Which one? If you put a Maine lobsterman in the same room with an Alabama sharecropper you'd have difficulty believing they are speaking the same language.
“Which one? If you put a Maine lobsterman in the same room with an Alabama sharecropper you’d have difficulty believing they are speaking the same language.”
One of my teammates was on a conference call yesterday with a lady from (it was obvious to me) Louisiana. They couldn’t understand her very well so they got me on the phone with her. Being raised down South myself I thought she had a very charming and sexy accent and had no difficulty understanding her.
I was born in Texas, but we left when I was a baby. After that, I never ventured below the Mason/Dixon line.
When we moved to Georgia in the mid-90’s, I was horrified to find that I couldn’t understand *anybody*. For the first two weeks, my mom took on the role of translator as I tried to get our electricity turned on, phone hooked up, garbage collected, etc.
It only took me a couple of months to get the hang of it, now I can barely hear a difference. Weirdly, I occasionally slip and let loose a Southern accent myself. Without even realizing it, I was involved with “language immersion”.
My wife is from Rhode Island, I’m from Georgia. If my grandmother had been healthy enough to attend the wedding we would have had to translate if she & my sister-in-law had tried to have a conversation.
After we married and moved to Georgia, while driving out in the country one day I stopped to ask directions from a young black boy. After we finished talking I got back in the car whereupon my wife asked me,
“What language were you speaking?”
“English”, I replied.
“Both of you?”
“Yes.”
“I did not understad a word that either of you were speaking!”