Tuesday, August 24, 2004

You Sure Do Talk Funny!

From Far Outliers, a map of American dialects:

"Like so many of the old Anglo-immigrant stock along the coasts from Cape Cod to Chesapeake Bay, I say ahnt and peeKAHN. I alternate between UMbrella when I'm not thinking about it and umBRELLA when I stop to think. And, although I pronounce poem in two syllables, my reduced vowel ('barred i') always elicits correction from my daughter. What these dialect survey results show is how mixed-up, scattered about, and network-based U.S. dialects really are. The old regions overlap all over the place."