Language isn't Easy

“Ay, where you from”, he said, echoing through the deli. Nobody looked around, because the deli was jampacked with people.

“ Philly, why?”, I responded

“I could tell, with that accent and that way of speakin’, we don’t use those words that you use around here”.  He said in a deep southern accent, slowing down the pronunciation of his words.

I was in the South for a trip with my family. We decided to take a trip to visit all of the southern states, from Georgia to Mississippi. At the time, we were in South Carolina. We had stopped at a local deli for something to eat, after being in the car for the past couple hours. I had mistakenly said hoagie instead sub sandwich.

“Oh.. alright”, I responded, grabbing the hoagie from his hands and sitting down with the rest of my family.

Later that week, I was in Georgia. Georgians have a very different accent than people from South Carolina. In Georgia, their speech is even slower, and doesn’t stop there. It’s slower and slower the farther South you get. My family and I had stopped at a hotel in Georgia, where we stayed the night before we headed into Atlanta. We had just gotten the keys to the room, and right before we left the hotel desk clerk said.

“Ya’ll have a great night's sleep, and have a good morning. Just ring down if y'all need anything”, the hotel clerk said, in the most southern accent possible.

It reminded me of the different things that we say in everyday life that other people in different areas of the world don’t say. They don’t say hoagie, they don’t speak as fast as I do, and they don’t use as much slang as we do. In the city, we speak quickly so we can get out point across. However, in places in the middle of the countryside, they don’t need to speak quickly. In a place like New York City, you need to speak quickly and get out of the way. But in the countryside, it doesn’t matter what you stop and talk to somebody for a solid twenty minutes.

Accents aren’t the only things that are different between cities. Speed of talking, words, and even ways of acting are very different between; say Macon, Georgia and Tokyo, Japan. Not only is there a language barrier between Japanese and English, there is also a different speed of saying something. In Japanese, you have to use emotion to convey some words, because a word said calmly might mean something different than something said in a high pitched voice.

For example, I was in Indiana to visit my family this summer, and they spoke with a ¨nasally” accent, which means they relied on their nose a lot for speaking. I couldn hear it myself, but people told me about it. Words like soda and pop, pond and lake, and even sugar all have different meanings everywhere in the US. In Maine, they call what we call a lake a pond, and a lake is a much larger body of water. Sugar in the North means the sugar we use in cooking, but in the South it may mean to kiss somebody.

The classic example for this is how people say soda. Some people call it soda, some call it pop. Some call it Coke, and some people just straight up call it a soft drink. It’s different everywhere, and that’s one of the best parts about language. It’s different everyone, and nowhere is the same as somewhere else.I don’t know how these words changed meaning just depending on where they are, but whatever changes them is probably the culture where they are.

Another time, when I was in California this past summer. I stayed with two Vietnamese immigrants, whom my grandmother had taken in after the Vietnam war. They learned English, but still have a heavy asian accent, making it hard to understand their English sometimes. They took me to all the local asian places, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. We stopped for Pho, which is a Vietnamese breakfast. In the restaurant, they were talking about something, but I couldn’t understand because of their thick Asian accent, I could understand them perfectly when I was, for example, at their house.

The same probably happens to us when we speak with our regional accents. Somebody from Boston will probably be easier to understand if he’s in Montana rather than if he’s in his hometown of Boston. James Baldwin once wrote ,“A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal-- although the “common” language of all these areas is French.” This can mean the same for English. If you replace the French towns with cities in the USA, then it will still have the same message - English isn’t just one language, it’s a whole variety of languages, all bunched up into one generic term. In the essay, he was talking about how Black English is it’s own language; and it is. But so are so many other versions of English.