3:35am December 28, 2014

When I was little…

…there was a day they wouldn’t let us go out to recess until we came up with a rhyme.

I could have gone with simpler rhymes, I know, but I was determined to come up with one that went with my special interests at the time. I didn’t know they were called special interests mind you, I wasn’t diagnosed yet. But I knew they were special to me and I wanted to commemorate them appropriately in this assignment. (I did things like this a lot. I’ve still got a copy of a ridiculous story I wrote about someone having to move to Mars from the moon, in fourth grade.)

Anyway, I eventually came up with granite and planet.

They told me it wasn’t a rhyme, but that they’d let me go anyway.

And it only just hit me now what happened.

I don’t have the pin/pen merger. But my mother does have the pin/pen merger. I can remember so many times her asking for a pin, me looking around for sewing pins, only for her to say “I found a pin!” and holding up a pen.

So every time I heard these words spoken, they rhymed. Gran-it + plan-it. I probably learned to pronounce them that way, too. My pronunciation was all over the place:

My mom’s mom’s family was Swedish-American. As in, my great-grandmother was born in Minnesota (naturally), raised in Sweden, and then came back all by herself when she was twelve. She spoke Swedish. Her husband was another Minnesota Swede, I think.

My mom’s dad’s family was from Kansas or Arkansas or somewhere in that area where the Midwest connects with the South. He had a very interesting accent that I wish I had on tape, it was wonderful.

My dad’s parents were Okies. Or specifically, one side were Okies and one side were Arkies. But usually Arkies got blended in with Okies back then, and Okie became a generic term for anyone migrating from that general region of the world to come to California for work. They also have a lot of interesting accents.

My parents each have accents and dialects that reflect their upbringing. I think my mom was more able to adapt when moving to California, although there were some areas where she didn’t adapt. I feel horrible now, I was one of those autistic kids who drove people crazy by correcting their pronunciation all the time. Until I took a linguistics course and learned about descriptivism versus prescriptivism, had an epiphany, and went “Shit I’ve been being a real bastard to people for a long time.” If you’re reading this, Anna, I’m truly and awfully sorry for every time I gave you a hard time about saying “warsh” instead of “wash”. I now feel utterly horrible because it’s like I was chasing my own heritage out the door, and putting her on the spot in the process.

Meanwhile I picked up a lot of my dad’s way of speaking, and sometimes got in trouble for “sounding uneducated” which seems to often be a code word in the North for “sounding even a teeny bit Southern”. I developed a fierce internal editor that would stop any words coming out that would get me called that. It was a combination of Southernisms, and “like”. (Which my dad insists Okies were using long before Valley Girls were.)

And now i kind of feel like I’ve been robbed of my heritage, because all those pressures to “speak proper English” worked on me and unless I deliberately drop my filters, you ain’t gonna hear me sayin’ I’m fixin’ to go to the store today to buy some coke. …so it’s not like I don’t have the accent/dialect inside of me, it’s that it’s really hard to get it to come out because of the training (read: indoctrination into Northern speech) I got as a kid.

I still remember my dad glowing with pride if he heard me using a Southernism regardless, and called me “my little Southun girl”. Last time I talked to him and my brother about it, my brother talked about how he too has traces of the Southern accent, that only come out when he’s in a rural or Southern area himself. Me, it’s hard to type with an accent. I sincerely wish for a poor/working-class Okie/Arkie accent in text-to-speech, so I can sound like my relatives. I found a couple Southern accent TTS modules once, but the man barely sounded Southern and the woman sounded like something out of Gone With The Wind, and people don’t talk like that in real life. The guy who designed them was from Arkansas, too, so he ought to have known better.

Oh and i’ve been told that I should know better than to complain about being asked not to speak “dialect” in the classroom, because people inevitably write how we talk, and we can’t have that. I just wish that I could easily write like the blend of my parents’ accents and dialects that I would have had without interference from the outside. But that wasn’t going to happen, especially since writing and speech are so divorced from each other, to me, and I got a lot of my echolalia-store of writing from books that didn’t have my ancestral accents in them.

(I tell people I’m part Swedish and part Southern. That seems to cover the bases pretty well. Knowing where everyone was from hundreds of years ago is interesting, and does have some impact on my culture, but Southern trumps Irish/Scottish/Swiss/etc. and allows for the ambiguity of being wrong about that stuff.)