Musings from Graceland

YOU'RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE ARE YOU?

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me if I'm from this area, I'd have enough to buy quite an assortment of cute, new, fall accessories. ;) Yes, I was born in this state and raised within an hour and half radius of my birthplace. When folks that aren't from around here visit, they definitely think I sound like a Southern Belle. Pilots stationed at the airforce base by my college town loved asking me and my girlfriends to repeat certain words and phrases.

But I guess the 2 summers I lived in California and Illinois as a child, a summer in Israel during college, and 2 years in Africa as a single missionary meant that my vocabulary and the way I say things received some "outside" influences. You add to that the factors that my mama was an English schoolteacher, my daddy spoke "Mississippi Gulf Coast", I lived on the Gulf Coast for years surrounded by military transplants, I'm married to an adopted son-of-the-south who grew up in CA & Canada, and I love learning new words and Brit lit/videos and you get a dixie darling who speaks more gen'l English than Southernese.

But though I may sometimes tell my kids to empty out their rubbish bins and I ask hubby to pick up some sodas from the store, I think that the fact that I still call all my Mama's friends "Miss So-N-So", I'm often "fixin'" to do something, and "y'all" is definitely one of the most used words in my vocabulary means that this gal will always have more than a touch of Southernese in her verbal potpourri.

Taking an online quiz rated me this way:

Your Linguistic Profile:

40% General American English

35% Dixie

15% Yankee

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

http://www.blogthings.com/whatkindofamericanenglishdoyouspeakquiz/