Posted on 01/25/2005 7:28:57 AM PST by Arrowhead1952
Students get lesson in how Americans talk from 'NewsHour' ex-anchor
By Katie Humphrey
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Y'all better get ready because the Texas drawl is the future of American English -- at least according to journalist Robert MacNeil, who has spent many years studying and chronicling how Americans talk.
Maybe it's because of country music or migration from north to south, but any way you look at it, the number of people speaking with a Southern dialect -- particularly "Texan" -- is on the rise, MacNeil told about 270 area high school students who gathered at the campus of Advanced Micro Devices on Monday afternoon.
"Talking Southern may ultimately become the most normal way of talking American," he said, recalling a study from the 1990s that found that 76 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 41 percent of people older than 65 in the United States used "y'all" on a regular basis. And that was before President Bush took office.
MacNeil, former executive editor and co-anchor of "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," used Monday's discussion as a prequel to his evening speech at the University of Texas' LBJ Library, part of KLRU's Distinguished Speaker Series.
The discussion focused on MacNeil's latest book, "Do You Speak American?" and his Public Broadcasting Service documentary of the same title, which aired on KLRU in early January. In the documentary -- MacNeil's first since retiring in 1995 -- he travels across the United States to explore the slang, dialects and quirky accents that give American English its linguistic diversity.
"Most people are really interested in language because it's something that we all own and it belongs to all of us," MacNeil said, adding that even slang-happy teenagers can find linguistics interesting if it is presented in the right way. "Only when they saw the series did they realize that it didn't have to be boring at all."
Students laughed as they watched MacNeil mimic a "Surfer Dude" accent using a 69-word sentence that included the word "like" 13 times. Then he slipped into a slow Southern drawl to share some typical Texas phrases with the students.
"Texas is known for its wonderfully colorful metaphors and expressions," he said, including sayings such as "meaner than a skillet full of rattlesnakes."
"The great skill in Texas is to not copy these expressions but to create your own," he said. "Our language is constantly changing."
But our perceptions of certain dialects are not, he said. While working on the documentary, MacNeil said he met people who faced discriminated for talking differently: an inner-city student who "talks black," an immigrant who speaks Spanglish and a New Englander who drops the r's in words.
"While we are very careful about what we say about all kinds of things, we permit ourselves a certain degree of racism when talking about language," he said.
As a result, people have learned to be bilingual in a sense, speaking a formal standard English and a more informal dialect, depending on the situation, he said.
Sarah Mendoza, a senior at Del Valle High School, said she noticed changes in her classmates' speech patterns as they asked MacNeil questions.
"People talked differently here than when they are at home or with their friends," she said. "Some of them stuttered or tried to use a bigger vocabulary."
One student's use of the word "proliferation" did indeed draw gasps from his peers.
FGS
Forgot about that one. We used to play them in HS football. I imagine the pep squads just did "beat flu phlu 'EM!"
Used to live in Buchanan Dam, Near Burn-it... had to explain a few times that it was BUH-canon, no BYOO-canon.
Pert-in-alis,
Burn-it
Man-shack.
Another Austin Fave: Guada-loop.
Here in Houstonm San Felipe is San Fileep.
Frontage Road, Access Road, or Feeder?
I love regional dialects.
Boston: Soda? Pop? or Tonic? Gotta go get my clothes from the Cleanser.
And then there is the broad A. For a more novel example than Paak the Caah at Haavad Yaad, how about
Khakis -- Something you start your car with.
Car-keys -- A pair of tan colored cotton twill trousers.
Well, I suppose we could use "ye", but I don't think it will catch on again.
“Son of a gun, that‘ll pop your girdle, granny."
; >
haha! :^D
haha! Texas Twang fer Dummies. :^D
"Y'all better get ready because the Texas drawl is the future of American English"
I have given my family and friends full authority to shoot me if the phrase "y'all" ever comes out of my mouth.
Dang you, now I've got to get one of those luscious DQ baskets with the 'libary' paste gravy to sop up the tasty chicken-fried steak fingers with, and all those french-fries (whose quality McDonalds doesn't come near). And then the banana split afterwards, of course.:)
Actually, maybe it was an imitator of DQ, but there really used to be a 'Frigid Queen' hamburger place in Alpine, Texas. I was in Alpine on a summer field trip, and a lot of the students had their pictures taken standing underneath the sign.:)
My curmudgeons work is done! ;-)
That's easy. It's "New Brawns-fulls". Right? Right???
'Course, the main reason so many people have an opportunity to mispronounce it is because Schlitterbahn is there. Interestingly, nobody has trouble with that name. :-)
HAHAHAHAHAHA! You beat me, I was going to post that joke!
And, btw, the plural form of ya'll is ALL ya'll.
sundero
Well, y'all is an excellent second-person plural.
Do the rest of us have to wait until then?
Residents in the other 49 states, don't fret. "Texas drawl" has yet to take over most of Dallas, Texas.
Do the rest of us have to wait until then?
I'm afraid so.........sorry.
I've heard it pronounced that way, but the lady who did so also did the same
with "huge". She was a native Houstonian.. maybe there is some obscure group 'round here that do this.
Here tis! :^D
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