Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 45% Dixie |
| 40% General American English |
| 10% Yankee |
| 5% Midwestern |
| 0% Upper Midwestern |
For most of my life, people have asked me where I was from. Not because I looked strange or anything, but the question comes after hearing me speak.
As it turns out, apparently I don't sound like I am from here the South at any rate. To hear us talk (and to see us, for that matter) you would never know that my sister and I were related. Her Southern/Haleyville accent is definitely recognizable to the ear. Not only do I not fit in with my family that way, but my lack of drawl has led a lot of people to initially treat me with suspicion. I've been treated as an outsider because people have thought I was a Yankee or something because I didn't sound like Pa Kettle. (And by the way, when spell check sees "Haleyville" as a mispelled word, it suggests "hillbilly" as a replacement. So you know that that has to mean something about where I'm from.)
So what happened? Why do I talk this way? Two things. One, my parents encouraged both my sister and I to use proper English grammar it's a source of pride and confidence, as well as a sign of respect to the person that you are talking to. And two, when I was a child, I had a pretty severe speech impediment.
Apparently a genetic trait that was passed down from my great grandfather on my mother's side, male babies are sometimes born with attached tongues. Lift up your tongue, notice the skin that is under there, mine went all the way to the tip of my tongue. When I began to speak, it was impossible for me to say certain sounds like "th," "l," and "d." Somewhere between 4 and 6 my parents noticed the problem and I had my tongue clipped to help me speak better. (Bet you didn't know that you could have your tongue circumcised did you?)
After that, I had to go to speech therapy to relearn how to talk. So, with that, along with my parents encouraging us to speak well, I lost my "Southern" talk.
One of the most interesting events that has happened related to this was last year when doing my CPE residency at UAB Hospital. I was on call late one night and an African-American family had been called in to be told that their 50-year old ex-husband/brother/son had died from a massive heart attack. I was there to comfort the family and to "babysit" them because the ER docs didn't want to deal with them while they waited on other family members to travel in so that they could see the body.
The night turned into a comedy of errors as later, unknown to the family, the body was moved from the ER to the morgue. Granted, the ER needed the room, but some of the family members were waiting to go back there to see the decedent with the traveling family before leaving to go make arrangements. Typically, I would imagine in most hospitals, making arrangements with the morgue (or "Decedent Services") would be easier. Not at UAB.
The morgue had just been moved to a new area, along with many other locations that had been changed due to new construction. Going from old to new wasn't a problem for me since I didn't know the old locations, but apparently everyone at UAB Hospital was having a really tough time with the learning curve. Even the people who worked in their respective departments had trouble giving directions to where they were.
We found locked doors, walked through 2 parking decks, and took elevators that you could get on but not off and still never saw this family's loved one. After about 2 hours of this and my constant apologizing for the difficulties and the run around that I was getting by the UAB staff, they decided to just give up. "Mama" of the family was in a wheelchair and could only take so much.
The family was so appreciative, even though their time there was futile and frustrating, and they had just lost someone they loved. But they thanked me nonetheless. As they were leaving, one of the older brothers in the family asked me where I was from. It caught me off guard, because at that time it seemed like a really random question, but for some reason, thinking that he was implying that I didn't have a southern accent, I replied. "I had a speech impediment growing up." (As a side note, I was getting the question asked a lot as I was visiting with different patients there at the hospital.)
As it turns out, and after reflection with my CPE Supervisor, this man was probably really asking the question, "What's this young white guy doing - going out of his way to help us when no one else would in this hospital and not like most of the white folks we meet in this city." Now I've probably exaggerated a little bit, but you get the gist. It wasn't the sound of how I talked or my accent that made an impression on them, it was a voice of compassion and caring of the Spirit that they heard.
When we speak with God's voice of love, then people truly do hear something completely different. So, where you from, boy?
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