Whut up, Y'all?

[jsbowden]

So, that little Y'all ain't from 'round here, are ya? thing that many of you have done?

I scored 70%, AKA "Just under the Mason-Dixon Line."

So, it's going to snow today. Depending on which forecast you believe, it's going to be totally inconsequential and you might not notice, or the next Ice Age is approaching and we're all going to die terrible icey deaths. I'm up for either, really.

I suspect the reality is somewhere in the middle. The one concession I make to the threat of snow is that I fill the gas tank. I can't think of a worse way to end my day than to be sitting in traffic creeping home at 3mph and running out of gas. Well, I can, but while we're still in the realm of more likely than getting struck by lightning, this is somewhere up there when relevant.

I had something I wanted to talk about, but I can't remember what the hell it was now, so you get fluff this morning.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"57% (Dixie). Right on the Mason-Dixon Line" -- I'm not sure if I'm more or less southern than you. I've actively gotten rid of the parts of southernspakk that I don't like, though...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It looks to have been based on the Harvard Dialect Survey.

I remember studying that for a while a few years ago and figuring out that my dialect had actually evolved as I moved, though I never consciously realized it. My mother was from Davenport, Iowa and I lived in a suburb of Cleveland from the ages of 1-3, but then we moved to suburban Northern Virginia where I grew up, and I moved to New England for graduate school. So I've still got a pronounced Midwest/Great Lakes accent, but some pronunciations changed, and there are dozens of words for which I have memories of switching from a Great Lakes usage to a Mid-Atlantic one because nobody seemed to use the original word any more. And then there are a few Boston-area usages that I picked up in adulthood, like "rotary".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Maps have moved to here (http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html).

The "aunt" pronunciation was one that baffled me when I was a kid, because of a strange geographical accident. The survey says that "ahnt" is a Northeastern pronunciation, but it's also common in a narrow strip of Virginia running up the Peninsula from Newport News toward somewhere around Charlottesville.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I grew up in the Hampton Roads area (primarily Va. Beach, but Norfolk for the first few years), with my mother's family all being from New Hampshire (and with very much rural New England accents), but the military influence is so strong there that the language is almost entirely neutral. My bio. father's family are from the New Bern, NC area originally (and they're definately all sporting rural NC accents), so my pronunciation tends to be a bit...odd at times.