Penguin Awareness Day and Why I talk funny!

Did you know today is Penguin Awareness Day???

Wear black and white to honor our little friends. Tuxedo optional. ;)

Did you know? Penguins are found in Antarctica, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Elsewhere, they are only found in zoos.

Q: What do Penguins have for lunch?
A: Icebergers.

Q: What do you call a penguin in the desert?
A: Lost.

Speaking of penguins, that word gets a lot of discussion around here. As some of you may know, my parents are from NE Kentucky, so I grew up hearing Appalachian English spoken in my home. (That's NOT what Jeff Foxworthy calls it, by the way. ;) So while I do not speak with a twang, there are certain words that I pronounce differently than my husband who grew up in NW PA and my children, who for some reason, learned to talk like their Dad.

Penguin is one of those words.

When it flows eloquently from my lips, it sounds like this: Ping-gwin.

My kids say, "Mom! It's not Ping Gwin - it's Pen gwin." This makes no sense to me at all!

So my daughter says - "How do you say pen?" I answer - "Pin".

"NO, that's like a safety pin or a stick pen - I mean the thing you write with."

"Oh, a pin."

"NO, it's pEn - with an E."

Honestly, I was an English major. I homeschool my children. I know how to SPELL pin and pen. I know the difference between a stick pin, a pig pen, an ink pen and a diaper pin. But to my ear, they all sound EXACTLY the same! Just as "to" and "too" are spelled differently but sound exactlythe same.

Ahh, frustration on their part. I just smile smugly knowing deep down that they all talk funny.

Language is something that interests me - especially dialects within the English language. So when my friends in college and later, my own flesh and blood started making fun of certain things I would say, I needed to understand why it was that everyone had an accent besides me. ;) That's when I discovered that there is actually a term for what we all speak "down home" and Appalachian English is what it's called. Here are the specific phonetic differences that make Appalachian English one of the most distinctive and divergent dialects within the United States:

An intrusive R occurs in words such as wash, leading to the pronunciation "warsh". (I used to love sitting in front of my mom in church so I could listen to her sing "Are you warshed in the blood?" :D)

Creek is pronounced /krɪk/ (As in, "We'll be there if the crik don't rise.")

An -er sound is often used for long "o" at the end of a word. For example, hollow— "a small, sheltered valley"— is pronounced holler. (i.e. He lives just around the holler from here.)

The "z" sound in certain contractions is pronounced as a d stop. For example, Isn't and wasn't are often pronounced idn't and wadn't. ("My cuddin dudn't like me to talk is way." - translation: My cousin doesn't like me to talk this way.)

H retention occurs at the beginning of certain words. It, for example, is sometimes pronounced hit, and ain't is sometimes pronounced hain't. (He hain't been here for a week.)

Participles and gerunds such as doing and mining end in /n/ instead of ing. While this occurs to some extent in all dialects of American English, it occurs with greater frequency in Southern Appalachia. (My Papaw worked in minin' for a long time when he wadn't doin' somethin' else.)

Word final a is sometimes pronounced y, as in okra. (My Aunt Wanda is called Wand-y.) and while we're at it, Word final i is sometimes pronounced /a/. (Cincinnati is pronounced Cincinnata. and Ohio is pronounced O-hi-uh.)

Intervocalic s as in greasy is pronounced /z/. (Also in my Aunt Daisy - pronounced Daze.)

Some Phonetics:

Vowels are drawn out in that "Southern drawl" and may have two syllables - red is pronounced rey-ed.

In the two-syllable vowel /аɪ/, the second half of the vowel syllable is often omitted, and is thus pronounced similar to [ɑː]. In extreme instances, words such as "wire" and "fire" are pronounced so as to completely rhyme with "car." (I wonder war's the far!)

AND HEREIN LIES THE PROBLEM:

Short "i" and short "e" have the same pronunciation when appearing before "n" or "m" (e.g., "pen" and "pin" are both pronounced "pin"). Adjectives are often used to distinguish between the two (e.g., "ink pen").

If you'd like to read even more ways we talk differently than those of you who talk wrong, you can read about Appalachian English here. ;)

Here is a conversation I might have had with my Papaw (grandfather) when I was a young'un...

"Well hullo! Come on in. I was just fixin' to get somethin' to eat. Sit on down here and get yuself a cathead biscuit and sop it in some gravy. I reckon they'd be plenty if ya hain't too hungry. Doggonnit! If I hain't knocked that bowl clean off the table and gaumed it all up. Land sakes! Well, get that sack of flour down from over yonder and I'll go to fixin' some more. After we're done eatin' we'll fix us a mess of beans and a pone of cornbread to have for dinner. Then for supper, we'll go on up the road apiece and get us somethin' at the Burger King."

Now, granted, I don't talk like that in my regular day to day life, but when I get on the phone with one of my aunts in Kentucky, that dialect starts to slide out of my mouth like butter on a hot biscuit. My kids always know when I'm talking to one of them, because even after I hang up the phone, it takes awhile to shake it off. "Welllllllll, Lord have mercy! What in THE world are you all lookin' at?"

"Mom. Talk normal."

"This IS normal, I reckon!"

So why do my people talk is way? There are lots of theories about that. One theory is that people in Appalachia are cut off from the rest of the country. Well, not since the advents of things like cars and the internet - and they still talk this way. And why, when someone moves from Kentucky to the big city, do they continue to talk this way? And even the second generation of transplants (that would be me) continue in some of this dialect.

Many of the words can be found in Shakespeare, like afeared and reckon. Well, shoot. Reckon is even in the Bible! So are we just the remnants of a society that spoke Elizabethan English, cut off from the rest of the world who continued to speak it when the rest of the world evolved into what my family calls "normal" English? Nah.

The most probable theory is that many people in the Appalachian region came from the lowland Scots who were early settlers to the region. You can find phrases like "might could" and I'm "a-goin" and "right cold" in many Scottish dialects. Which would explain why my family tree is made up of surnames like Lawson, Henderson and Erwin, all of which have clans and tartans and probably talked just as funny in good old Scotland as they still do in my old Kentucky home!

So let's be politically correct about all this. Just because we talk differently than the rest of America doesn't mean we're rednecks; it means we're interesting and have a rich cultural heritage. No foolin'!