Language. I use it. Southern dialect? Creeping into my usage more and more. I'll write more on all of this later this evening, I thought I'd just go ahead and put in this small post so that I don't disrupt the order if Glenn decides to post the new topic before I have a chance to write.
**UPDATE**
Alright, so since posting that and reading the comments I've had time to think about some issues.
First, interestingly enough, most of my friends have a non-regional dialect. Or well, I guess more correctly, don't really have accents. I was raised in VA for the first half of my life, my grandparents on my mothers side are Yankees, and my parents don't have accents either. So, for most of my life I haven't really had one. However, I have found I am easily influenced by the people I am around, and tend to pick up mannerisms or certain sayings. So, for 4 yrs now (well and two others, but there was a gap in-between), I've worked with a couple of people who have Southern accents, and have been developing more of one myself. This comes out more at work because it seems friendlier. I don't know if that's because it's associated with southern hospitality, or whether people with southern accents are generally thought of as dumber, and therefore non-threatening. It bothers me somewhat. I was actually quite proud of my non-accent, but I get it back if I actually pay attention. I slip into southern when I get lazy.
I do say some words that are obviously not southernized. Like aunt. I pronounce it "awnt", whereas most people down here probably say "ant". Or pecan - I say "picahn", whereas most probably say "pee-can". I say soda, or the name of the particular soda I'd like, but I don't usually just offer or ask for a coke. I took Caitlin's little dialect test - not the one online though. She had one that had two similar sounding words - like cot and caught, and depending on how you pronounced them, there were markers for a certain southern accent. I'm pretty sure I don't have those markers.
As far as the term "y'uns" goes, I actually first heard it in TN, not PA, though most people associate it with that area. Apparently it is the plural form of "y'all", even though to me, "y'all" is already plural. I can't refer to a single person as "y'all", only "you", but I guess that is the magic of Tennessee. My friend Jeff was the first person I heard use that term. He had a pretty thick accent, and one of the church groups that came to the camp we worked at actually thought he had introduced himself as "Jif", like JIF peanut butter.
I don't have a problem with the words "dinner" or "supper" - they're interchangeable to me for the evening meal, though usually I just say dinner. I don't like it when it's used for the midday meal - that's "lunch", and nothing else. My grandmother often calls lunch "supper", and it irks me. She and her side of the family (my father's side) are from south GA. In fact, we still have farm land up there. She uses words like "yonder" and "dungarees", and we harass her to no end for it.
In closing - here's a hilarious quote from The Office I just saw the other night - not really to do with accents, but it's relevant:
Gareth: "My dad, for example, he's not as cosmopolitan or as educated as me and it can be embarrassing you know. He doesn't understand all the new trendy words - like he'll say 'poofs' instead of 'gays', 'birds' instead of 'women', 'darkies' instead of 'coloureds'."
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8 comments:
Murphy's law of Glenn suggests that if you hadn't posted this, Glenn would have posted the new topic, but now that you have, all bets are off.
My grandmother (and her relatives in PA) all say you-uns, and that just bugs the hell out of me for some reason!
The word "dinner" replacing "supper" as the the main evening meal really bugs me as a Southerner raised in religious households that all had at least one painting of "The Last Supper," not the last dinner. Odd, because I am no longer religious, but I grew up eating my grandmothers' suppers and mid-day dinners.
Again, while no longer religious, it also irks me that many Europeans call vacations, "holidays," when they are not taken on Holy Days. This is where the term comes from. So, why isn't the Catholic Church weighing in on this topic as they do on everything else?
Well, I was raised in the South by non-religious Yankee parents, and we always ate supper as our night time meal, but we had lunch at noon - none of this dinner-means-lunch silliness.
I'm okay with the word holiday, simply because languages evolve and the meanings of words change over time. However, I still differentiate between "holiday" and "vacation" - To me, a holiday is a day sanctioned either by one's religion or one's government (or both). A vacation is when you take time off from work or school and go somewhere for fun.
Heh heh - non-region dialect is technically an accent.
Also, back in the day when I waited tables, I found that the more Southern I made myself sound, the bigger my tips.
Here's what the folks at Wikipedia have to say about my eating DINNER at noon and then SUPPER around six (before primetime in the Central time zone). They even have me pegged since I grew up on a farm and am more prone to use these two terms for two of my main meals than the upper class who decided to ease them from our common folk usage.
"Lunch is an abbreviation of luncheon, meaning a midday meal.[1] It is arguably the most important meal of the day. In English-speaking countries during the eighteenth century what was originally called "dinner"— a word still sometimes used to mean a noontime meal in the British Isles, and in parts of the United States and Canada — was moved by stages later in the day and came in the course of the nineteenth century to be eaten at night, replacing the light meal called supper, which was delayed by the upper class to midnight.
The mid-day meal on Sunday and the festival meals on Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving (in the U.S. and Canada) are still often eaten at the old hours, usually either at noon or between two and four in the afternoon, and called dinner. Traditional farming communities also may still commonly have the largest meal of the day at mid-day and refer to this meal as "dinner.""
Does anyone still speak only in the vernacular of William Shakespeare, Chaucer, or in Latin? Languages change over time. Words come and go as do people. I've hung on to dinner and supper as a reminder of some great times, and meals, with my grandmothers and my family. I don't like using lunch for dinner and dinner for supper, but as an ESL teacher they are what I use in class. However, among friends, and in my own home, I use the past versions to keep the past alive.
Sorry, Steph, you have a (relatively slight for LC) Southern accent. Don't worry, Southern accents often sound nice from women. Well, sometimes.
Oh, Stephanie! You do have an accent. It's just pretty much Standard as opposed to Southern :-)
You know who does have an accent? My dad. I hear it more and more all the time.
I have started to cover my southern-ness (what little there is) up here in Canada. Every time a client smirks at my calling her "ma'am" I know that I need to try harder.
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