dialect

[truepenny]

This is so cool.

(Found, of course, via the inestimable Making Light.)

elisem pointed to the results on "the thing you might drink water from in a school."

I'm pointing to the correct pronunciation of lawyer. (Lawyer. Law-yer. As in someone who practices LAW. In case you were wondering.)

This lawyer thing has been driving me nuts since moving from east Tennessee to the Upper Midwest, and I'm unspeakably glad to have someone prove it's a regional dialectical variance and not just the fact that I am as crazy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Also the dual modals result. I occasionally say "might could," as in, "We might could do that," and my husband has never failed to give me the hairy eyeball for it.

Comments

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

That's neato-keen. I should point out that I say both "soda" and "pop", but prefer the former. I say "loyer," but also "soyer". My given name is Laurie, which is pronounced like Lori, but I had a chem teacher in high school who always pronounced it "Law-rie". It was faint, but definitely there. My mother-in-law, who is from a small town in Pennsylvania (not quite Appalachia, but reallyreally close) says "warsh" which really drives me (and my husband, for that matter) nuts.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Heh. I get picked out here for pronouncing "quarter" without the r and "library" with it.

And yet these people can't get the 'g' on the end of a participle to save their lives. *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I say "y'all." Sometimes defiantly, mostly just reflexively.

My idiolect is very weird, because, while I was born and raised in east TN, my parents are both from Washington State and, my father especially, were fanatical about eradicating the local dialect from my and my sister's speech. (One of my earliest memories is of my father insisting that I pronounce lamp as one syllable, not two: lamp instead of lay-ump.) This backfired slightly, since my one gesture of teenage rebellion in high school was to develop a deliberate twang. And then I went to college in Ohio and, because I am chameleon-eared, lost most of it. Though not quite all. Native Midwesterners insist I have an accent (while I maintain that it's them that talk funny), and there are bits and pieces--like lawyer and y'all and numbers--that just haven't quite eroded away.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I went to Case Western Reserve University. Meeting Obies in grad school has convinced me that I should have gone to Oberlin, but when I was not quite seventeen and doing college applications, I was too frightened of the counter-culture types even to visit. My loss. OTOH, if I had gone to Oberlin, I would not have met my husband, so I really can't feel TOO bad about it.

Kenyon creeped me the fuck out when I interviewed there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

They're rebuilding Thwing now, to make it harmonize with the Kelvin Smith Library. I am bitter and resentful.

I actually very much disliked Cleveland, although that's partly because the neighborhoods around CWRU have gotten scary-scary-bad (and partly, I suspect, because it was my first experience with real winter weather). But I'm still pining for CMA.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

you-uns (pronounced with something closer to two syllables) used to be the Indiana version of y'all. It wasn't very common in my childhood in the '70s, but older Hoosiers used it.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Oh cool! I took that quiz, months and months ago, when they were compiling data. I'm immortalized! Sorta.

[kaylarudbek.livejournal.com]

Cool, cool site. And I agree on some of the results -- I had never heard "bubbler" before I moved to Wisconsin. It's a Milwaukee thing.

But the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street is the "boulevard," of course. Silly Harvard study, not knowing that. And the strip in the middle of the street can also be the "boulevard," although I know my New Orleans in-laws call it the "neutral ground."

[kaylarudbek.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I had a friend in college who was from Rhode Island, and I don't ever remember him using the phrase. But then again, there might have been pressure not to use the phrase.

I wonder what effect education and mobility has had on regionalisms? Probably decreased them greatly...

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

[driveby friendsfriends] What an interesting study. I'm always captivated by regional differences in terms and pronunciation. I wonder whether they mapped by where people lived, or by where they grew up.

My in-laws live near Wolf Creek Pass in southwest Colorado, which they pronounce "Whooff Crick." This never fails to amuse me.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

A friend's mother when I was a kid said "warsh" and "woof," and I think it must have been her influence that led the friend to pronounce crayon as "crown." We were very snippy with each other over that.

One regional variant they didn't map is the pronunciation of Missouri. I pronounce it with a long e at the end, but the only native Missourian I've ever known (AFAIK) pronounced it "Missouruh."

And they didn't get into city names at all. Maryille, near where I grew up, is pronounced "Mervull"; Louisville is "Louvull," or sometimes "Lou-uh-vull." And they could probably do a whole separate study on the varying pronunciations of New Orleans: New Orleens, New Or-lee-ans, New Orlins, Nawlins. Are there others? (I usually end up with New Orlins myself.)

[kaylarudbek.livejournal.com]

I hear a bit of that "warsh" in the accents of some people in my area as well.
Hmm. I'm from the upper Midwest and I say New Orleens or New Orlins; my in-laws who are from there say Nawlins.

Of course, there's also Wis-KON-sin versus the other variants, and then all the names of cities derived from Native American languages...

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

My mother-in-law also says "warsh." However, my mother-in-law actually grew up not far from my mother (an amazing coincidence, really) in New Jersey, and didn't move west until she was 17 or so, so I imagine her dialect was acquired at an older stage than usual.

Ah, city and state names. Any native of Mississippi will tell you that there's only three syllables there -- "Mi-sippi." I'm clearly not native to the state where I live, because I say "ColoRAHdo" instead of "ColoRAAdo." A state, incidentally, that has numerous shibboleths we use to identify hapless tourists. My favorites are the towns of Ouray and Saguache, neither of which is pronounced remotely as you'd expect.

I grew up in the very middle of the Mid-Atlantic and therefore have absolutely no discernable accent.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I can't help laughing when Americans say they have no accent.

There's no such thing as "no discernable accent", though it may well not be discernable to you it would be really screamingly obvious to me.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah. That's the point. I guess I need to put little smiley faces on my posts so everybody knows when I'm joking.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

I think the -i ending pronounced as -uh may be more midwestern than just Missouri. My real first name is Naomi. When I lived in Indiana, little old ladies called me Nay-oh-muh. Which I preferred to the younger Hoosier pronunciation: Nye-oh-me. The *right* pronunciation is Nay-oh-me.