Vol. 23 •Issue 14
• Page 9
Person to Person
You Say 'Tomejto' and I Say 'Tomahto'
By Jacqueline Thrash, OTR
Having lived both on the East and West coasts and worked with OT clients from all around the U.S., I have noticed that there are several "accents" in American English. We had two distinct variations in my home. My mother was from Brooklyn, NY, and my father was from Norfolk (pronounced "Norfuk"), VA. I could hear the differences in their "accents," and began noticing other differences around me.
Later, in my 20s, when I traveled to Georgia to see my (Virginia-born) grandmother in a nursing home, I heard a woman use the phrase "mash the button" instead of "push the button," which is what I am used to saying. When she said mash, the vowel had a glide, like the first "tomato" in the title of this article. Mejsh. This was more proof of regional variation in pronunciation, both in "accent" and word choice.
As a clinician, I used to play a game with myself to see if I could guess where my clients were from, based on their "accents." I usually was able to pinpoint a region.
One movie which compares and contrasts several regional pronunciations nicely is Sweet Home Alabama, starring Reese Witherspoon. I did a linguistic analysis of this movie for my linguistic anthropology class a few years ago. The writers, Douglas J. Eboch (story) and C. Jay Cox (screenplay), utilize a Southern dialect to reinforce the perceived social aspects of the South, in general, and Southern characters, in specific, in this story. We see representation of the dialect in the phonology (accent), lexicon (regional vocabulary) and syntax (grammatical rules and sentence word order) in the movie.
In Sweet Home Alabama, and in the United States, the first noticeable characteristic of Southern dialect is the "accent" or phonology. These accents can be recognized all across this country and easily identify the speaker as Southern.
Examples of this pronunciation:
So I can key-es ewe any tyme ai wan'.
All raight, how com' y'all let me sleep?
Okay, get outa here befor' ya' mayke me cry.
Aw, he's lowd but he don't baight.
Ai'll le' chew run me outa town.
Ah' ewe hongree?
It can be summarized by a twang, a slower rate of speech, and modification of vowels: "I" turns into "ai," "in" becomes "e-in," and "take" becomes "tyke."
Another characteristic includes dropping the "g" off the -ing suffixes. Brooks indicates this is from southern England, (The Language of the American South. University of Georgia Press, 1985) and Smitherman calls this an African-American language rule regarding the reduction to a vowel sound or a single consonant sound. (Black Talk. Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000)
This can be seen in the following:
Lite-nin' nevah strai-ks the saym' playce t'why-ce.
While I'm doin' the dishes or shellin' peas.
Jus' plyin' wit chew.
Ai's jus' kiddin.'
Following this same rule, we also see it with the letters "t" and "d" in:
Ge chur butt back in that car, you drive over an' see-em.
Pearl, won chew git us sum of that baloney cake out the icebox?
We see combining two t's as in "wanta" from "want to" and see "thangs" instead of "things," which is indicative of the rule about "vowel sounds in words that rhyme with 'think' and 'ring.'" (Smitherman)
Whai would you wanta marry me for anyhow?
Oh, them thangs, Russ don't wanta put one e-in on account you lose personal contact with the customers.
Later in my professional life, I started studying linguistics in order to get a better understanding of the components of language as a foundation for my book series project, Common Phrase Translation. I took several linguistic classes and attended the Linguistics Society of America conference on Jan 3-5, 2007.
While at the conference, I met Dr. Joan Hall, chief editor for the Dictionary of Regional American English (DARE). She was giving a talk about her predecessor, Frederic Cassidy, and his long years working on the DARE. Regarding the varieties just in the English language, she commented, "Despite the common notion that American English has become 'homogenized' by the media and our mobile population, there are still thousands of differences that characterize our language from one part of the country to another. Recognizing and understanding such differences is a crucial part of communicating with people whose backgrounds are different from our own."
She mentioned that regional variants of words used to describe the same thing have the potential to be misunderstood by the professional, which can cause problems if the professional is trying to ascertain whether the client is aphasic or not.
I also met a speech therapist, Shelley Velleman, SLP, who was discussing phrase variations used by the mother of one of her speech therapy clients. She had asked the mother what the child did, and the mother replied, "He fell out." Velleman didn't understand the expression. She wondered, "He fell out of what?" She didn't know that to fall out is an expression which means "to fall down on the floor either in a fit of laughter, to faint or pass out, or to fall down on the floor to throw a tantrum."
So besides being just plain interesting, this topic is relevant to OT and speech therapy. For example, if the OT or speech therapist was to show a picture of a carbonated beverage to a client to test the client's perceptual abilities and ask, "What is this?" there are multiple answers which could be considered correct from a regional dialect perspective.
In some regions people call any kind of carbonated beverage, regardless of flavor, a "coke." Others would identify the picture as a "soda," a "pop," a "soda pop," or "tonic," or even a "dope," depending on where they are from. These regional variations of the meaning of expressions can lead to misunderstandings as well.
By learning more about linguistic variations, we can better communicate with our clients and hear and appreciate examples of their cultural differences.
Jacqueline Thrash, OTR, has nearly 20 years of clinical experience in California and Arizona, in acute care and outpatient rehab, SNF, adult day treatment, and home health. Reach her online at www.livingskillstherapy.com or by email at thrash@pinkiemae.com.
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