dialectal brogues

[Jonathan Lighter]

Tennesseans refer to their stereotypical accent as a "brogue."  I never heard this term used up North except for Irish English.  (The Scots have a "burr.")

JL



Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Beverly Flanigan
Subject: Re: dialectal brogues
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>>
>>Wilson Gray writes:
>>
>>>when my father first went up to
>>>Madison from his home hamlet of Moundville, Alabama, to get what was
>>>then an LlB [sic] but is now a JD, the locals had problems with his
>>>Alabama-backwater version of BE. As he put it, "When I first went up
>>>yonder to go to school, folk in Wisconsin couldn't understand my
>>>Alabama brogue." The OED has "brogue, n. A strongly-marked dialectal
>>>pronunciation or accent." Webster's New World has "the pronunciation
>>>peculiar to a dialect."
>>
>>I was under the impression that "brogue" referred specifically to an
>>Irish
>>accent.
>
>I think "primarily" is the term that you're searching for. But, IMO,
>even if the term is accepted as being restricted specifically to Irish,
>it merely makes my father's use of it to describe his idiolect of BE
>even more noteworthy. Unfortunately, he died in January of this year,
>at the age of 97. Otherwise, I'd question him about it.
>
>-Wilson Gray

I assume "brogue" came in with the Irish, but it's not restricted to their
accent, in my experience. My mother (Norwegian-American, born 1906) used
the word all the time, referring not only to other or "foreign" accents but
to the common Scandinavian English everyone used in Minnesota. She'd
comment on someone's extreme brogue, i.e., a heightened or exaggerated
(conscious or not) use of Scand.-Am. intonation patterns, "ya," "uffda,"
"doncha know," etc.--the sort of brogue used in "Fargo." So, if it was
used in Texas and Minnesota, I suspect it became widespread regardless of
dialect or idiolect.

Beverly (Olson) Flanigan,
from the old sod of Minnesota
(and I can say this truthfully, since my grandfather lived in a sod-roofed
dugout when he first came from Sweden).


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