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Archiver > APG > 2008-02 > 1204039333


From: Kathleen McLaughlin <>
Subject: Re: [APG] Dialects and language
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:22:13 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <000c01c87885$f998e6f0$020ba8c0@BARBsHP>


See a dialect map of American English at
http://www.geocities.com/yvain.geo/dialects.html .
Also The Teaching Company has an excellent course
called The History of the English Language. I was born
and raised in, or very nearly in. a very small region
called "Chicago Urban". This region is surrounded by a
region called "Inland Northern" The area includes what
is called the "least accented" region in America, but
my parents were both raised about 115 miles south of
there, and their parents spoke with very different
accents. Mom's family lived 35 miles south of my
father's family. While Mom had an accent and
vocabulary very different from her mother and sisters,
(I don't know how that happened) I think my
grandmother and her siblings language and accents were
very southern, somewhat hill-billy, in style. They
were rural-small town people, and three generations
away from Scotland. I don't remember if the general
population in their community shared their accent, but
I visited that region a few years ago, at a family
reunion, and heard the accent there: "ahh" for "I".


Kathleen McLaughlin

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