Dialects are great, until you start writing a story and the
character has a very particular dialect that needs specific spelling to get the
point across. For example, in Little
Women, Alcott, being from Boston, wrote the name of the girls’ mother as
“Marmee” because to a Bostonian, “Marmee” is said like “mommy”. These girls
didn’t have some weird thing that they called their mother, Alcott just had a
Boston accent, which could be a tad bit confusing for people unfamiliar with
it. To my understanding, some Rs are added and some are dropped. To an Ohioan,
it makes no sense, but we have our own thing. Something I notice about native
Clevelanders is that we have “the Cleveland A”, which is a drawn-out nasally A.
After hearing someone point it out, I can’t un-hear it. It’s like the arrow in
the FedEx logo, the bear in the Toblerone mountain, or the 31 in the Baskin
Robbins “BR”. Once you know it’s there, it’s never gone.
What regional things do you like? What bothers the **** out
of you? Drop a line below!
(184 words)
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