About them dialects...

I met another one of my daughter's friends over the weekend, and after speaking with her for a few minutes, I noticed that she had a slight speech impediment. Later on, another of her friends arrived and we were all talking together and I noticed the other friend, whom I had met before, also seemed to have developed a problem with her speech.

Then it hit me.

Both girls were in biracial relationships (marriage or otherwise), and both girls were attempting to speak with the slang and dialect of their partners. I found this to be very sad. They were bypassing their uniqueness, their own natural ways of speech.

I am from the south and that's a fact, but I do know how to speak grammatically correct English and even though I sometimes (oftentimes) revert to that "easy, laid back way of talkin" that we do down here, I do know and respect the English language. What I found to be so sad, is how foolish these girls sounded trying to speak with a dialect that they weren't born to. I don't mean this as in their trying to speak a different language, but in a difference in tone and inflections that is learned naturally by people from birth.

They sounded about as natural as Ted Kennedy would with his Bostonian self, coming down here and trying to say "beans and taters" right!!




for the Southpark fans amongst ya.