10:01pm September 21, 2014

so tl;dr

nicocoer:

I did basically the opposite of what the original post was about for a long time because I was worried I wouldn’t be taken seriously because of rural and class backgrounds. I spent time taking on markers that were slightly more from the academy to hide the folks and y’alls. And it sucks. 

Yep, yep, yep.  I hid a lot of speech markers that I got passed onto from my dad, for a long time.  Trying to get them back has been a struggle.  Not that I artificially try, they feel very natural, but they come across this inhibitor-thing I’ve installed in my brain that doesn’t let me use them easily.

Like, saying I’m fixin’ to go somewhere, or that thing done gone, or ain’t, or anything without a g on the end of an -ing word.  Also waller instead of wallow (which I didn’t realize were even supposed to be the same word until I grew up)..  These are all regional rural poor/working-class Okie/Arkie/Ozark things, and I was taught in school that I’d “sound uneducated” if I talked like that.  

Hell, even using ‘like’ is something a teacher publicly humiliated me over, she said people only use 'like’ because they can’t think.  And in doing so, she made me practically nonverbal, but told me that was a good thing because it meant I was thinking before I talked.  I wish I’d had the nerve to throw my textbook at her head.  I later read something by a teacher triumphant about having gotten a student to “think instead of using like” and it made me spitting mad.  My teacher got the entire class in on laughing at me if I couldn’t speak, it was awful.  And even outside of class if she heard me talking to people she’d come up to me later and analyze whether I was talking right.

(My father says that far from being just a Valley Girl thing, that usage of 'like’ was very much an Okie thing in California as well.  Okies being a generic term for all the migrant workers coming in from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and surrounding regions.  They all got called Okies, sometimes Arkies, but usually Okies.  So 'like’ is something I likely got from my father and his Okie family.)

Now I feel like being able to talk like that when I want to connects me to my roots, and I get very annoyed at anyone who assumes it’s an affectation or that I have no right to be speaking like that.  We have roots for a reason, our language is deeply embedded in our roots, and being surrounded by Northerners makes me feel out of place even though I’ve rarely been to the South.  I’ve just mostly been to the pockets of the South that moved to California and brought our culture with them.  I call myself “half Southern” because I think “Southern” sums up that side of my family more than any national origins they might have had.

My friend told me that with immigrants there’s often a pattern:  The first generation – like my great-grandmother who moved here from Sweden – stay with the culture they came from.  So she remained very Swedish to the day she died.  Then the next generation tries their best to assimilate into American culture.  And then the generation after that gets curious about their roots and gets very into being Swedish or whatever, and this may go on for a few generations.

I feel that way about the Okie migration.  Although nobody I know in my family really tried all that hard to assimilate.  But I feel like I’m of the generation that is trying to reclaim their Okie roots regardless of not having been to Oklahoma or Arkansas ever in my life.  It’s not just the location that matters, it’s the people, and I have definitely had my culture passed down to me by a lot of great people including my dad.  (I’m talking about Okie culture.  From my mother’s side I get Swedish culture and.. wherever my grandfather is from, he lived all over Kansas and Arkansas and other places for awhile before moving to California then Oregon.)

TL;DR: Anyway… just wanted to say, I did spend a long time suppressing the elements of my regional accent and dialect that got through despite my living somewhere where that dialect was not heavily used.  And now I feel like I’ve lost something and want it back.  And if anyone decides that’s me being reverse-pretentious or something, that’s their problem, not mine.  

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