Voices

This morning’s word of the day which showed up in my email was “Cockney”. This refers to people who live in the East End of London and the way they speak. I started to wonder why people from different areas speak as they do. We speak English but we sure don’t sound like the people who live in Great Britain. Australians speak English but their speech is easily distinguished from any other. If I listen closely, I can tell if a speaker is from Scotland or Ireland. But why do they sound different?

Here in the USA, there are certainly differences in dialect.  We have many, many ways of saying the same thing with  lots of different pronunciations and accents. The speech of someone from New York is easily distinguishable from the speech of someone from Louisiana. Some newscasters talk so fast that I have to listen fast to understand them. You can bet they are not from the South! Folk from Minnesota and Wisconsin talk differently from those in Oklahoma or Arkansas. Even word meanings change from area to area. In some southern state, “toboggan” means a winter time cap. To me, a toboggan is a sled.

Within the dialects, of course, every voice is different. Yesterday, I spoke with my son, my brothers, and my dear friend Carol. Even though the conversations were not face to face but were by telephone, I knew instantly the name of each speaker.

I always associate RCA Victor with the trademark of a little dog sitting in front of a wind-up gramophone, listening to a recording. The slogan was, “His Master’s Voice”. He couldn’t see his master, but he identified the voice. For some reason, that picture has always seemed poignant to me.

Now, I don’t mean that I am endorsing crude, vulgar language or think that murdering the King’s English is acceptable. We should all learn to use grammar rules and respect them when talking or writing. Difference is no license for coarseness or rudeness or vaunting ignorance.

Anyway, I’ve often wondered why people who speak the same language speak it a little differently from region to region. I wouldn’t want to change this for anything. We need identifying differences. We don’t need to be such a homogeneous society that everybody is like everybody else, thinking alike, acting alike, having the same goals, and sounding alike! I enjoy hearing different dialects and if they were traced back to their roots, I could probably understand why they are different. Homogenized is good for milk but not for people or our way of talking. Long live the difference!