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!

1. Virginia
2. Georgia
3. Mississippi
4. Alabama
5. Tennessee
6. North Carolina
7. Californian – the one they use in SNL!
8. Great Lakes Midwest (me)
9. Manhattan
10. 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!

https://www.southernliving.com/culture/supper-vs-dinner