Idaho vs California

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by DCCougar

Interesting info!



On a side note, Utahns definitely have their own accent. It's pretty well isolated to the use, or non-use, of a single consonant. They don't pronounce the "t" in "mountain." It becomes "moun-in." Clinton becomes Clin-in. It's funny! I've been living in Utah for a while, but I'm not from here.

Can't rec you again, but that's sure the truth! There's a lot of speech traits I hear only in the mountain west like this. I hear them in my own speech.

My daughter had a friend who moved to the south after she married. I knew the girls' husband too, and saw them both after they had been living there for about 5 years. His speech hadn't changed at all, but hers sure did!

It's always been a mystery how some folks' lifelong speech can change very quickly, and other folks don't change at all. And I know some families where all the members have strong accents except for one child, who has none of it.

[FutureNorthender]

Originally Posted by banjomike

One of the strangest things I learned was when folklorists want to study old past traditions, they don't go to the mother country; they go find immigrants who have moved from there a long time ago.

When immigrants leave their homes for new ones, they take their culture as it was then with them and hold to it stronger than those who stay and never leave the mother country.

Culture always changes, so the mother country changes over time, but since the immigrants don't live in the changes, the old stuff is preserved (and cherished) by them. It's sometimes almost unchanged when the immigrants move to a really unfamiliar new home as a small group for a very long time afterwards.

This definitely rings true. When I was a kid, my family lived in Denmark for a year. Shortly after we returned to the U.S., we visited Solvang, a Danish village in California. We scoffed at the place because it was nothing like the 1974 Denmark we’d just left However, upon returning to Solvang years later it seemed just like my memory of Denmark.

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by FutureNorthender

This definitely rings true. When I was a kid, my family lived in Denmark for a year. Shortly after we returned to the U.S., we visited Solvang, a Danish village in California. We scoffed at the place because it was nothing like the 1974 Denmark we’d just left However, upon returning to Solvang years later it seemed just like my memory of Denmark.

Yup. The oldest and strongest of traditions linger on the longest in the immigrants. The stuff the grandparents said and did, especially songs and stories.