While at Kellee's and Bob's on Monday I was telling Kellee about some of my driving adventures. I related my attempts to refrain from calling Route 1 the Post Road, which is is in many places in Connecticut.
"You can tell you're from the North," she exclaimed. "You say 'root' instead of 'rowt'."
In spite of decades of radio, television, and social media, we still have regional pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar unrelated to accent. Many of them come from the native languages of our immigrant forebears. For example, my Chicago cousins would say, "I'm going to the store, do you want to come with?" To me that sentence was always incomplete, but it's the way they talked. It wasn't until I started taking German that I figured out where that phrase came from. In German it's grammatically correct. Given the large number of German immigrants, and those who spoke other Germanic languages, into the upper Midwest, it's no surprise that some of those speaking patterns found their way into everyday English in the region.
And there are numerous examples of word usage.
What do you call a carbonated beverage?
What do you drink water from in school hallways?
What do you call the pan you cook your eggs in?
What is the long upholstered piece of furniture you sit on in the living room?
Language is not static, in spite of what many people would like to believe. It continues to evolve. It's why the English spoken in Britain is different from what we speak in the United States. Or why the French spoken in France is different from what is spoken in Canada. It's why French, Italian, and Spanish became separate languages from the same root language.
And for those of you who get annoyed when people say "aks" instead if "ask", the "aks" pronunciation comes from the older form of the verb.
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