(no subject)

[geekchick]

I just had to call about an order I placed from The New York Review of Books (four of the five books I ordered apparently failed to make it out of their NY warehouse). Their processing center is in Jackson, MS. Hearing the familiar accents on the other end of the line makes me miss...well, it's not "home" anymore, but it was for a very long time. To hear me talk, you'd never peg that I grew up in Mississippi but that was my home from the time I was very young until I left for college. At the time I couldn't wait to get away, but now I sometimes find myself wanting to go back. Not permanently I don't think, but just for a little while.

Comments

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Just out of linguistic curiosity, how long did your accent (if you had much of one to start with) take to soften after you moved out of the area?

[geekchick]

I never had much of one to start with; my mother was from Long Island, and it seems to have muted my own accent a bit. She picked up a bit of an accent later though, and my brother and sister and father all had pretty strong ones.

[geekchick]

If you listen to *what* I say rather than *how* I say it though, you'd probably peg me as Southern regardless. The grammar and word use examples here list a lot of things that just seem completely natural: "y'all/all y'all", "I reckon I might", "fixin' to [do something]", "I got one of them", "coke" as the generic name for soda (my Mamaw called it "co'cola"), although lots of years further north mean I normally call it "soda" now.

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what I say probably pegs me a little more than any sort of accent. As an undergrad, I took the same sort of communication performance class that a lot of broadcasters do and it had a side effect of erasing pretty much any accent I had. Even my regional dialect is corrupt from years of being an anglophile and picking up New England idioms from visiting there a lot. I do call a lot of generic things by a brand name, though (Coke, Kleenex, etc.). And I think "y'all" should be added to the language officially because it eliminates pronoun trouble. :-)