UPDATE—“MICROACCENTS” IN FRANCE.
UPDATE—“MICROACCENTS IN FRANCE.” I posted here about a review of Graham Robb’s THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE which pointed out the hundreds of subdialects in France at the time of the French Revolution. P.N. Furbank has a review of Robb’s book in the New York Review of Books for December 6 which discusses how small the “pays” which had its own dialect might be: “It might be the area within which its own church bell could be heard more distinctly than those of other villages; and on the other bank of the local river people might very likely speak an altogether different dialect and have quite different traditions and manners.” In my post, I had remarked on how we still have “microaccents”—a contemporary linguist was able to identify the block in the Bronx where Dick Weisfelder grew up.
I love to think of an area being defined by how well you could hear the church bell! Love it.
Living in Virginia is an opportunity for me to experience different accents. Lee’s mother has a pretty different accent from most of the people I speak to daily and she grew up in Richmond, or the outskirts. My friend Patsy, who’s lived in Danville her whole life, has a very distinctive accent–but identical to everyone else I met in Danville when I visited.
I’ve only been told once that I had an accent, and that was by a college-aged boy who was from Portland, Oregon. Patsy says I speak “normally” and said she couldn’t imitate the way I talk.