There's No Place Like Home

Couple Too-Tree, Tree, Mayan, Y'all, pock, yeh, and all those other little tid bits we hear on a daily basis allow for conversation, if you could actually understand what the hell those Bostonians or those North Carolinians are trying to say!

Accents, are hard to not to notice when they aren't the same as our own. I used to have a slight Philadelphia accent, and when I moved to Nort-eastern Pennsylvania or NEPA as more people call it, or "this valley". I'm still trying to figure out where this "valley" is referring to! Just a dialect thing that has never been explained to me.

Well, "this valley" has some pretty strange sounds to a suburban me. Sounds like, "anyways, maya, didjew?, couple two-tree, I seen it, nort, dare, deeze, doze, and one of the most baffling, "henna".

I went to my Intro to Mass Communication class one Friday, and remember sitting confused for about 20 minutes because my teacher and another student were having a conversation in what seemed to be a different language to me, when they were using the term "henna". I was so unfamiliar with it, I could not understand what they were saying or what it meant.

That was one of the strangest communication flukes I have ever encountered. It was the weirdest thing. Sometimes though, I feel the accent is a comfortable place, it makes us feel welcome when we're around people who talk like us. Sometimes if the accent is slight, we don't notice it until it's pointed out to us. You'll have a conversation with someone and they'll tell you about your accent, and you yourself don't hear it or recognize it.

Before I moved to Northeastern Pennsylvania, I never really referred to Pennsylvania as "PA", like most people call it Northeastern PA or NEPA.

When I moved here, everyone pointed out to me, my accent, I never even thought I had one. The cool things about accents is, we don't even realize we have them! 

I know, I really haven't picked up on the "Valley" dialect, or the Philadelphia accent. I've kind of lost my slight accent, but occasionally, I do pick it up again. It seems when we hear a familiar accent, we slip right back into it, because it reminds us of wherever we call home. 

I can go to LCCC, and notice a Philadelphia accent,  from anyone who has ever lived in the city of brotherly love for even a short period of time, and even at a foreign college. The accent is just so bluntly there and hard to ignore. I really love the sounds of the Phila accent. When I hear people talk that way--Dead give away--You're from Philadelphia.

The way they say wooter. It's just so beautiful, sometimes I wish I grew up in Philadelphia, just so I would be able to talk like them.

Well, I think all accents are cool to listen to in their own home dialects, wether it be Boston, New Yawk, Nort-eastern PA,  Caro-lah-na, or wherever, it reminds us that even in a united nation with the same language, we can still have a different culture. Our English language is the same, but there's just no place like home.