Accenting your Speech

College is supposed to be a time of new experiences. A time to be exposed to the different and the foreign to what we are accustomed to. My friends here at school come from all across the country and supposedly, they all speak English. Sometimes, however, the different speech patterns and accents we bring with us make it barely recognizable as such.
In fact, I once tried to convince some kid from Tennessee he had a funny Southern accent for about two hours, including numerous examples and a demonstration of his accent.

Fortunately for you, I have few if any oddities about my speech, and the ones that I do have are perfectly acceptable and barely noticable. Just to get that straight.

My roommate, for example, is from Minnesota. I figured I’d start with the least noticable and work my way up. (If you disagree, just remember that my accent or lack thereof is considered absolute zero in terms of normalcy. And I used to live in Wisconsin.) So anyway I guess my roommate considers me normal because one night we stayed up until 3:00 AM with me teaching her to say ‘bag’ instead of ‘bay-g’. It was quite intensive therapy, and apparently though she still regresses, we muddied her accent enough so that her sister made fun of her this summer. Yup, I like to make a difference in people’s lives.

The weirdness doesn’t end there. I know a certain person (not mentioning names but you know who you are, buddy) from a certain East coast state (which may or may not be New Jersey). I don’t know if it’s just a New Jersey thing, but remember the Micro-Machines man from those old commercials who would talk so fast he was barely comprehensible? Right. This New Jersey resident talks so fast she makes him sound like Ben Stine. And in addition to trying to make my brain function fast enough to understand her, she also throws in her own creative pronunciations of words like ‘arnge’ and ‘wudder’. I’m writing them phonetically so you can learn them too. An interactive column all because Hooked on Phonics worked for me.

Living in such close proximity to everyone, I’ve noticed that accents are contagious. Like one of the fun viruses that are floating around campus, I’ve been picking up little bits and pieces of other people’s accents. I don’t know if blended inheritance applies to the way we talk, but by the end of my four years here it’s more than likely that all of my friends and I will talk exactly the same.