Monday, July 28, 2008

Los Idiomas de Juventud

I noticed last night that my girls have achieved the linguistic phenomenon described by Steven Pinker as "children spontaneously invent[ing] a consistent grammatical speech (a creole) even if they grow up among a mixed-culture population." For example, both girls have begun to use an "oye" sound instead of an "or" sound (to-moye-rrow, D-oye-ra, d-oye-r) and, to my utter disgust (sorry, all you Midwesterners!), saying "maaaaaahm" instead of "mom". Add to this the Ebonics that they've unavoidably picked up (a few days ago, Amber said, "What the hay-ell!?" just like the attitudinous multi-ethnic kids who lurk outside our door), and they are definitely in for it as far as accents and language go. Yikes!
I've also noticed my atrocious hybrid hick/blue collar (translated: Utah/Michigan) vernacular becoming increasingly grating to my own ears. Whatever will we do? A self-proclaimed linguist should never suffer from such cacaphony. I guess we'll just abide by another of Pinker's observations, that "rules like 'a preposition is not a proper word to end a sentence with' must be explicitly taught, therefore they are irrelevant to actual communication and should be ignored." Word.

3 comments:

Becky said...

That elongated or flattened "aaaaaa" sound was the first hint of accent I noticed upon my Michigan arrival. I too think of myself as a linguist and love to see the ties between languages. The variations seem to change with the altitude or at least the planting zones. We're a zone 5 here so that must mean we drop the "t"s in the middle of words: Lay-uhn" (Layton). Just a theory, and probably completely wrong, but I may have to look more deeply into it. Lay-uhr dudette!

Deanne said...

Yes, I'm guilty of the drawn out "ah" sound for my o's. I say "pahp" for pop, "cahp" for cop, "mahm" for mom. The worst part is I never knew it until I moved away from Michigan for a little bit and everyone kept asking me where I was from. Pretty scary. Sorry the hickish accent rubbed off on the kiddos. At least there's hope - they're still young! =)

Amy said...

That's hilarious! Which is worse...Michigan lingo or Utah. How many people pronounce hurricane as "hurricun"???