouncing 'human' wrong, which may be another reason why I stubbornly decided not to change.
I don't think I can hear my parents accents in my own speaking. My mom pronounces a lot of words differently than all my siblings and I do. for example she say "orange" like "ARE-inge", or "Italy" like "IT-ly" she completely ignores that a, whereas the rest of us say all the letters. I think this is because my mom spend most of her childhood in downstate New York, while my brothers, sisters, and we spent most of our childhood in upstate New York. I don't here much of my mother's "accent" in the way my grandparents speak/spoke. I only occasionally hear my grandmother pronounce words like my mom. I think most of the way I speak fits in with the way most of the people near where I grew up speak.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed a slight difference between the way the western part of upstate New York speaks versus the east, where I'm from; the "a"'s in words sounds flatter to me in the western part. .. I think given the large portion of time I spend in the western part now because of school, I've begun to pick up some of that "flat a" way of pronunciation.
I have lived all over the place. I was born in a small European country called Slovakia. I have also lived in Virginia, Missouri, and most recently South Carolina. I have grandparents in Maryland and Ohio. As a result of this geographic diversity my speech is not characteristic of one specific region. My natural speech is mostly neutral although I'm told I do have a slight southern drawl at times. I have noticed that I tend to unconsciously adapt my speech patterns to what ever is spoken around me very quickly. As a consequence, I have never felt very uncomfortable because of my accent. I will usually pick up an accent with in a few hours although it takes months or years for it to become "natural".
ReplyDeleteI speak pretty much the same way my parents do, the only time we are different is when I change my speech. I remember one time when I was younger my parents went out of town for a few days and I stayed with a friend one had a strong British accent. When they came back I was speaking like a natural born Brit, but after a few days I adjusted my speech back to what my parents spoke.
I have lived in a lot of different places from Germany to South Carolina to California and finally to New Hampshire due to my dad being in the Army. I spent most of my life in New Hampshire with my mom and sister as my dad moved around, so I can't really remember what the accents were like and even when I lived in California for middle school I didn't notice much of a change in speaking pattern or accent. It may have been that I just wasn't aware of the style switch or change in accent, but I never really saw a difference in the language or felt alienated by that change.
ReplyDeleteAfter growing up in Tehran and speaking Persian (Farsi) for eighteen years, studying in an American college was a huge shock for me. I had started studying English at school Since I was 10, but none of those pronunciations that our teachers taught us worked. I clearly remember those first days at RIT that I could not understand my professors/classmates American accent and how stupid I looked. My classmate were not willing to hang out with me and I had communication problems not because I did not know English, but I pronounced them in completely different way, such as pronouncing the T in words like Saturday or letter. After 3 years, I still have a heavy accent and when I meet a new person, one of the main question is "where am I from?". The answer is sometimes problematic and cause people to judge before they really know me. I can never get rid of my accent and it always tells the story of my immigration to people. On the other hand, last summer when I went back home to visit, some people told me that I have accent when I'm speaking Farsi which really surprised me! Now I am sure I am talking not like my parents nor my peers back home also never going to be a good English (American) speaker! I am sure what I speak now is a type of Farsi and English that most of Iranian-American talk in East coast.
ReplyDeleteMy mom was born in and grew up in Philadelphia, so she has a fairly prominent Philly accent. She sounds a lot like my grandmom when she says certain things (my grandmom also grew up in Philly). One thing that's easy to point out in their accents is how they say 'water', they pronounce it like 'wuh-ter' instead of 'wah-ter'. I never really noticed my mom's accent until I got older and a few different people pointed it out to me that weren't from the Philadelphia area. I don't seem to have that accent, probably because I grew up outside of Philly and not directly in it. Although I do sometimes pronounce water the Philly way, as some people have pointed out to me.
ReplyDeleteMy dad and his side of the family are from central Pennsylvania, and I started to notice that he has a bit of an accent as I got older. I can't really describe it except for how he pronounces the 'day' in the days of week. Instead of saying 'Tues-day' he says 'Tues-dee'.
I think I have a fairly neutral accent from not growing up in an area with a prominent way of speaking. I've never experienced any type of isolation from the way I talk.
My mother's family is from in and around Jersey City (opposite Manhattan on the Hudson River), and my father's family is mostly in and around Chicago. Having lived in Pennsylvania all my life, I wouldn't have expected my voice to come from either of those places, Yet, hearing myself speak, my voice seems to more of a combination of theirs than what I would expect people from my state to sound like. I get a discerning lack of pronunciation from my mother's English, and I seem to combine words that sound similar thanks to the influence from my dad's side. All of the people in my high school seemed to pronounce everything by the books, and I had trouble pronouncing the "kn" in "knife" as an f instead of an n. While I saw in grade school, I was placed in speech classes to help me pronounce suffixes, prefixes, and just words in general, but in the end, my parents' influence got the better of the schools'.
ReplyDeleteAs I grew older I just learned to live with it,... then I took a trip to Kansas City with some of the students in my trade school class. A national trade convention had participants just about every accent I had ever thought of (stereotypical or not), and I came out of there significantly prouder of my voice. Yes, I might not use it as often as I like, and I might not be understood easily, but that's just how I talk.
My parents were both born and raised in Guatemala and were learning English in my first years of life. So I grew up with their very heavy accent on the English language. My parents often poke fun at my "American" pronunciation of a street in Florida called Linton; my parents pronounce it "Lin-tón" while I pronounce it "lit-in", I don't pronounce the t or n (very difficult to type out the way it sounds). Because my americanized speech does not include the pronunciation of all the letters in the word, my parents often get confused with what I am trying to say so I end up just speaking in Spanish so that we are all on the same page.
ReplyDeleteAnother issue I had growing up, my cousins (who were born in Florida like I was) took up the ebonics that was spoken by the Haitians and African Americans that they befriended in school. They often made fun of me and sometimes even shunned me when I wouldn't conform to their way of speech. It seemed ridiculous to me that they would dumb down their English to be accepted by their new friends. When we would all go to see a movie, I was often ignored unless I spoke in their vernacular. My cousins were 2-3 years older than I was so I had to listen to them. Because I spoke "like a white girl", I was made fun of.
Now, as an adult (at least I like to think I am) I speak with a lot of my parents pronunciation habits. I tend to exaggerate my spanish accent on words that are normally pronounced in english, like Chipotle and Bachata. I find my pronunciation of words with a spanish accent keeps a tie into my identity with my parents and where they are from.
I was born and raised in New York City, however my first language was actually Spanish. My Mother moved here from the Dominican Republic a few years before I was born, and to this day her accent is quite heavy. My Father's family fled to America from El Salvador when he was seven years old, so his accent is very slight and his English is clear and sounds very "New York". Growing up at home, my Father never spoke in Spanish and my Mother never spoke in English. So I grew up fluent in both languages. I never believed that I had an accent until I went to middle school.
ReplyDeleteThe school I went to was predominantly Hispanic. They could all tell that I was of Dominican descent from the way that I spoke. When I asked them how, they explained to me that my Spanish was broken and very informal. When Dominicans speak they drop vowels and syllables and use odd phrases that usually only apply to your small community. This was probably the first time I had ever noticed it and I have been aware of it ever since. As I started to learn more correct and formal Spanish, I have found that people have a harder time placing my accent. Even more interesting is that I have found that there are phrases used by other Hispanic cultures that I don't recognize. For example while speaking to my Mexican friends I frequently ask them to explain certain words or phrases. One such word is the term "flojera", which describes a feeling of laziness. In Dominican culture we use the term "bagencia" to describe those feelings. Its interesting to me to see that although we speak the same language there are times when we don't understand each other.
Growing up in a melting pot like New York City, I was exposed to different cultures and languages. Having this many cultures all in one place means that there are lots of miscommunications. I was always curious about other cultures and have almost always had friends from different backgrounds. For example, My best friend is Korean and has only been in the country for about 9 years. Her accent is slight and if she talks fast her Korean shines through. When she speaks, I can sometimes hear the roughness of her "r" sounds and the rhythm of speech she uses when she speaks Korean. At first we often had misunderstandings and had trouble getting our feelings across. Learning to communicate with her was as much about learning about her culture as understanding her English. The way I like to think about it is that English has a very informal tone to it. I would say I love a pair of shoes the same way I would say that I love my Mother. While I obviously love my Mother in a different way than a cute pair of boots, its not communicated in the language. When transitioning from a language like Korean, where there are informal and formal ways of saying things, English is awkward and personal. I learned a lot about her culture and now, after much patience, we have an understanding and miscommunications rarely happen. Mainly because I have a better sense of her reasoning and she has a better understanding of mine.
At home I am constantly being isolated because of language barriers. I have found that with a lot of patience and an open mind, most of those barriers are easily overcome. For the other ones, just being willing to understand the culture behind the language can allow you to become apart of a community instead of being isolated from it.
I feel very inexperienced with this by reading a lot of other peoples posts. I have lived in Rochester all my life, and have visited a few places but not for much longer than a week. All of my family is here in Rochester with me besides my aunt, who lives in Colorado. When she comes home, we don't see a difference in her language or way of speaking. By the looks of it, a lot of people in class have moved somewhere a lot different and had an experience with this, but i guess i have not. The only example i have is when my friend comes up from Florida, and i can hear a slight southern accent in her voice. My friends and I often imitate what she says when its a big difference in accent, and then we all just laugh. She also talks very fast. That is the only example i have for this topic. :(
ReplyDeleteI was born and raised (and my parents were both born in raised) in Colorado, basically near the Denver area. I really don't think I use any special phrasing or have any sort of accent. Growing up, all the kids in my town would poke fun at different phrases and accents from the east coast or west coast or the South. Some people would talk like Californians (using phrases like "hella" to mean "very", etc) and there was a division about whether this was a cool thing, or a highly annoying thing (non-Californians tended to think Californians were annoying, therefore found their speech annoying). Similarly, people would mock Texan accents as stereotypical Texans were also found annoying. To us there was a great distinction between a Texan accent and a southern accent, though. Southern accents were seen as being classier than Texan accents.
ReplyDeleteHere in Rochester, the only major speech idiosyncraticity I've noticed from the natives it the pronunciation of words that end in "ary." Words like "documentary" tend to have over-emphasis on the "ary" part so it sounds like "document-ary," whereas I've only ever heard it pronounced like "documen-tree." "Elementary" is another word that gets pronounced differently. To me, it sounds like the people are trying to say those words in a posh British accent.
Traveling and hearing accents is always fun. It was amusing when we went to Ireland for a few weeks. The first part of the trip we stayed in County Cork, and everyone apologized for their unintelligible accent (even though we could understand them just fine most of the time). Then when we went to Dublin and told people we had been in Cork, they all remarked about how no one can understand the Cork accent, but we had a harder time understanding people in Dublin. My cousin who was studying in Cork and had been there a year admitted she could barely tell the difference between a Dublin accent and a Cork accent.
I am from Cleveland, Ohio and have never noticed a significant difference in my accent compared to others not from Cleveland, unless they were from places that are generally known to have strong accents (such as my cousins from Pittsburgh and South Carolina). In fact, growing up I was told many times by people who are from Cleveland and even those who are not, that Northeast Ohio and Midwest accents in general were “normal” which the video seemed to both confirm and deny.
ReplyDeleteI have heard, however, that people from Cleveland combine words so instead of “can’t you” we would say “cantcha.” I have also noticed differences in the way we name things such as lights on a car. When I got my car’s oil changed in Rochester last year, the man at the car place asked me to turn my “high-beams” on and I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, since where I’m from “high-beams” are called “brights”.
As my father’s side of the family grew up around the same area as I did, I do not hear a strong difference in our speech. My mother’s side of the family, however, is originally from Southern Ohio so many of my aunts, uncles, and grandparents have what my father oh-so kindly refers to as, “that weird Ohio River accent.” He is kind of a snob.
I was born and raised in Marcellus, NY (20 minutes outside of Syracuse), and my family didn’t really do a lot of traveling when I was young so I grew up thinking that the way I spoke was the way that everyone spoke. I didn’t really notice much of a difference in the way people spoke (or at least I wasn’t paying much attention) until I decided to host a foreign exchange student for two weeks. She was from England, so she spoke English, but their dialect of English and ours were completely different. Honestly, I had never heard anything like the way she spoke before, so it was hard for me to understand what she was saying for the first few days. But after a few days, I was getting used to the way she was speaking and slowly started to adapt a few phrases just because I thought they were cool little phrases to say.
ReplyDeleteI did notice that the British (“Geordie” dialect) had a tendency to drop their “r” at the end of words. Ex, “proper” would sound more like you were saying “pra-a” and so on.
I really started to use these phrases when I visited her the following year. And instead of being isolated due to my accent, I was actually put on the spot! Everyone wanted to hear me talking to hear just how different our languages were, and to compare what common for me to say versus what was common for them to say.
I am from Shadyside, OH (right by Wheeling, Wv, or about an hour southwest of Pittsburgh, PA). It is an area of "that weird Ohio River accent" that I refer to as "hillbilly." My mother is from that area, and doesn't have the accent, and my father took a class to get rid of his Long Island accent, so I learned English from fairly neutral parents. As I aged and was forced to interact with other people, I heard the horrid clicks and gargles of "hillbilly." You may have guessed that the accent irritates me based on the previous statement. That is correct. The use of the accent and intelligence in a person seemed to have a general negative trend. I learned to associate it with stupid people, as it has generally been true in my experience. As such, I use very few slang terms from the area. I try to maintain neutral speech, so I've never really had any perceived isolation.
ReplyDeleteAs a born and raised "Rochestarian" I never heard about any accent I might have until coming to our little mixing bowl, RIT. I know that people from here are fast talkers and I've heard we are a bit nasally "Kodaak" but it could be worse! I feel isolated about 2/3 times a day, there are non English L1 speaking people I have passing friendships with that I know would be more fun if I spoke Spanish or was actually from the D.R. like most people say I look as if I am. Freshman year a girl from Massachusetts got some culture shock when she realized a bubbler is not an actual thing outside of her little Mass. bubble. To the rest of us its referred to as a water fountain. I still think the word pop sums up the most about Rochester's vernacular, yeah don't say soda.
ReplyDeleteI am from California, this is my first time on the East. My parents are both Mexican so I might cary a little accent, however i do not notice it. English was not my first language, but i feel as if I am pretty good at it. When i hear myself speaking back in California to all my friends, or as i call them "amigos," its all normal. However, now that i am in the East Coast a whole different kind of terminology is used, people misunderstand me when im speaking to them! People here do not say "Hella" and they seem more conservative. Back home people may seem crazy but thats just the way of life. In Berkeley, people are very liberal and open, here, with most of the "east coasters" i have spoken to, they are very direct, and come off as rude but that is just the way they are. To them (i have been told) i come off as crazy! Because i just say what comes to mind because where im from that is okay.
ReplyDeleteThe summer of 2007 I travelled through Greece, Italy and France. This was the first time I really noticed how language is influenced by geography. I always knew that people spoke different language and had accents but actually hearing it in person versus hearing it from a t.v. helps to hear the differences. During this time I heard multiple people speak English who had a different native language. The difference in how we pronounce words can be heard clear as day. It is interesting that where we grow up has such a large impact on how we pronounce words. A great example is rolling the “r” in Italian words. It is very hard to do unless you grow up doing it. After spending six weeks in Italy it was still somewhat difficult to pronounce certain words correctly because in English we don’t roll the “r”. Language can be learned but the accent that comes with it is something that is molded while we are first learning that language when we are young.
ReplyDeleteI never really considered myself to have an accent, even though I am from Long Island. On Long Island, people that live in mid-island, or Nassau county, have a “typical” long island accent.
ReplyDeleteThe some of the most famous words are coffee, water, and dog because in these words the “aw” sound comes out. Words like coffee, water, and dog are pronounced cawffee, wawter and dawg. Sometimes, the “hu” sound turns into a “yoo” sound, for example: “We are all yooman beings.” Also, words like horrible and orange are pronounced harrible and arange.
I have asked around a bit where the Long Island accent derived from. Most people moved out to Nassau, to be in the more surburbian areas, from Brooklyn and Queens. The two meshed together to form the accent.
However, I live in East Hampton, which is in Suffolk county (east of Nassau). The “typical” Long Island accent never reached as far east as East Hampton, therefore I don’t have that accent.
When I travel, my family typically gets called out as the “typical” American family. It may have something to do with our accent, however, I think it is all the blonde hair, blue eyes, two parents and a child type of image.
“I’m just a simple girl myself, grew up on Long Island…”
First off, I would like to compliment Caroline on her choice of music. (The quote is from "Gone Country" by Alan Jackson.)
ReplyDeleteI didn't really realize that I had a southern drawl until I moved to New York. Although I was born in Arkansas, I spent an equal amount of my childhood living in Texas with my father and his family. One thing that I've noticed among different accents and styles of speech is that southerners tend to use way more metaphors and similes in everyday speech than other accents. For instance, Do You Speak American? used the example: "...Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit." I've heard that saying since I first learned to talk. Other sayings such as "dad-gum" and "dog-gone" are friendlier and more common adjectives that are usually used in place of curse words. I've also been told that I stress the 'ine' in Pine tree or Mine. At the same time, I have been hanging with people who never knew I was from Arkansas and it wasn't until the found out that they noticed my accent.
On a different note, my roommate, a Pittsburgh native, learned just how strong my accent became when I first called home. Unbeknownst to me, my pronunciation of words were a lot different. He couldn't describe it to me other than saying it was just "mad different" which is a whole other topic.
I haven't left my two home states more times than I have fingers. But, Living here has been the greatest change in my life. Yet, all everyone keeps telling me is just wait for the winter.
When I first came to college, I realized that we are all from different places and have very different forms of dialect. I didn't notice it until some of my friends laughed at me for saying "pop". Being from Buffalo, I grew up calling carbonated beverages "pop". All of my NYC friends say "soda". Something else that was noticed was my accent. A lot of people say that I pronounce "ar" ending words differently. For example, if I were to say "car", it sounds like I'm stretching the "r" at the end of the word. Being at RIT for five years has diluted my accent. Whenever I go back home, I actually hear the Buffalonian accent when speaking with friends and family.
ReplyDeleteI personally don't believe that I have an accent. I was born in the Midwest but grew up in Texas. When I first came to college here, I came across some students who never met anyone from Texas before. And I think that they simply thought that everyone from Texas had an accent. That being said, a few people have approached me and told me that I do pronounce some words with a "Texas accent" however, I just think that's them assuming that everyone from Texas has an accent.
ReplyDeleteI live in the Southwest, and the region that I live in definitely has a western influence. From the style of homes to how people dress, Californian culture plays a large impact. That being said, in high school, I started saying the word like quite often. It has stuck with me since. Whenever I do speak, I have to consciously remind myself not to use it as often.