For true word nerds, it’s a guilty pleasure. You meet a stranger, and you find yourself listening closely to that person’s way of speaking as you try to guess the accent. Martha and Grant confess they play “Name That Accent” all the time in the privacy of their own heads. Recently though, a listener phoned to challenge them to guess where she’d grown up based on her accent. See if you can figure it out!

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Grant;

I was born in Indianapolis and raised in Cincinnati. I say “waash” and “drout”. My father was raised in Illinois and says “waash” and “drout”. My mother was raised in southern Indiana and says “worsh” and “drouth”. I can’t recall any other words that my mother says differently than the rest of the family. My pronunciation reflects Cincinnati, as far as I can recall. I believe my mother’s sisters also say “worsh”.

Can you explain this? Or “show me”

Grant Barrett said:

Kent, so you’re asking why you took after your father rather than your mother? The short answer: for the same reason you probably took after father in other ways. Children learn from their parents and their choices of role models are strongly guided by social and gender roles, so you probably have always been more likely to talk like your father.

Our idiolects–the way we each speak–are guided by many other things, too, of course.

I think it’s more likely that the public school systems “corrected” his accent. I know that’s what happend to me. Elementary/high shcool started the process, and college pretty much finished it off. I was born and raised in northern rural Indiana and have lived here all of my life. I grew up saying things like “worsh” and “feesh” and calling bell peppers “mangos”, eating dinner at noon and supper in the evening, but I sound much different now as an adult than I did as a child. It may sound corny, but in a way it makes me sad, because in a way I feel like I’ve lost my “native language”!