“You talk funny,” my family complains in their midwestern twang every time I go back to visit them in southern Oklahoma.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say with precise diction.
My siblings and I, having been born in Arizona, learned to speak in a way that follows established phonetic rules. Then when I turned 7, we moved to Oklahoma where people’s syllables seemed to run amok.
My brothers and sister assimilated this new language, but I somehow kept my crisp mother tongue. Now every time I protest that I do not speak funny, they list the words I say wrong, including my younger brother’s name.
“Why can’t you say his name right?”
“I am saying it right.”
I say it several times: Cole, Cole, Cole.
Cull, Cull, Cull. They parrot me.
Each time, they shake their heads in disgust.
They brand me a northerner even though I live just a couple states away to the northwest–not straight north. Doesn’t that make me a westerner? And why does it matter, anyway? They are midwesterners–not southerners!
Then one afternoon from Colorado while trying to locate an old friend I can’t find on social media, I called the Dunn Lumber Company in my family’s town. I hoped he could give me his sister’s number.
“Is James Lance there?” I asked the woman who answered.
“Who-o-o-o?” she asked in a voice like sweet tea.
“James Lance.” I emphasized each mono-syllable of his name.
“Who-o-o?”
I said it again, but louder.
“James. James Lance.”
“Ma’am, I cannot understand a word you’re saying.” She strung out every syllable.
“Ja-imz. Ja-imz La-ince,” I drawled out.
“Oh, no. He’s not here today.”
That day, I learned the hard way that I truly no longer speak the dialect of my clan, but I can twang with the best of them when necessary.
(You can learn more about me here if you’re interested.)