Many years ago I worked as an interpretive historian at Ellis Island, the old immigrant processing station in New York Harbor. (not interpreting languages, but interpreting history) The National Park Service ran guided tours then, and as it was the late 1970's there were still many elderly immigrants who had passed through the island in its heyday who would come out to the island with their families and could tell of their time on Ellis. I got to where I could tell accents from lots of regions of Europe as well as the US, because in addition to returning immigrants were large numbers of decendants of immigrants who returned to the island.

In my "Mom hat" I'll just remind the list that even as we enjoy comparing bad representations of accents by actors who should know better (or by casting directors who should have known better) that the key is to communicate, and even with accents, most people can make themselves understood. How we do it, and our grammar, is just the "manners" part of it, variable rules we learn locally to follow. That said, it is awfully hard to understand some regional accents in any English speaking nation because as a language with 1,000,000+ words (compared to French with 50,000) we all have a lot of material to draw from. The many sources of English are simple to understand: conquer someone, acquire parts of their language. Be conquered by someone, end up with even more of their language. English speakers have been doing this for a long time. And we're not always good at using all of the parts of the words we acquire. Dropped letters in regional shortcuts are what so many of the examples above illustrate (beautifully! I'm going to send a link to this to my Professor who taught History and Development of the English Language. He has a broad west Texas drawl, and is a hoot to listen to when he recites Shakespeare!).

With this in mind, I'll reflect here on the summer I spent at Sugarlands Visitor Center in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The non-local park rangers held a Tennessee Spelling Bee on our back porch one evening:

"Spell Far"

"F-I-R-E"

"Spell Tar"

"T-I-R-E"

Maggie (M.A. in English, 1999--and it is true--the more you learn, the less you know!)