Bringing Back Your Accent from Home

Hello, welcome to Away With Words.

Hi, how are you guys?

I’m Beth.

I am actually calling from Virginia.

So I’m calling because I thought you all would be just the ones to help me reclaim my accent.

So I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia, which was kind of a unique area because it was settled fairly early on by the British colonists.

And it was pretty well isolated up until maybe the early to mid 20th century.

So there’s this kind of regional accent that seems to be pretty specific to this area.

I moved actually to the Midwest a few years ago.

And one of my colleagues there said to me, oh, I’m surprised.

I thought you would have a southern accent, but you sound like you’ve lived in Illinois all of your life.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

I mean, I don’t think she meant it in any specific way, but I was kind of like, wow, I wish I did have an accent.

I wish you could kind of tell where I was from.

I would love to get back some of those sounds I heard growing up.

So, Beth, what were some of those sounds?

Can you put it on if you need to?

A little bit I can.

But just as some examples, house is more typically host.

Of is more of a of like an a h v sound instead of an o v sound you know I’m a little bit homesick.

Living in the Midwest and I just kind of would like a little piece of of home with me and a little I don’t know a little bit of my identity.

Are there people back home who still have that accent?

A very few people, mostly maybe my grandparents’ generation born in maybe the 20s or earlier.

So there are not a lot left.

And so those who do have the accent are few and far between.

How does somebody reacquire their accent?

Well, a couple ideas.

Well, one, obviously going.

Back home on regular visits is a way to do it. We get a number of calls and emails every year from people saying like, you know what? It’s so strange. When I go back to where I’m from, it doesn’t take more than a couple hours, and I sound like I used to. I pick it all right back up.

And so that’s one thing you could do, Beth. Another one is the Dictionary of American Regional English has put its tape recordings online. These are recordings that they made for decades as their field workers traveled across the country interviewing people and recording their words and their ways of speaking. And you can find those at the University of Wisconsin library site. We’ll put a link on the show notes. Or you can just Google Dictionary of American Regional English Fieldwork Recordings.

If you do a search for Virginia, you will come up with several pages of results so you can hear people. And since many of these recordings were done decades ago, you’re very likely to hear exactly the kind of voices that you’re remembering, that you’re nostalgic for. Oh, I would love that. I would love that. What a great idea.

Okay. It is hard though isn’t it? It is hard because because you tend to talk like the people who are surrounding you and if you’re not around people with that accent, I mean it must be weird if you ever run into somebody who does have that accent, right? its It’s like it’s like the hairs on the back of your neck just stand up, don’t they? I have been known to introduce myself to people who I think speak in a similar way and just kind of try to try to interrogate them a little bit, like, where are you from? And see if we have any connections.

And that leads me to my other bit of advice for you. That’s actually a really good approach.

I want you to think about another you, somebody two or three generations further down the line, who themselves may be nostalgic for your voice and the way that you sound.

And you might want to start your own language memory project, where it’s something as simple as recording videos or phone calls of you talking to people back home. Anybody, it could be schoolmates or old teachers or just folks that you know, getting that stuff on tape and asking their permission to save it and store it so that 30, 50, 80 years down the line, somebody else will consider this a language treasure. And it it’ll be something that you’ve done for the future you, Beth.

That’s a lovely idea.

I love that.

Do you all know anything about the accent itself in the area? And like what, I don’t know, how could I research it a little bit more and just kind of learn more about the specifics of where it came from?

Well, we mentioned the Dictionary of American Regional English. It is available online. There are many libraries have subscriptions, so you might check your local library or if you still have university library privileges, check there. But they allow you to search by region and those will give you a little bit of idea of some of the Lexus and some of the pronunciations used in each one of these regions.

Another thing that you can do, and I know this sounds weird, but go back and read old newspapers. You will be surprised how often the letters to the editor or the recipe column or the sports pages will just start ringing some bells for you. Because the cadence of the writing will remind you of the spoken speech.

That sounds like a lot of fun, actually.

It can be. And if you search for family names, you may be surprised what you find. When I search for my family names in newspapers, I find garage sales that they held. Or the time that my brother and sister won a T-shirt at a mall, which I didn’t remember until I found it in a newspaper. You know, it’s just like dumb stuff. But I’m like, hey, that’s my family.

Yeah.

You got to hold a small town newspaper. And so much of it is sound. I mean, I’m looking on YouTube right now for a Tidewater accent. And there’s a, you know, there are all these little clips of a TV spokesman with a Tidewater accent is the first one that pops up. I’ve been known to do that with the Western North Carolina accent, which is part of my childhood in the summers when I went to visit my grandparents. And sometimes I just do that just for fun, just to get that little.

Yeah.

It’s like when you smell something and immediately you’re back in first grade, you know, that there’s something just limbic about hearing those sounds. So you might just cruise YouTube.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, you’re welcome. And thank you for suggesting this idea. This is something we would recommend to everyone is that they reconnect with their linguistic history. And maybe you’ll start something new here.

Oh, maybe start a trend.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Be well.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Beth.

Bye-bye.