If you’ve got one of those families—nuclear or extended—in which talking politics at the dinner table brings out the glares and knives, or you just get bored hanging around the in-laws and outlaws of your own little clan on Thanksgiving, perhaps you can turn the whole affair into a language experiment that everybody can participate in.
Well, that’s not right. Not everybody. This only works for those who have spoken English from a young age and for groups of people who didn’t all grow up in the same part of the country. For instance, if some people at your TDay get-together are from, say, Duluth and some from Dallas, that’s the kind of contrast that works best.
The whole experiment is about pronunciation and choice of words and expressions. Not unlike that New York Times regional language quiz.
I was born in the Deep South and learned two languages from my earliest days, English being the one I still use daily. At age nine I moved to Nebraska, and soon after to Colorado, where I lived 29 years, and then to California for the past 31 years. Along the way, I’ve learned to speak one other language fluently. So, I’ve had quite a few influences on my pronunciation and my use of expressions. One of those influences, my Georgia accent, I got rid of on the playground in Colorado. Most of it anyway.
But some stuff sticks with you forever.
For example, I say “pin” and “pen” exactly the same way. This is typical of speakers from Kentucky and all points south of it, and a few other places:
The pin-pen merger is a conditional merger of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before the nasal consonants [m], [n], and [ŋ]. The merged vowel is usually closer to [ɪ] than to [ɛ] (examples include: kin-ken, bin-ben, and him-hem). The merger is widespread in Southern American English, and is also found in many speakers in the Midland region immediately north of the South, as well as in less densely populated inland areas of the Western United States, particularly in Bakersfield, California. It is also a characteristic of African American Vernacular English.
Oddly enough, Nebraska and Colorado are two of those few Western states where the pin-pen merger appears. So I lived in the exact right places to have that pronunciation reinforced for my first four decades.
It’s not just being unable to say those and similar words in a manner that makes them distinguishable from one another, I can’t hear the difference either. Babies don’t start out life this way. They can hear every phoneme in every language, but start to “lose” vowels around six months and some consonants at 12 months. So a Japanese baby can distinguish la from ra but a Japanese adult cannot. Just as a baby surrounded by English speakers can distinguish Japanese i from ii but an adult who learned English as a first language cannot.
Had I been born in California, as long as it wasn’t Bakersfield, I’d now pronounce pin and pen so that it is obvious which object I mean.
The dialect map above that Robert Delaney has put together is fascinating. As is this little tidbit of his about the South Midlands dialect:
This area, dominated by the Appalachian Mountains and the Ozark Mountains, was originally settled by the Pennsylvania Dutch moving south from the North Midland areas and the Scotch-Irish moving west from Virginia. A TH at the end of words or syllables is sometimes pronounced F, and the word ARE is often left out of sentences as they are in Black English. An A is usually placed at the beginning of verb that ends with ING, and the G is dropped; an O at the end of a word becomes ER. ("They a-celebratin' his birfday by a-goin' to see 'Old Yeller' in the theatah"). A T is frequently added to words that end with an S sound. Some words are: bodacious, heap, right smart (large amount), set a spell, and smidgin. American English has retained more elements of the Elizabethan English spoken in the time of Shakespeare than modern British English has, and this region has retained the most. Some Elizabethan words that are now less common in England are: bub, cross-purposes, fall (autumn), flapjack,greenhorn, guess (suppose), homely, homespun, jeans, loophole, molasses, peek, ragamuffin, reckon, sorry (inferior), trash, well (healthy.
The experiment for you is to see how much you and the others at your Thanksgiving reunion speak the same and differently. You can kickstart things with the New York Times quiz above or the Which English (of the world do you speak) quiz to get things rolling.
If this sounds more boring than a 12-hour game of Yahtzee, you can always listen to Uncle Wes expound on the glorious presidency of you-know-who instead.