My column from February 25, 2017.
Do you ever hear someone speaking with an accent and catch
yourself mimicking them?
Unless you do it intentionally, it may be what psychologists
call the “chameleon effect.”
It’s a natural tendency to copy another’s speech inflections
or even physical expressions (mirroring their body language, for example) in a
subconscious effort to make them like us better. Our brains give us the urge to
empathize and affiliate with others.
In high school, I called a friend and reached his mother.
Originally from the South, she had a slow and soft drawl. While leaving a
message for my friend, I noticed that I was speaking with her accent. She
graciously did not call me out on it, but it left me stricken with
embarrassment and worried that she thought I was mocking her.
I still catch myself picking up accents. While watching a
movie from the Harry Potter series, my son told me knock off the English accent
I started using.
While growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in the years
before cable TV arrived, I did not understand that I had an accent – a Yooper
accent.
It was not until my family moved to Western Colorado while I
was in fourth grade that I discovered I sounded different. Younger students
would come up to me on the playground, ask me to say mountain lion, and then
run away laughing when I did. I now wish I had a recording of how I said it, so
I could try to understand what was so funny about my pronunciation.
My accent softened after many years of living in Colorado.
While there, I picked up “y’all” from school friends from Texas. The accent
came back after we returned to the U.P., and gets thick again after I spend any
length of time up north.
My alma mater once had a professor studying linguistics,
with an interest in capturing what makes the Yooper accent unique. I now wish
I’d taken a few more of her classes. My understanding of linguistics is limited
to the difference between an accent and dialect.
An accent is the sounds (pronunciation), while dialect
includes vocabulary and grammar. A Yooper’s tendency to use a “D” sound instead
of “th” can be traced to the influence of Finnish immigrants.
I still pepper my sentences with “eh” and the occasional
“youse.” My vocabulary includes pank, swampers, snow scoop, choppers and bug
dope. I confess to cringing when I overhear someone mispronounce “sauna.”
Some people have asked if I am from Canada. I find it a
puzzling generalization, as Canada has its own dialects and two official
languages- English and French.
There are several quizzes online that attempt to identify your
dialect by asking what words you use or how you pronounce words.
Try it by visiting http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html
Wikipedia offers a map of the different dialect regions in
the United States, and links to explain what makes those dialects unique.
Learning that my home state of Michigan now offers a
pronunciation guide made me smile, and the news release announcing it came out
shortly after a friend on Facebook shared a list of words Michiganders
pronounce “wrong.”
You can find Michigan’s guide online at http://www.michigan.gov/lara/0,4601,7-154-28313_54234-401841—,00.html .
There is an unofficial guide for Wisconsin at http://misspronouncer.com/. The website
offers pronunciations for Wisconsin cities, counties, state parks and more.
Listening to it reminded me of a video shared during the Green Bay Packers’
last Super Bowl appearance, with people from Dallas attempting to say Wisconsin
city names.
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