Je parle southern.
Some of the fine folks in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University have come up with a Dialect Survey to find out how Americans really talk. I suppose being away from home these past couple years and meeting people from all over the world has really increased my awareness of my own particular dialect.
At first I thought Scottish people had a really odd way of sayings things. They probably thought likewise about me. Then people back home started talking funny and everybody developed a strange accent — at least that’s how things began appearing to me. And let’s not even mention what French has done to my ability to speak and hear English!
But just to let everyone back in the South know, I still speak your language. I’ve done my fair share of convincing the rest of the world to call any sweetened, carbonated beverage a coke and to refer to a group of two or more people as y’all. Little did I know how geographically-oriented the terms rolling a house and cutting the grass could be.
Do you know where something that’s catty-corner is located or what a roly poly is?