Alaskan

[Robert Lawless]

When I was a young school boy in a small Southern town, I, along with my 
classmates, could easily identify as “foreign” the speech of anyone from 
more than 40 miles away. When we went on football trips to towns in 
other counties, we often talked among ourselves about the funny sounds 
these “foreigners” made and tried to mimic their speech. I have since 
lived in Chicago and Florida, New York City and San Francisco and points 
in between as well as 12 years overseas and lost whatever regional 
linguistic identification that I once had. I know for sure because 
several years ago when I attended the wedding of one of my nephews in my 
old hometown, his bride asked me, “You’re not from around here, are 
you?” I replied, “Why, yes. I grew up here.” She shook her head and 
said, “But you don’t sound like you’re from around here.” I think I also 
lost my ability to hear the regional differences. I don’t mean the 
differences between Brooklyn and Texas but the differences between 
counties. I don’t have a linguistically trained ear but I do have the 
linguistic sophistication of a trained four-field anthropologist. I’m 
wondering whether I have actually lost that childhood ability to hear 
“foreignness” or whether speech locally has generally become more 
homogenized. Robert.