’ Tain’ t What You Say, but How You Say It
~ by Mark Blackwell
I
don’ t know if it’ s true for everybody, but it seems like no matter where I travel, the folks all talk funny there. And I don’ t have to imagine that folks from other places think that we have peculiar ways of expressing ourselves. But that is part of the charm that draws people to Brown County.
Regional dialects( that is the vocabulary that people of a particular area use and the way they pronounce their words) have intrigued us going all the way back to biblical times. In the Book of Judges there is a story about the Gileadites who dwelt in the valley of Gilead and the Ephraimites from the tribe of Ephraim.
It seems that the Ephraimites got it in their heads to invade the land of the Gileadites. It was probably plunder and pillage or something along those lines. The Gileadites whupped on the Ephraimites and chased them back across the River Jordan. The Ephraimites got the idea of sneakin’ back across the river pretending to be Gileadites. I expect they were planning some kind of fifth column action.
Now, here is the kicker, both the Gileadites and the Ephraimites spoke Hebrew but with a different accent. So, what the Gileadites would do when they caught somebody coming over the river was to challenge them to say a certain word. In this case the word was Shibboleth. The Ephraimites pronounced it Sibboleth. Therefore, when an Ephraimite tried to say it he would immediately come under some harsh harassment and be sent packing or worse.
Now flash forward a hundred years or so— America is a nation of regions and there is the“ Down East“ region of New England, particularly Maine, and the deep South. And there’ s the upper Midwest of Minnesota and South Dakota, all with their own ways of talking. Most of these regional dialects derived from the immigrants who settled in those areas.
When people came from the countries of Europe they brought their own languages and dialects that in a generation or two got translated into English with a patina of different pronunciations. The longer a region was isolated, the more a dominant vocabulary and ways of pronunciation took hold.
In Maine there is a distinct accent and what I call a word tic“ Ayuh” that sets their culture apart. In the Upper Midwest there is a very detectable mélange of Scandinavian and
60 Our Brown County • May / June 2019