6 October

I felt that the article we discussed in class, "Mountain Speech," was more fun than informative. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that it was an informal summary of a book that went into novel-length descriptions of Southern Mountain dialects. In the author's paraphrases of the book, she rewords things vaguely and un-scientifically, which makes it more accessible for the average reader but also more difficult to distinguish what it is exactly she means. For example, I am confused by her statement "[the "r"] is also usually blended with a preceding vowel;" I remember that we discussed this particular statement in class and general consensus found it puzzling. She also cites as other distinctions of mountain speech "crossing the vowel as in funeral (furnal)," "house is prnouned ha-h-uhs," and "because of the habit of thrusting forward the chin forward sounds are often dragged out." These pithy assertions, while perhaps making perfect sense in the author's mind, do not convey exactly what it is he/she means because they do not use a standard method of conveying pronunciation.

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It's hard for me to give a general statement on my views on regional accents; I don't have one view about the whole of them. I am neither Meghan nor her brother (the first loves all accents, the second thinks that anyone who deviates from 'standard' English should be corrected). I can say that I think that for the past decade or so, the younger generation of Americans have began a slide toward losing distinct dialects and melding together because of the proliferation of online channels like YouTube and Facebook. With so much intercommunication, words and phrases that were once specific to certain states, cities, or even schools are now being spread around the internet to others much faster than if the internet were not being used. For example, when reading one of the articles from the American Dialect Links website, I came across a Texan Lexicon site, which listed a bunch of very Texan sayings that I, despite coming from a Texan family, have never heard. Phrases like "You're as happy as a gopher in soft dirt" and "like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs" seem quaint and outdated, because I could never imagine anyone in generations X or Y saying them. But maybe this only concerns vocabulary; after all, television has been spreading the so-called "TV voice," or midland accent, around for decades and yet regional dialects resisted becoming more like it. I personally hope that regional accents remain colorful and distinctive, if for no other reason than entertainment.