At Maitri: where dinner is supper, and lunch is dinner.
If you’re from Tennessee.
…We have fascinating American dialects/ accents at the facility right now!
- Virginia
- Georgia
- Mississippi
- Alabama
- Tennessee
- North Carolina
- Californian – the one they use in SNL!
- Great Lakes Midwest (me)
- Manhattan
- Youngstown Ohio
None of the people from the South sound alike.
All are completely distinctive. An acting student would go nuts here.
Mississippi is a gravelly, rapid monotone free of consonants- no time for those – peppered with a hard-won sense of humor and the most abbreviated drawl. Mississippi is deadpan and entertains any group. There’s a touch of blues/ stomp in it too, and more than a little preacher.
Tennessee Is higher-pitched but resonant, and has a musical twang and an expressive lilt at the end of each statement. There is a little “high lonesome” in it. If Mississippi is a gator, Tennessee is a pretty bird.
Virginia is dignified and even-paced and unhurried, and has some poetry in it; it is gentle hills and dales and a thoughtful delivery. It would recite the Declaration of Independence in a quiet tone of voice, as if it were the most natural thing ever.
Georgia is laid- back as one would think; opens windows and doors with each slow syllable and asks why this and why that- all the while knowing the answer through long experience.
While our Alabama is “correct” -because Mama ironed the accent out- the back-home Alabama is an exhortation; an intense high staccato monotone, brusque with phrases that seem to be engaged in an internal argument or a declamation. Don’t mess with Alabama!
(Alabama on the speakerphone from Mobile is as unintelligible as the Scottish brogue, to the midwestern ear.)
North Carolina has its stately, elegant “o”; a favored vowel that says a lot in one syllable, shaped in an exhale, where it came from no one knows.
Youngstown Ohio is flat with gray weather. Unaffected, it is a calculator tapping out syllables in a drone. It pronounces every “R” and pays its taxes on time.
(California sounds to Tennessee “like they’re talking with two sticks of chewing gum in their mouth.”)
There are Philippines- two varieties; Bolivia, Guatemala. Vietnam. Eretrea, Cameroon. All pronounce American in characteristic ways.
Americans, who sets at your table? Other Americans from all over! Sweet!
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