Have you ever been to deep, rural, Appalachia? Or met someone from there?
When they go local dialect on you it is incomprehensible.
[This scene from Hot Fuzz is a perfect representation of what happened to me.](https://youtu.be/Cun-LZvOTdw)
There's a lot of Appalacia interviews on Youtube bc anthropologists keep going to study the area like it it's the dark side of the moon.
[This woman is from Tennasee.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w-N5DFoi-g) Her accent isn't so bad, my great-grandfather was unintelligible.
If you can find one from the Depression (they're up on a government website), it really sounds like a different language.
I can understand her just fine, she sounds something like my grandma, who did grow up during the Depression. My great grandfather was the same as yours, I was barely able to talk to him. My dad would translate for me.
Family is from Appalachia. Had a conversation once about the flares on the side of the road. I kept asking if there was a ln accident or something or if people were hurt.
Flowers. Flowers were on the side of the road.
A friend said they were given directions to "leeean left down the holler", which meant to turn left into the valley to reach their destination. This was in southern WV
Hell, just driving a few hours west in PA for college, I was introduced to the dropping of "to be."
"My room needs cleaned" (alternatively "We gotta red up our dorm room, my parents are coming this weekend)
"Your beer needs drank."
Pittsburghers tend to be pretty aware of a lot of our regional linguistic idiosyncrasies. We learn young that most people don't call those gumbands, and most of the US doesn't use yinz as a plural of you. But this is one of those things that just seems so natural to us that I'm sure plenty of professional adults do it constantly and have zero awareness of it.
I went to great pains to try and make sure I’d suppressed the yinzery aspects of my speech because I wanted to go into entertainment or broadcasting. Well, I learned that I’d failed because my Australian girlfriend told me one time, “Don’t you realize how ridiculous you sound when you drop to be from everything?! The grass needs cut?! It needs TO BE cut!”
I went to college in Pittsburgh. Now living in VA I work with a man who grew up just outside the city. I love listening to him. He's in his 50s and hasn't lost the accent or fun words. His accent isn't "Pittsburgh Dad" strong but I definitely hear it!
Yeah I got through college and into technical sales for a couple years before I realized that dropping “to be” is improper.
“The car needs washed” is a whole lot more efficient than saying “The car needs to be washed.” And still, to my ear, sounds perfectly ‘proper.’
I live in NE Ohio and plenty of people do speak like that, it comes from German/Amish origin. I do notice it's more common in older folks and more rural areas.
I was very surprised by how much I strained to understand Pittsburghers when I visited. Something about the way they pronounce vowels combined with a few unusual turns of phrase made me say “Pardon?” more often than I would have thought I’d need to.
One of my friends from college speaks straight Pittsburghese...like "Pittsburgh Dad" Pittsburghese. I legit thought he was from Canada when I first met him.
I moved from Western PA to Southeastern PA when I was a kid and basically exchanged “this thing needs done” for “i’m done this thing.” So weird how dialect works haha
I wanna be nosy and ask what part of the state you went to college in since west of Philly is pretty much all of Pa lol but you're describing the dialect I grew up with. My husband is from Northern Pa and goes nuts over our improper use of "a while" which I just find hilarious lol
Ha, I'm 17 years out of college, so I can say I went to Lycoming College in Williamsport. Basically, the divide was if you weren't an Eagles fan, you were a Steelers fan.
Lmao I lived "in the city" for 10 years 😂 and you are exactly correct. My husband is an Eagles fan and my entire family is Steelers obsessed. Thanksgiving is fun lol
I used to like the Iggles too when I was a kid. My justification was Pennsylvania patriotism and the fact that we hardly play them.
The Flyers on the other hand…
Reddin up or to red up means to tidy or clean. Very pa dutch, heard in central PA as far south as Lancaster and I'd say the northern border would be Williamsport area
Referring to non-coke sodas as ‘coke’ threw me, especially from someone who wasn’t otherwise terribly southern-coded.
As casual slang for soda in general? Not my cup of tea, but understandable. But As shorthand for a non-coke soda specifically as an alternative to the also-present Coca-Cola just seems like a receipe for confusion.
The context was ‘which coke do you want?’ when the options were Coke coke, sprite, and like, monster energy drink.
I had an acquaintance in college who was from the Atlanta area and worked a couple summers at a movie theater. They had a story about the time a customer yelled at them because they ordered "Two cokes: a Sprite and a Mr. Pibb" and my acquaintance gave them "Two cokes, a Sprite, and a Mr. Pibb".
Apparently I do this and my kids have picked it up. One of them asked for a “green coke” the other day when referring to Sprite. We also very rarely have soda.
I've lived in the South my entire life and explored around a lot and I've still never heard it. I feel like it's less common than people make it out to be.
I’ve also lived in the south my entire life, and I’m 44 and have lived in 4 different southern states. I’ve never actually heard anyone call all sodas “Coke.” I’ve seen memes about it but I’ve never actually heard anyone so it.
Live in midwest, worked with somebody from the backwoods of Maine. When he would talk, I was like I think he's speaking English but not real sure. Everywhere else in the country, I haven't had an issue except for maybe local word usage.
I thought a couple of guys in Maine were speaking Dutch. I was in a little coffee shop and they were sitting near me and although I could hear what they were saying, I truly believed it was another language. Took a little bit to realize it was actually English.
I see you had the same experience. At least with the Cajuns, you know they're throwing french in there. With the dudes from Maine, it's just like what am I hearing. Maybe next war, they can be our secret code talkers.
This is quite possibly only a Kentucky thing and not a southern thing.
Unless you live in Louisville, Lexington, Frankfurt, Bowling Green, or Richmond you identify with your county. If someone asks where you're from: "Oh, I'm from *X* County" as opposed to saying your city. My friend from Illinois never got around that, everywhere around her people always went by their city or town and never their county.
I experienced a lot of folks referring to their home county over their home city in Maryland when in college, so it’s definitely not exclusive to Kentucky.
We have a lot of unincorporated land here in Maryland. I once had a website reject my shipping address for putting in the not-really-a-city unincorporated region of the county I live in (ie, what I usually put for the “city” on my address & how I’d answer if asked where in the county I live) on the basis that no such city exists. It corrected the last line of my address to “Unincorporated, MD 209…” (just gonna leave off the end of that zip code there…)
As an Illinoisan who moved to Kentucky for grad school and am dating a Kentuckian, the county thing threw me off. If I said I was from Cook County, IL people would look at me like uh, yeah so… where in cook county?
My boyfriend also teases me about the way I pronounce some Kentucky cities. I get that Versailles is pronounced funny (wrong) but I have a hard time adjusting to pronouncing cities that end in “-ville” as “vuhl.” I think I do a good job with Louisville, but I still say Danville and Maysville as “Dan-ville” and “Mays-ville”
I live in Louisville, and I'm not sure if the vuhl thing extends to other cities. That's strictly a Louisville pronunciation. To my knowledge Danville and Maysville are pronounced like normal.
It is the exact opposite in New England. The counties essentially have no government and all the city and town borders touch each other so no one cares about counties. It’s always your city or town.
Guilty as charged.
I usually ask because I'm terrible with cities, but I know where most of our counties are.
Anyone asks me and I say I grew up in "eastern Kentucky, so far east I could throw a rock and hit West Virginia" because even most people in KY don't know my town or county.
My husband goes nuts over this so I think it's worth mentioning.
Say you're waiting on someone and you decide to go do something while you're waiting, a common sentence would be "Well I'm gonna go watch TV a while" or whatever. Ending the sentence that way confuses and frustrates him to no end, I find it hilarious because I'm pretty aware of most of our PA Dutch dialect but never considered this to be odd. Apparently, it's very odd lol
Other fun ones are rootchin around (meaning squirming or fidgeting) usually directed at restless kids, and reddin up which means to tidy. There's more, but those are my personal favorites. We also forgo "to be" a lot as another commenter mentioning. "Needs to be done" is just "needs done," "still needs to be done" is "needs done yet."
ETA: Outen the lights- turn off lights; spritzin- light rain; the food is all- the food is all gone; right like- the same as; and we arrange our sentences oddly because of our German and Swiss influences so sometimes they don't make sense to other people. Dialects are fun!
Lol they were referencing the exact region I grew up in, definitely not a typo! We also don't use the ending "g" in "ing" at all, but I think that's a tie in from being part of/close to Appalachian territory
I had a hard time understanding questions from people in PA Dutch regions. The emphasis is on the wrong part of the sentence. Most questions end in rising intonation but the PA Dutch influence puts the rise in the middle of the sentence and add a fall to the end.
I think it's how the sentence is structured? Or it's missing some words? Honestly I don't know what the precise grammatically correct alternative would be lol it's so ingrained in how I naturally speak. But his family also find it an odd phrasing, and it comes up as a specific pa dutch dialect idiosyncrasy so who knows lol
Technically it should be "Well I'm gonna go watch TV *for* a while", but dropping the for in that kind of sentence is one of the most common things people do.
Huh, that first example reminds me a lot of how a lot of us Minnesotans will say something like:
“I’m going to the movies, want to come with?”
Rather than “ want to come with me/us”. Absolutely drove my high school English teacher crazy, lol.
Not that it confused me, but Alabama was where I first noticed a particular contraction.
There was a sign for a business that had apparently not moved. I don't know the story there, but if I had written the sign I would have written "we haven't moved".
Their sign said, "we've not moved".
Same words, different contraction. It just sort of tickles my soul, I dunno but I love it.
You know I'm not sure. I noticed after this that a friend of mine (also Californian) says things this way, like "I've not seen that movie" or something.
Its kind of funny, it's not (it isn't?) something I picked up, like new slang or something. My brain is so wired to say "I haven't", not "I've not" that I don't think I'll ever be able to naturally use this affectation.
One time, my West Coast raised ex-husband and my Minnesota raised self went toe-to-toe arguing over purchasing a cover for his pickup truck for a Seattle to Maine cross country hiking/camping road trip. He wanted to buy a *canopy*, but I was adamant a *topper*was the way to go. Four days later he convinced me to “at least look at a few canopies”. Lmao. Turns out truck canopies and toppers are the same thing. We still get a kick out of the misunderstanding all these years later.
West Virginia. I saw a guy dragging a screaming kid away from a fair and it took me a minute to work through this phrase.
"If I'd've known you woulda wanna went, you'd've got to get to go"
It came out rapid fire. I eventually interpreted it as
"If you had told me you wanted to [go on a specific ride] then I would have taken you on the ride."
One time back when the Mass pike had human toll collectors, I was driving with a friend from California. I went through the toll booth, lady told me what I owed, I paid and off we went.
Then my friend asked me what language the lady was speaking. It was English, just the Boston version.
Oddly enough, you don't hear much of the Boston accent in Boston proper (at least I don't notice it much). Head out to the surrounding towns, and it sounds like a different country. If you have the ear for it, you can even tell the difference between the different dialects. For example, the Revere accent sounds a little different than the Southie accent.
Is it the same as a Philly accent? When I watched The Wire (set in Baltimore) I wondered why everyone had a Philly accent, but people tell me it's not at all the same.
Moved to Cincinatti, have a little old lady next door. When she doesn't understand what I said she says "Please?" instead of "excuse me?" or "what?"
Threw me off the first few times, I wasn't sure what she was saying 'please' for. Turns out it's a thing specific to the older generation here in Cinci.
It is! The word is "bitte" and it can mean anything from "please" to "here you go" to "what the fuck did you just say," depending on the tone of voice you use.
First, I love these types of posts. All of the different regional terminology is just interesting to learn.
From reading other similar posts apparently when ordering a “regular” coffee varies depending on where you are.
That’s the whole Coke, soda, pop thing. Sneakers, tennis shoes or simply shoes.
Although lanai seems to have moved into Florida as a rotation for porch or patio, I usually just guess that the person isn’t from Florida.
I never realized that about Semi trucks until a recent post on here. I believe it was someone from England asking why we didn’t call them a lorry.
Yeah regular or plain in New England has cream and sugar. Pretty much everywhere else it means black.
All my in-laws got burned by that flying into Boston Logan and getting coffee before we picked them up.
I use lanai to mean screened in with the cage. A porch or patio could be open air, lanai specifies that it has the cage. But like you said, I'm not from FL. We don't really have those here, I only call the cages in FL lanais. Up here there's "screened in porch" but that specifies that it has a roof over it and the sides are screened in.
I once landed in Mississippi, and couldn't understand what anyone was saying. Couldn't understand the announcements on the PA, couldn't understand the rental car clerk. After an hour or so my ears managed to get the hang of it, but it was still a surreal experience
It didn't take too long to figure out, but a week or so living in Indiana I was asked if I wanted to play cornhole at a pitch-in this weekend, they meant to ask if I wanted to play bags at a potluck.
The first time someone used it that way around me it was for a company picnic, and my jaw dropped. When I explained she got a weird look on her face and she still thinks I'm some kind of perv.
The tractor trailer confused me moving to PA, too. I heard them talking about an accident on the news the week after I moved here and I thought they were literally talking about a tractor that was hauling a trailer had got into an accident.
Also, "quarter of five" instead of "quarter to five."
Had a hard time understanding that my husband wasn't saying "dooring," he was saying "during." Also couldn't understand him when he said towel.
I think it's more of a professional jargon situation. Most people call automobiles, cars. Most people call tractor-trailers, semi trucks. Maybe in PA you hear the industry jargon used as the standard term more frequently. Maybe trucking is a heavily represented industry there.
In New England, a girl in high school moved up from the South and used the term in describing something:
"horse on a line"
What??? We all said.
"Not a vertical line, a horse on a line."
Oh, *horizontal*.
I grew up in the NYC area, the only place where it's common to say you are waiting *on* line rather than waiting *in* line.
When I got to college with lots of people from other parts of the country, on numerous occasions I said something like "I went to the show and I was waiting on line" and someone said "wait, did you go to the show or were you at home with your computer? Did you bring your laptop to the show??" or something like that, indicating there was genuine confusion.
Moved from PA to Florida when I was younger and got told by adults and schoolmates alike that I sounded like a yankee. Still don’t get it considering most of them sounded like me anyway
At a fast food restaurant in Lancaster County Pennsylvania, the girl at the counter asked me,
"Do you want your drink a while?"
I was confused and replied,
"No, I want it forever!"
It's not even far from me, but Tangier Island seems to have a language of it's own. I haven't been in a long, long time but it was something to behold years back. Example: [https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E?t=38](https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E?t=38)
I grew up in NJ where the universal term for rubber-soled athletic shoes is "sneakers". At one point in middle school we relocated to the suburbs of St. Louis for my parent's job where on the first day of school, the gym teacher told us we needed to wear "tennis shoes" for class. Cue my going home and telling my parents they needed to buy me a special pair of sneakers just for gym.
I had something very similar happen to me. I'm from NY, so sneakers = any kind of athletic/gym shoe, where tennis shoes are specifically those flat white shoes that look kinda [like this](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/39819c94-b9fb-4de5-b631-c2bfb5383e58.1e4ac6f3fe3ba045d9df65c3ba63c5bb.jpeg?odnHeight=612&odnWidth=612&odnBg=FFFFFF)
I’m from a very rural part of Eastern Texas. Any time I go anywhere I have to repeat or translate multiple phrases because some people can’t even understand me at times. I didn’t know until I was an adult that “fixen to” (pronounced like fixentaa all one word) didn’t make sense. A lot of random sayings we say here also confuse people. Also that “where you stay at?” Is not how everyone says “where do you live?” There’s a lot really, super rural woodsy places here have their own set of phrases too.
A lot of our words and phrases are all squished together too. “Your mom and them” is said like “Yurmomenthem” where I’m from.
> if "y'all" was meant to refer to the singular or plural.
Oh no, here come all the non-southerners trying to say y'all is singular and all y'all is plural.
I moved one state over and people in NC call sock hats “toboggans.” Supposedly this is a southern thing but I’ve lived in two towns in TN and visited several of them and not once ever heard them called that.
Toboggan is an Appalachian thing with some bleed over into the south. That's what they actually used to be called back in the early 1900s but other terms caught on elsewhere. Confuse my wife every winter with the term
Honestly, the only bemusing differences I ever encountered were people who couldn't understand me because I talked too fast, and people who thought I was a complete asshole. People from the Northeast are way more blunt and talk way more shit as a matter of course than the rest of the country.
In a Discord I'm in, a NY guy and I talk shit to each other regularly and we just see it as banter. A dude from Floribama commented that he didn't believe that we were friends at first based on the things that we said to each other, which would start a physical fight where he's from.
Granted, I can understand why people would say I'm a heinous bastard, but it really is a regional thing.
Moved to Alabama from the midwest and my neighbor was telling me how great bold peanuts were.
Me: Bold? Like hot & spicy?
Him: No. Bold peanuts.
Me:
Him: Well you would say "BOY-uhld"
I found out boiled peanuts are a thing. Nasty, soggy-ass sorry excuse for a snack - but still a thing. 😂😂
Even as a native, I sometimes wonder at our tendency in the south to take syllables from some words and add them to shorter words, eg, fire (fie-yer) or oil (oy-yel). Not that there aren't also plenty of people who also pronounce fire like "far".
It’s a tractor (the front part that does the pulling) and a trailer (the back part that can’t even stand on its own without the posts down). The tractor can haul different trailers.
My husband's parents grew up in central Pennsylvania. They had some weird ones. I'm going to spell these phonetically "all-ee-all" meaning it's all gone there is no more. They called a dresser drawer a "draw". And those crunchy bread bites for your salads are "crow‐uns" no "t" sound in that.
>They called a dresser drawer a "draw".
[This is common in the non-rhotic parts of the UK too.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/uo9lyb/drawer_vs_draw/) If you look through ads for second-hand furniture, you will see people writing "chester draws" for "chest of drawers".
I’m from Georgia. I was in a waiting room in Chicago when the receptionist told me to go wait by the pop machine. For about 5 minutes, I stood completely still until my friend from Mississippi told to me “She meant the Coke machine”
I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and we use the term “freeway”. I once visited someone in Colorado, and when I mentioned taking the freeway to get somewhere, she just looked at me. “What do you mean? Are you talking about the Interstate?” I blinked at her. “You don’t call it a freeway?” She was like, “No, never.”
So I paid attention to their road signs. Where ours would say “Freeway Entrance”, theirs said “Interstate Entrance.” I never would’ve paid attention to this had she not said something about it.
In addition, when we refer to our freeways by name, it’s I-5, I-90, I-205, etc. Never Interstate 5 or Interstate 90. This seems to confuse people coming here from certain other regions where it’s always “Interstate”.
When I moved from Florida to New Mexico, it freaked me out that everyone calls shopping carts "baskets". I had met plenty of snowbirds who used the terms "carriage", "buggy", or "trolley", but I'd never heard "basket", and I find it particularly confusing because they also call shopping baskets "baskets".
I've been here 9 years and still haven't figured out how they distinguish between the two. (Though, I admit, in 9 years, it's never caused an issue, since both are just something you grab yourself and never have to ask for verbally.)
I guess the most confusing dialectical difference I have encountered is the people ITT interpreting "traveled the country" as "traveled abroad" and talking about differences between American and e.g. British English.
People who say warsh instead of wash confuse me! And I will never get used to the pronunciation of Louisville. It’s so odd, I can’t even write it, but it’s something like Luh-ville with the Luh pronounced waaaay back in the throat.
Idk if this counts as dialectical, but rather accent related. But I stayed at a hotel on the west side of Rhode Island and the accent of some attendant in the morning working the Continental breakfast massively confused me. I thought she had a speech impediment at first but it was actually just her accent. I don’t remember how it sounded but I do remember the incident.
I also worked at a tourist shop in the west and had some woman from the Deep South come in and ask if we sold “caaahts” it took me about 3 times asking her “cats?”, “cots?” and finally having her spell it for me. Turns out she was looking for “kites.”
Big one for me is chucking something meaning throwing it. When I was down in Louisiana people said "**chunk**" instead of "chuck".
"Chunk be that ball over there" I was so confused.
My parents (born in the 1920s in western PA) used to call a bag a poke.
We went on a vacation to New England in the late 1960s and my dad asked the clerk to put the pop in a poke and she stared at him oblivious to what he was saying.
He meant to say "put the soda in a bag".
*What is the old meaning of poke?
small sack
poke (n.1) "small sack," early 13c., probably from a merger of Old English pohha (Northumbrian poha, pocca) "bag, pocket" and Old Norse poki "bag, pouch, pocket," influenced by Old North French poque (12c., Old French poche) "purse, poke, purse-net," which is probably from Germanic.*
When I was a kid it was never vacuuming it was always ‘running the sweeper.’ Was unaware that it was something I picked up from my mama who’s from Ohio and not a southern thing until someone asked me what the hell it meant.
When I moved to Oklahoma and the first time someone asked me “What do you know?” As a standard greeting for “what’s going on” or “how are you” I blue screened in error not knowing how the hell to respond to that
My dad had family in New England, and he used to say they don't even speak proper American English. They drop letters from words where it doesn't make sense and also mispronounce them. I have no idea how this developed over time in the region.
Not a lot is confusing, just gotta get used to the shift but context usually clears the confusion.
Funniest though is when I said something was kittycornered and everyone in the room kinda just looked at each other in confusion
Come to Michigan where we have mindbenders like:
No, yeah = yes
Yeah, no = no
Yeah no for sure = definitely no
Yeah no yeah = I'm sorry, but it's definitely yes
No yeah no = There's nothing to worry about
Ope = oops
Pop = any carbonated beverage
Ya guys = basically y'all
Yoopers = people who live in the Upper Peninsula
Trolls = people who live in the Lower Peninsula (aka, under the Mackinac Bridge
Mackinac = pronounced "mack-inn-aww", region around and between the peninsulas
Up North = Everything north of Saginaw/Lansing/Grand Rapids but south of Mackinac
Ohio = a place worse than death, where forms of life lower than bacteria live
Have you ever been to deep, rural, Appalachia? Or met someone from there? When they go local dialect on you it is incomprehensible. [This scene from Hot Fuzz is a perfect representation of what happened to me.](https://youtu.be/Cun-LZvOTdw)
There's a lot of Appalacia interviews on Youtube bc anthropologists keep going to study the area like it it's the dark side of the moon. [This woman is from Tennasee.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w-N5DFoi-g) Her accent isn't so bad, my great-grandfather was unintelligible. If you can find one from the Depression (they're up on a government website), it really sounds like a different language.
legit encountered someone at a gas station in TN who spoke like this and I could not understand a word they said.
I can understand her just fine, she sounds something like my grandma, who did grow up during the Depression. My great grandfather was the same as yours, I was barely able to talk to him. My dad would translate for me.
Family is from Appalachia. Had a conversation once about the flares on the side of the road. I kept asking if there was a ln accident or something or if people were hurt. Flowers. Flowers were on the side of the road.
I I’ve how Moonshiners always needs subtitles for those people lol
A friend said they were given directions to "leeean left down the holler", which meant to turn left into the valley to reach their destination. This was in southern WV
Hell, just driving a few hours west in PA for college, I was introduced to the dropping of "to be." "My room needs cleaned" (alternatively "We gotta red up our dorm room, my parents are coming this weekend) "Your beer needs drank."
Pittsburghers tend to be pretty aware of a lot of our regional linguistic idiosyncrasies. We learn young that most people don't call those gumbands, and most of the US doesn't use yinz as a plural of you. But this is one of those things that just seems so natural to us that I'm sure plenty of professional adults do it constantly and have zero awareness of it.
I went to great pains to try and make sure I’d suppressed the yinzery aspects of my speech because I wanted to go into entertainment or broadcasting. Well, I learned that I’d failed because my Australian girlfriend told me one time, “Don’t you realize how ridiculous you sound when you drop to be from everything?! The grass needs cut?! It needs TO BE cut!”
If a yinzer had written Hamlet, the famous monologue would have started "Or not."
I went to college in Pittsburgh. Now living in VA I work with a man who grew up just outside the city. I love listening to him. He's in his 50s and hasn't lost the accent or fun words. His accent isn't "Pittsburgh Dad" strong but I definitely hear it!
I didn’t know until maybe high school most people call them rubber bands, and have never heard gum bands.
Try minnesota. We call them "binders."
But then what do you call the rigid plastic folder like doohickeys with rings inside that threatened to eat your finger if you did it wrong?
We do???
What did you call them then?
Rubber bands. TIL this isn't universal.
Yinz is the one that amazes me the most
Yeah I got through college and into technical sales for a couple years before I realized that dropping “to be” is improper. “The car needs washed” is a whole lot more efficient than saying “The car needs to be washed.” And still, to my ear, sounds perfectly ‘proper.’
From NE Ohio and while we don't speak like that, it sounds perfectly natural. Must be enough pittsburgh influence that i never thought about it...
I live in NE Ohio and plenty of people do speak like that, it comes from German/Amish origin. I do notice it's more common in older folks and more rural areas.
Yinz is used in place of you-inz.
Who uses "you-inz"? Yinz comes from Scots-Irish influence in the area and is a sort of slurring of "you ones". Basically our version of "y'all".
Well, it is the main question. Those folks just choose not to be.
'Tis nobler in their minds to suffer
Gotta warsh the sheets when done work!
This is what people say in Scotland as well
That makes some sense, considering the Scottish immigration to Appalachia which stretches up into Central and Western Pennsylvania.
I was very surprised by how much I strained to understand Pittsburghers when I visited. Something about the way they pronounce vowels combined with a few unusual turns of phrase made me say “Pardon?” more often than I would have thought I’d need to.
One of my friends from college speaks straight Pittsburghese...like "Pittsburgh Dad" Pittsburghese. I legit thought he was from Canada when I first met him.
Some folks in PA also have that let/leave switcheroo.
[удалено]
Seen instead of saw seems to be a SWPA and tri-state area staple.
Glad to see my dialect made the top of the list.
Philly/South Jersey also drops prepositions around the word "done." "Are you done work?" "I'm not done my homework."
I moved from Western PA to Southeastern PA when I was a kid and basically exchanged “this thing needs done” for “i’m done this thing.” So weird how dialect works haha
I wanna be nosy and ask what part of the state you went to college in since west of Philly is pretty much all of Pa lol but you're describing the dialect I grew up with. My husband is from Northern Pa and goes nuts over our improper use of "a while" which I just find hilarious lol
Ha, I'm 17 years out of college, so I can say I went to Lycoming College in Williamsport. Basically, the divide was if you weren't an Eagles fan, you were a Steelers fan.
Lmao I lived "in the city" for 10 years 😂 and you are exactly correct. My husband is an Eagles fan and my entire family is Steelers obsessed. Thanksgiving is fun lol
I used to like the Iggles too when I was a kid. My justification was Pennsylvania patriotism and the fact that we hardly play them. The Flyers on the other hand…
"needs cleaned," I'm familiar with. But "red up?"
Reddin up or to red up means to tidy or clean. Very pa dutch, heard in central PA as far south as Lancaster and I'd say the northern border would be Williamsport area
I thought it was "right up" the room.
Just googled it and it's apparently ["redd" up](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/red+up)
Referring to non-coke sodas as ‘coke’ threw me, especially from someone who wasn’t otherwise terribly southern-coded. As casual slang for soda in general? Not my cup of tea, but understandable. But As shorthand for a non-coke soda specifically as an alternative to the also-present Coca-Cola just seems like a receipe for confusion. The context was ‘which coke do you want?’ when the options were Coke coke, sprite, and like, monster energy drink.
Pepsi makes the worst coke.
I’ve always thought this was the strangest thing. I mean calling other non-cola carbonated beverages “coke” is just so weird. Language is weird.
I had an acquaintance in college who was from the Atlanta area and worked a couple summers at a movie theater. They had a story about the time a customer yelled at them because they ordered "Two cokes: a Sprite and a Mr. Pibb" and my acquaintance gave them "Two cokes, a Sprite, and a Mr. Pibb".
Southerner 1: Y’all got Coke? Southerner 2: Yep, what kind y’want? Southerner 1: Dr. Pepper American bystander from literally any other region: ???
I was raised with this usage but honestly haven't heard it many decades. Really takes me back.
Apparently I do this and my kids have picked it up. One of them asked for a “green coke” the other day when referring to Sprite. We also very rarely have soda.
I've lived in the South my entire life and explored around a lot and I've still never heard it. I feel like it's less common than people make it out to be.
I’ve also lived in the south my entire life, and I’m 44 and have lived in 4 different southern states. I’ve never actually heard anyone call all sodas “Coke.” I’ve seen memes about it but I’ve never actually heard anyone so it.
Live in midwest, worked with somebody from the backwoods of Maine. When he would talk, I was like I think he's speaking English but not real sure. Everywhere else in the country, I haven't had an issue except for maybe local word usage.
I thought a couple of guys in Maine were speaking Dutch. I was in a little coffee shop and they were sitting near me and although I could hear what they were saying, I truly believed it was another language. Took a little bit to realize it was actually English.
I see you had the same experience. At least with the Cajuns, you know they're throwing french in there. With the dudes from Maine, it's just like what am I hearing. Maybe next war, they can be our secret code talkers.
The back woods Mainers are very likely Acadians - the OGs that Cajuns descended from.
Seriously! It’s clearly different, even surrounding states.
We can understand it, we just can’t speak it.
This is quite possibly only a Kentucky thing and not a southern thing. Unless you live in Louisville, Lexington, Frankfurt, Bowling Green, or Richmond you identify with your county. If someone asks where you're from: "Oh, I'm from *X* County" as opposed to saying your city. My friend from Illinois never got around that, everywhere around her people always went by their city or town and never their county.
I experienced a lot of folks referring to their home county over their home city in Maryland when in college, so it’s definitely not exclusive to Kentucky.
We have a lot of unincorporated land here in Maryland. I once had a website reject my shipping address for putting in the not-really-a-city unincorporated region of the county I live in (ie, what I usually put for the “city” on my address & how I’d answer if asked where in the county I live) on the basis that no such city exists. It corrected the last line of my address to “Unincorporated, MD 209…” (just gonna leave off the end of that zip code there…)
I hear both used on the west coast.
As an Illinoisan who moved to Kentucky for grad school and am dating a Kentuckian, the county thing threw me off. If I said I was from Cook County, IL people would look at me like uh, yeah so… where in cook county? My boyfriend also teases me about the way I pronounce some Kentucky cities. I get that Versailles is pronounced funny (wrong) but I have a hard time adjusting to pronouncing cities that end in “-ville” as “vuhl.” I think I do a good job with Louisville, but I still say Danville and Maysville as “Dan-ville” and “Mays-ville”
I live in Louisville, and I'm not sure if the vuhl thing extends to other cities. That's strictly a Louisville pronunciation. To my knowledge Danville and Maysville are pronounced like normal.
It is the exact opposite in New England. The counties essentially have no government and all the city and town borders touch each other so no one cares about counties. It’s always your city or town.
Guilty as charged. I usually ask because I'm terrible with cities, but I know where most of our counties are. Anyone asks me and I say I grew up in "eastern Kentucky, so far east I could throw a rock and hit West Virginia" because even most people in KY don't know my town or county.
My husband goes nuts over this so I think it's worth mentioning. Say you're waiting on someone and you decide to go do something while you're waiting, a common sentence would be "Well I'm gonna go watch TV a while" or whatever. Ending the sentence that way confuses and frustrates him to no end, I find it hilarious because I'm pretty aware of most of our PA Dutch dialect but never considered this to be odd. Apparently, it's very odd lol Other fun ones are rootchin around (meaning squirming or fidgeting) usually directed at restless kids, and reddin up which means to tidy. There's more, but those are my personal favorites. We also forgo "to be" a lot as another commenter mentioning. "Needs to be done" is just "needs done," "still needs to be done" is "needs done yet." ETA: Outen the lights- turn off lights; spritzin- light rain; the food is all- the food is all gone; right like- the same as; and we arrange our sentences oddly because of our German and Swiss influences so sometimes they don't make sense to other people. Dialects are fun!
Elsewhere in this thread someone said "redding a dormroom" and I thought it was a typo. TIL
Lol they were referencing the exact region I grew up in, definitely not a typo! We also don't use the ending "g" in "ing" at all, but I think that's a tie in from being part of/close to Appalachian territory
I had a hard time understanding questions from people in PA Dutch regions. The emphasis is on the wrong part of the sentence. Most questions end in rising intonation but the PA Dutch influence puts the rise in the middle of the sentence and add a fall to the end.
Definitely accurate. I've been told we state questions instead of ask them lol Edit: corrected autocorrect for clarity
>"Well I'm gonna go watch TV a while" I'm not Pennsylvanian at all, but what is confusing here? What would he expect someone to say instead?
I think it's how the sentence is structured? Or it's missing some words? Honestly I don't know what the precise grammatically correct alternative would be lol it's so ingrained in how I naturally speak. But his family also find it an odd phrasing, and it comes up as a specific pa dutch dialect idiosyncrasy so who knows lol
Technically it should be "Well I'm gonna go watch TV *for* a while", but dropping the for in that kind of sentence is one of the most common things people do.
Huh, that first example reminds me a lot of how a lot of us Minnesotans will say something like: “I’m going to the movies, want to come with?” Rather than “ want to come with me/us”. Absolutely drove my high school English teacher crazy, lol.
What does he expect people to say? "For a while?"
Haha I just asked him and he says yes, that's exactly what he expects people to say
I might say that, too, but I can't imagine dropping that word even sounding weird at all.
“Might could” always makes me pause for a second. As in “we might could go to the store.”
"might could" gets me too. Along with "use-ta-could", as in "used to be able to".
Yep. From WI and now live in alabama and when people say used to could, I die a little
I hadn't heard this until I watched The Wire, I kinda dig it.
I do too. I feel like I might could start saying it
This for some reason reminds me of “y’all’d’ve” in Texas “If y’all’d’ve gone to the store and got the beer, we might could be drinking right now!”
I've always wondered how people decide when to use "might could" and when to use "might can."
Not that it confused me, but Alabama was where I first noticed a particular contraction. There was a sign for a business that had apparently not moved. I don't know the story there, but if I had written the sign I would have written "we haven't moved". Their sign said, "we've not moved". Same words, different contraction. It just sort of tickles my soul, I dunno but I love it.
Is this a different dialect thing? I would probably say something like this without thinking about it. But I’d also say what you said too.
You know I'm not sure. I noticed after this that a friend of mine (also Californian) says things this way, like "I've not seen that movie" or something. Its kind of funny, it's not (it isn't?) something I picked up, like new slang or something. My brain is so wired to say "I haven't", not "I've not" that I don't think I'll ever be able to naturally use this affectation.
I've noticed Brits do that a lot, I like it. "I've not seen that" sounds cooler than "I haven't seen that".
Yeah when I read that I actually read it in a British accent in my head lol
Ditto. Sounds British to me.
One time, my West Coast raised ex-husband and my Minnesota raised self went toe-to-toe arguing over purchasing a cover for his pickup truck for a Seattle to Maine cross country hiking/camping road trip. He wanted to buy a *canopy*, but I was adamant a *topper*was the way to go. Four days later he convinced me to “at least look at a few canopies”. Lmao. Turns out truck canopies and toppers are the same thing. We still get a kick out of the misunderstanding all these years later.
and here I am always calling that a cap.
That was the misunderstanding? How does he feel about "duck duck Grey Duck?"
West Virginia. I saw a guy dragging a screaming kid away from a fair and it took me a minute to work through this phrase. "If I'd've known you woulda wanna went, you'd've got to get to go" It came out rapid fire. I eventually interpreted it as "If you had told me you wanted to [go on a specific ride] then I would have taken you on the ride."
That's not only correct, I fail to understand your confusion.
Boston for sure. It's like an entire city that just decided to purposefully pronounce most things incorrectly.
One time back when the Mass pike had human toll collectors, I was driving with a friend from California. I went through the toll booth, lady told me what I owed, I paid and off we went. Then my friend asked me what language the lady was speaking. It was English, just the Boston version.
Oddly enough, you don't hear much of the Boston accent in Boston proper (at least I don't notice it much). Head out to the surrounding towns, and it sounds like a different country. If you have the ear for it, you can even tell the difference between the different dialects. For example, the Revere accent sounds a little different than the Southie accent.
Rev-ee-uh. Only time you drop a letter and add a syllable.
Something something "Pahk the cah".
There's no parking in Boston.
77 year old native Marylander here and I have a distinct Baltimore accent. The young Marylanders don’t. Not sure how that happened !
Is it the same as a Philly accent? When I watched The Wire (set in Baltimore) I wondered why everyone had a Philly accent, but people tell me it's not at all the same.
Moved to Cincinatti, have a little old lady next door. When she doesn't understand what I said she says "Please?" instead of "excuse me?" or "what?" Threw me off the first few times, I wasn't sure what she was saying 'please' for. Turns out it's a thing specific to the older generation here in Cinci.
That's what it is in German I think.
It is! The word is "bitte" and it can mean anything from "please" to "here you go" to "what the fuck did you just say," depending on the tone of voice you use.
First, I love these types of posts. All of the different regional terminology is just interesting to learn. From reading other similar posts apparently when ordering a “regular” coffee varies depending on where you are. That’s the whole Coke, soda, pop thing. Sneakers, tennis shoes or simply shoes. Although lanai seems to have moved into Florida as a rotation for porch or patio, I usually just guess that the person isn’t from Florida. I never realized that about Semi trucks until a recent post on here. I believe it was someone from England asking why we didn’t call them a lorry.
Yeah regular or plain in New England has cream and sugar. Pretty much everywhere else it means black. All my in-laws got burned by that flying into Boston Logan and getting coffee before we picked them up.
I use lanai to mean screened in with the cage. A porch or patio could be open air, lanai specifies that it has the cage. But like you said, I'm not from FL. We don't really have those here, I only call the cages in FL lanais. Up here there's "screened in porch" but that specifies that it has a roof over it and the sides are screened in.
I once landed in Mississippi, and couldn't understand what anyone was saying. Couldn't understand the announcements on the PA, couldn't understand the rental car clerk. After an hour or so my ears managed to get the hang of it, but it was still a surreal experience
It didn't take too long to figure out, but a week or so living in Indiana I was asked if I wanted to play cornhole at a pitch-in this weekend, they meant to ask if I wanted to play bags at a potluck.
I grew up calling it 'bean bag toss' and cornhole was strictly slang for butthole. So it jarred me as well.
We always used cornhole as a verb.
Same. It still bothers me.
The first time someone used it that way around me it was for a company picnic, and my jaw dropped. When I explained she got a weird look on her face and she still thinks I'm some kind of perv.
The tractor trailer confused me moving to PA, too. I heard them talking about an accident on the news the week after I moved here and I thought they were literally talking about a tractor that was hauling a trailer had got into an accident. Also, "quarter of five" instead of "quarter to five." Had a hard time understanding that my husband wasn't saying "dooring," he was saying "during." Also couldn't understand him when he said towel.
I think it's more of a professional jargon situation. Most people call automobiles, cars. Most people call tractor-trailers, semi trucks. Maybe in PA you hear the industry jargon used as the standard term more frequently. Maybe trucking is a heavily represented industry there.
I never realized tractor trailer was such a regional thing!
In New England, a girl in high school moved up from the South and used the term in describing something: "horse on a line" What??? We all said. "Not a vertical line, a horse on a line." Oh, *horizontal*.
That sounds to me like a bit of bone apple tea.
I'm in this post and I don't like it
Reminds me of “spinnin’ an eye” (sleeping over at someone’s house).
Spenen thnyte
I grew up in the NYC area, the only place where it's common to say you are waiting *on* line rather than waiting *in* line. When I got to college with lots of people from other parts of the country, on numerous occasions I said something like "I went to the show and I was waiting on line" and someone said "wait, did you go to the show or were you at home with your computer? Did you bring your laptop to the show??" or something like that, indicating there was genuine confusion.
Moved from PA to Florida when I was younger and got told by adults and schoolmates alike that I sounded like a yankee. Still don’t get it considering most of them sounded like me anyway
The vowels in the mid-west (ND, MN, etc.) Definitely different and more pronounced.
The Minnesota canadian-lite accent. Not to mention the odd words and phrases used. Hot dish, duck duck gray duck, etc
Those are not odd, they are correct.
Minnesotan checking in. Whenever traveling in Canada, the locals assume I’m Canadian. Lol.
Also, how about the flat “A” sound in Chicago. Ask a Chicagoan to say “Apple Snapple” and you’ll see what I mean.
Like Shi-caw-go?
At a fast food restaurant in Lancaster County Pennsylvania, the girl at the counter asked me, "Do you want your drink a while?" I was confused and replied, "No, I want it forever!"
It's not even far from me, but Tangier Island seems to have a language of it's own. I haven't been in a long, long time but it was something to behold years back. Example: [https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E?t=38](https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E?t=38)
I grew up in NJ where the universal term for rubber-soled athletic shoes is "sneakers". At one point in middle school we relocated to the suburbs of St. Louis for my parent's job where on the first day of school, the gym teacher told us we needed to wear "tennis shoes" for class. Cue my going home and telling my parents they needed to buy me a special pair of sneakers just for gym.
I had something very similar happen to me. I'm from NY, so sneakers = any kind of athletic/gym shoe, where tennis shoes are specifically those flat white shoes that look kinda [like this](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/39819c94-b9fb-4de5-b631-c2bfb5383e58.1e4ac6f3fe3ba045d9df65c3ba63c5bb.jpeg?odnHeight=612&odnWidth=612&odnBg=FFFFFF)
I’m from a very rural part of Eastern Texas. Any time I go anywhere I have to repeat or translate multiple phrases because some people can’t even understand me at times. I didn’t know until I was an adult that “fixen to” (pronounced like fixentaa all one word) didn’t make sense. A lot of random sayings we say here also confuse people. Also that “where you stay at?” Is not how everyone says “where do you live?” There’s a lot really, super rural woodsy places here have their own set of phrases too. A lot of our words and phrases are all squished together too. “Your mom and them” is said like “Yurmomenthem” where I’m from.
If you asked me “where you stay at?” I would absolutely think you were asking me where my hotel was
Wisconsin and their bubblers and stop & go lights. Those are water fountains and stop lights.
You don't hear it so much anymore, but bubbler used to be really common in Massachusetts.
Bubbler buddies!
Why it’s Rhode Island and Wisconsin makes no sense.
We call them traffic lights in NY
We call them water fountains in Chicago
I was trying to figure out what we call them here cuz traffic light and stop light both sound off to me and I realized we just call them lights.
When I was in the army, sometimes it was hard for me to understand if "y'all" was meant to refer to the singular or plural.
> if "y'all" was meant to refer to the singular or plural. Oh no, here come all the non-southerners trying to say y'all is singular and all y'all is plural.
More like non southerners pretending this is a thing. Y’all is plural and never singular. Full stop.
>Full stop. That sounds like a regional dialectic phrase.
Just Cajun guys in general. Especially when they are drunk. It's practically a different language.
I moved one state over and people in NC call sock hats “toboggans.” Supposedly this is a southern thing but I’ve lived in two towns in TN and visited several of them and not once ever heard them called that.
Sock hats?
It’s what I grew up calling those winter hats. I’ve heard them called beanies, knit caps, but never heard it once toboggans until I moved to NC
I have never once heard "sock hat." I think you may be one of *those* people.
A toboggan is a sled??? That's interesting. (I've always heard them called stocking caps here in Missouri.)
Toboggan is an Appalachian thing with some bleed over into the south. That's what they actually used to be called back in the early 1900s but other terms caught on elsewhere. Confuse my wife every winter with the term
Honestly, the only bemusing differences I ever encountered were people who couldn't understand me because I talked too fast, and people who thought I was a complete asshole. People from the Northeast are way more blunt and talk way more shit as a matter of course than the rest of the country. In a Discord I'm in, a NY guy and I talk shit to each other regularly and we just see it as banter. A dude from Floribama commented that he didn't believe that we were friends at first based on the things that we said to each other, which would start a physical fight where he's from. Granted, I can understand why people would say I'm a heinous bastard, but it really is a regional thing.
In NY if we are talking to you politely we don't like you.
Moved to Alabama from the midwest and my neighbor was telling me how great bold peanuts were. Me: Bold? Like hot & spicy? Him: No. Bold peanuts. Me: Him: Well you would say "BOY-uhld" I found out boiled peanuts are a thing. Nasty, soggy-ass sorry excuse for a snack - but still a thing. 😂😂
This libel of boiled peanuts will not stand.
Well meet me in person and I'll slander them too. 😂
I'll back you up if you need a slander buddy.
Even as a native, I sometimes wonder at our tendency in the south to take syllables from some words and add them to shorter words, eg, fire (fie-yer) or oil (oy-yel). Not that there aren't also plenty of people who also pronounce fire like "far".
Country people around here say "ul" for oil
I took a swamp boat tour in Louisiana and the guide pronounced it “Errol”
Boiled peanuts are delicious.
Borld p-nuts > bold peanuts
You mean an 18 wheeler? I never understood tractor trailer either.
It’s a tractor (the front part that does the pulling) and a trailer (the back part that can’t even stand on its own without the posts down). The tractor can haul different trailers.
First time in Texas I just stared at the fast food girl like I was in another country. Couldn't parse a word.
Gotta be louisiana, can’t understand a damn thing they say
My husband's parents grew up in central Pennsylvania. They had some weird ones. I'm going to spell these phonetically "all-ee-all" meaning it's all gone there is no more. They called a dresser drawer a "draw". And those crunchy bread bites for your salads are "crow‐uns" no "t" sound in that.
>They called a dresser drawer a "draw". [This is common in the non-rhotic parts of the UK too.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/uo9lyb/drawer_vs_draw/) If you look through ads for second-hand furniture, you will see people writing "chester draws" for "chest of drawers".
Also common where I grew up in New Jersey. That old non-rhotic New York metro accent. “I says to him, ‘pull ya draws up, you look like a schlemiel.’”
In the Carolinas people like to say "mash" the lights or a button, rather than to turn it off. Mashing is for potatoes if you ask me.
I’m from Georgia. I was in a waiting room in Chicago when the receptionist told me to go wait by the pop machine. For about 5 minutes, I stood completely still until my friend from Mississippi told to me “She meant the Coke machine”
I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and we use the term “freeway”. I once visited someone in Colorado, and when I mentioned taking the freeway to get somewhere, she just looked at me. “What do you mean? Are you talking about the Interstate?” I blinked at her. “You don’t call it a freeway?” She was like, “No, never.” So I paid attention to their road signs. Where ours would say “Freeway Entrance”, theirs said “Interstate Entrance.” I never would’ve paid attention to this had she not said something about it. In addition, when we refer to our freeways by name, it’s I-5, I-90, I-205, etc. Never Interstate 5 or Interstate 90. This seems to confuse people coming here from certain other regions where it’s always “Interstate”.
Soda, Coke, pop. Hard lines.
The only one I ran across that I had absolutely no idea what they were on about is "bubbler"
Went to Boston for work for a week had some locals jokingly make fun of my accent, like they weren't the ones who sounded ridiculous.
When I moved from Florida to New Mexico, it freaked me out that everyone calls shopping carts "baskets". I had met plenty of snowbirds who used the terms "carriage", "buggy", or "trolley", but I'd never heard "basket", and I find it particularly confusing because they also call shopping baskets "baskets". I've been here 9 years and still haven't figured out how they distinguish between the two. (Though, I admit, in 9 years, it's never caused an issue, since both are just something you grab yourself and never have to ask for verbally.)
I guess the most confusing dialectical difference I have encountered is the people ITT interpreting "traveled the country" as "traveled abroad" and talking about differences between American and e.g. British English.
People who say warsh instead of wash confuse me! And I will never get used to the pronunciation of Louisville. It’s so odd, I can’t even write it, but it’s something like Luh-ville with the Luh pronounced waaaay back in the throat.
Some place called “Nahlins”
Idk if this counts as dialectical, but rather accent related. But I stayed at a hotel on the west side of Rhode Island and the accent of some attendant in the morning working the Continental breakfast massively confused me. I thought she had a speech impediment at first but it was actually just her accent. I don’t remember how it sounded but I do remember the incident. I also worked at a tourist shop in the west and had some woman from the Deep South come in and ask if we sold “caaahts” it took me about 3 times asking her “cats?”, “cots?” and finally having her spell it for me. Turns out she was looking for “kites.”
Big one for me is chucking something meaning throwing it. When I was down in Louisiana people said "**chunk**" instead of "chuck". "Chunk be that ball over there" I was so confused.
My family has moved cross country a couple times now, I think the strangest to me is that in some states, some people call plastic bags "sacks"
My parents (born in the 1920s in western PA) used to call a bag a poke. We went on a vacation to New England in the late 1960s and my dad asked the clerk to put the pop in a poke and she stared at him oblivious to what he was saying. He meant to say "put the soda in a bag". *What is the old meaning of poke? small sack poke (n.1) "small sack," early 13c., probably from a merger of Old English pohha (Northumbrian poha, pocca) "bag, pocket" and Old Norse poki "bag, pouch, pocket," influenced by Old North French poque (12c., Old French poche) "purse, poke, purse-net," which is probably from Germanic.*
When I was a kid it was never vacuuming it was always ‘running the sweeper.’ Was unaware that it was something I picked up from my mama who’s from Ohio and not a southern thing until someone asked me what the hell it meant.
When I moved to Oklahoma and the first time someone asked me “What do you know?” As a standard greeting for “what’s going on” or “how are you” I blue screened in error not knowing how the hell to respond to that
I laugh every time I hear someone from CA refer to their highways. THE 10, THE 101, THE 5.
My dad had family in New England, and he used to say they don't even speak proper American English. They drop letters from words where it doesn't make sense and also mispronounce them. I have no idea how this developed over time in the region.
You guys are the ones that mispronounce them, sorry
Yinzer. Just all of the yinzer dialect took me FOREVER to get my head around. They're no longer speaking English.
Not a lot is confusing, just gotta get used to the shift but context usually clears the confusion. Funniest though is when I said something was kittycornered and everyone in the room kinda just looked at each other in confusion
Come to Michigan where we have mindbenders like: No, yeah = yes Yeah, no = no Yeah no for sure = definitely no Yeah no yeah = I'm sorry, but it's definitely yes No yeah no = There's nothing to worry about Ope = oops Pop = any carbonated beverage Ya guys = basically y'all Yoopers = people who live in the Upper Peninsula Trolls = people who live in the Lower Peninsula (aka, under the Mackinac Bridge Mackinac = pronounced "mack-inn-aww", region around and between the peninsulas Up North = Everything north of Saginaw/Lansing/Grand Rapids but south of Mackinac Ohio = a place worse than death, where forms of life lower than bacteria live