Thursday, June 05, 2003

I love dialects. I think it comes from moving around so much as a kid - you learn the little differences in language with each new place. Even within the US, it’s like there are several little foreign languages to be learned - cool words and phrases, how to pronounce town names, how certain letters and words sound, new words (can anyone tell me what a frappe is?), etc.

I realized while I was in Georgia that as soothing as the southern accent is, I don’t love it like I used to. There was a lady from the Brooklyn USMS office who had the thickest New Yawk accent and I wanted to hear her talk all day long. And there was another from Maine that I enjoyed listening to as well. After spending almost six years in New England recently, I realized that I was completely in love with those accents - as harsh as they are. There’s something about them - I think it’s that I wasn’t able to pick it up (because there are about 7-8 dialects within New England and they’re all jumbled up in the area that I lived in because of transplants).

So I was surfing and discovered Wicked Good Guide to Boston English at Boston Online. Now this is wicked good stuff.

See also Vocab a-e, vocab f-p, vocab q-z, place names, and pronounciation.