When in Rome

Before last weekend, I had been to exactly 25 of the 50 States in the United States of America. Since then, I have been to exactly 27 of the 50 States in the United States of America. 

Last weekend, I went on a canvassing trip with about a dozen of my colleagues at AU through Virginia and North Carolina to Rock Hill, South Carolina. I was beyond excited leading up to the trip, as I have always wanted to explore the South Eastern United States but had never managed to make it much further than Southern Virginia. The night we drove down, my friends and I had a late dinner at Waffle House then went to sleep, only to wake up bright and early so we could start knocking on some doors. The culture shock was, to put it simply, rather evident when speaking with Southerners of mostly African American heritage, living in lower-middle-class neighborhoods. What was shocking to me was how differently people spoke in the South, but what was even more shocking to me still was how differently I spoke in the South.

My speech transitioned a great deal over the course of my trip. After my first couple of hours knocking on doors, I noticed myself greeting others very politely, using words like "Ma'am", "Sir", "Mr.", and "Miss" instead of addressing people by less formal nouns or pronouns. By the end of my first day knocking on doors, I noticed myself throwing the word "y'all" into my speech, and as the weekend progressed I noticed myself slurring my speech in an increasingly Southern fashion. 

This is obviously a form of code-switching, and it connects to a greater theme I have noticed myself falling into when I find myself in a foreign environment. When I was visiting Quebec for a French class trip in 2017, I stayed with a host family and noticed myself—on top of speaking more French—speaking English with a slight Quebecois accent with my host family.

When we are surrounded by people of a different background than us, we choose to try and make ourselves appear more familiar by adopting elements of speech we would not normally put on. This seemed especially apparent while I visited the South, as I feel that I (and fellow Yankees around me) embodied this idea of pronunciational mirroring to a great extent. This same concept can have more permanent implications to a persons speech when the individual is exposed to a foreign pronunciation for an extended period of time. 

My grandfather was born in England in 1945 but then immigrated to Southern California at the age of six. After living in the United States for a few years, he (and his older siblings) quickly lost their English accents. Then, when he was in his late 50s, my grandfather moved to Connecticut and now, after almost two decades, has definitely picked up the very real Connecticut accent. This demonstrates how exposure to a foreign form of a language can quickly cause someone to drop characteristics of their indigenous dialect, either for a short period of time or permanently.