Bienvenido a California, Part 4

Way Back Machine, Activate! (cue strange lights and sound effects). It's 1984, all over again!

One of the somewhat embarrassing things that came about while I was in Monterey, was revealed to me by my friends, my fellow soldiers. They informed me...not very politcally I might add...that I talked funny. It seemed I had a funny accent! Technically though, it was not an accent. Being from Baltimore, I spoke what linguists refer to as the Baltimore Dialect of American English. This dialect is mostly about minor changes in pronunciation of common words. It appears to be an interesting fusion of the Brooklyn New York dialect, and the Southern English dialect. It is spoken by mostly working class Caucasians in Baltimore City itself; the further away from the city you get, the less pronounced someone's "accent" is. Also interesting, the African-Americans of the city don't use this dialect at all, speaking in the "Black English Variant" instead, as it is called by linguists.

I studied foreign languages in high school, as I mentioned below, and our teachers would occasionally mention the fact that we all spoke the Baltimore dialect, and that it had an effect on how we pronounced Spanish, French, or German words, and we had to be aware of it. They were always telling us to open our mouths up and enunciate, rather than mumbling as if we were speaking in Baltimorese hehe. I never really thought much about our dialect before I went to Monterey. After all, everyone is from somewhere, and how you speak is just one more characteristic of you as a person. I had brown hair, I had brown eyes, and I spoke English a certain way...and that's all I had ever thought about it, it's just a part of who I am. I've tried to find some online soundfiles for everyone to hear, but unfortunately there was not much available. But this link here was very interesting about accents in English generally. Here is a link about the various pronunciations of the Baltimore dialect...though it appears to be a humor site, so bear that in mind hehe...it seems to exaggerate some of our pronunciation for comedic effect :) I certainly did not pronounce everything the way this list would indicate. Though I knew older people who did have "thicker accents" which were closer to this list. Specifically, I pronounced the word "wash" as 'warsh', the word "water" as 'wooder', the days of the week "-day" as '-dee' (ie Sundee, Mondee, etc.), and the word "on" as something like 'uu-wuhn'. The name of our city I pronounced as 'Baldimore', instead of "Bal-ti-more" or "Bal-amer", as that list would indicate. My army friends started teasing me mercilessly about this, and at first I just told them to get bent hehe...but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should try to pronounce English in some more standard way, just so I wouldn't sound like some uneducated hillbilly hehe. So I started practicing those words that caused my buddies to laugh the most, and started pronouncing them in my closest approximation of Standard American English.

A typical Baltimore Christmas



I went home to Maryland again for Christmas vacation. Unlike my last visit to my parent's house, this time everything was different. It was winter of course, and Maryland had its usual freezing winter weather. My parents drove down to National Airport in DC to get me, since that was where my flight ended up. We ended up getting lost in DC trying to drive back to their house, and it started snowing. Ordinarily this would have been annoying, and would have gotten my step-father extremely mad, but for some reason that night we all got a case of the giggles at the absurdity of it all. We eventually got out of DC, and had an uneventful drive north. As for the weather, I had spent the last several months in California, and I was completely unprepared for the cold. I spent my whole vacation shivering, even indoors. By the time I finally got used to the temperature, it was time to go back to Monterey. The worst part of the trip however, was my beloved Baltimore dialect. After spending several months practicing speaking Standard American English, here I was, once again surrounded by people speaking Balamerese. And I noticed every single word they said "incorrectly". And it grated on my nerves! And worse, I started noticing myself slipping back into the habit of talking like that myself. It was very frustrating. We had a little block-party get-together/cookout type thing, and all of our immediate neighbors came over one night in between Christmas and New Year's. And there I was, listening to all of the non-standard English and shivering, and lo and behold, one of the neighbor couples were talking normally! I mentioned this to them at a break in the conversation, "You guys aren't from Baltimore are you?" I asked. It turned out they were from Pennsylvania, but none of us had ever noticed before! They wondered how I knew, and I mentioned the dialect thing. And everyone stared at me as if I were a space alien hehe. Going back to Monterey was an all around relief, and I was really looking forward to the better weather, language study, and fun with my new friends.

A typical Baltimore party



It took me a few additional weeks to undo the linguistic damage a short stay in Maryland had done to my pronunciation, but I was talking "normally" soon enough. And future trips back to Baltimore had no effect on my accent, oddly enough. A more difficult habit to shake, however, proved to be my use of the word "hon". In Baltimore, this is used all the time as a friendly little add-on to the end of your sentences. Women use it with both men and women, men tend to only use it with women...but it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a substitute for the person's name. So we would say, "Pass me the salt, hon." instead of, "Hey you, pass me the salt!" hehe. But people not from Baltimore often interpret this as a sexist thing to say...especially when a man says it to a woman. It did get me quite a few funny looks!



I've given Baltimore and Maryland a fairly hard time in my posts here, calling it backward, provincial, etc. (and no doubt about it, it IS), but it turns out that there is one interesting thing that comes from Maryland...and that is John Waters and his films. When people heard I was from Baltimore, invariably I would hear the following things in the ensuing conversation, and would be thinking to myself the things in parentheses; 1) Isn't that state next to Connecticut? (No that's Massachussetts, the other East Coast M state), 2) Oh yeah, I drove through there on the way to Washington DC! (Yep, that's us, the Atlantic equivalent of "flyover country"), 3) They really like steamed crabs there! (Yep, oddly enough a coastal city eats seafood, you dork!), and 4) So do you like the films of John Waters? He's from Baltimore too! (hmmmmmm...). And actually I had never seen a John Waters movie. I was after all kind of sheltered. And his early movies are a little out there, sexually explicit, and frankly, gross. Not something parents would show their kids. And my family was dull anyway, heck my mom was still listening to Elvis music in the 80s hehe...they themselves had probably never seen a John Waters movie. In addition to their other qualities, John Waters films are known for featuring Divine, the drag-wearing chubby performer.



I ended up finally seeing some John Waters movies only later, after I left California, but I ended up loving them. I got my mom to watch Hairspray and Lust in the Dust, but she didn't really get them...and those 2 movies were pretty innocuous :) I've included a few John Waters and Divine clips here for the readers' enjoyment. And since many of the actors in his movies are Baltimore natives, listen closely for that dialect!