The commonwealth. (Greenwood, Miss.) 1896-1923, 1905-11-17
THE OLD YANKEE ACCENT.
New England Provlncialisms Are Not
Quite So Often Heard as
Formerly.

We hate to believe our Green noun.
tain friend, the Burlington News.
when 1t assures us that the Van,
kee accent IS dying out" says thu
New York Sun, Even in that New
England world OF French Canadians,
Italians and other foreign stocks we
hope that "Haow air ye?" still glad.
dens the ear. Yet the Burlingtonian
Is sure that even In remotest parts
Of Vermont the long.drawn 'caow' and
'naow and kindred words are rarely
heard" So much the worse. The
kindly native tang, the provincial
stamp Of speech, are welcome to all
but pedantic and priggish long ears.
The final "a" sounded as If" in pin, -
"Ameriky." "Africy," "Cuby:" "Eu.
ropean' with the accent on the ante
peHultimate, a pronunciation that even
Mr.. Seward is said TO have used; the
sloughing off OF final g" in ing"
the adding of "h' to height, thus pro
n]ouncing it as Milton spelled it; the
little "yulgarisms" like git" proba,
bly, "reminiscences of the speech of our
ancestors; they have their charm.
especially as one grows older and re,
turns to his first love,
If we may judge by books. dialect
never lourished more than in these
days OF trolleys and cheap travel and
Citified country, Mrs. Wilkins-Free.
nan hears dialect enough in New Eng
land. Probably Mr.. Kipling detected
strange intonations and lingo in Yer.
mont, though nothing approaching the
uninteiligible hash in which he Is
pleased TO compose. In Maine, lovely
Maine, there are pronunciations which
an outlander enYies but can scarcely
reproduce. Coat boat even
state" 'stet O. Maine" have their
interesting variations of sound.
"Surry," "Cluset," "cuierny," "Puca,
huntas"-why should everybody pro.
nounce like everybody else?
The truth is that no universal uni
formity prevails. The %southerner, the
westerner, the midSle slater, the in
habitant of each several state. have
their little p~eculiarites. The country
is full of local dialects. Many of the
peculiarities ascribed to the Yankee
speech may be heard more or less over
much of the country. Certain noun
tain dialects of the south may be more
limited in their geographical distribu,
ton, but the Yankee OF parts of Indi-
ana and of the south will preserve the
good old Yankee speech, even II it be
we decline to admit-that
Hosea Biglow Is "as extinct as the
The other day we picked some
good words out of the dictionary of
Terms Used in Forestry and Log
ging,' mere drops out of the great
ocean of special yet in the main es.
sentially popular vocabularies. That
strange and gifted speech, "Pennsyl-
Vania Dutch" is still too little known.
We see no reason why a man shouldn't
be eager and proud to possess and
treasure every particle of his native
dialect, be it Floridian, Oregonian,
kansan. Even If he is not, if he loves
that cheap plated ''cosmopolitanism"
which scorns the yernacular of the
soil, he may be guiltily sure that his
speech, and especially his vowels, be-
trays him. Keep your ears open in a
car, ~ferryboat or in the street and
you will catch many shades of pro.
vincial'-and therefore thrice blessed
and pronunciation.
Finally, even the snob will drop the
prunes and prisms out of his mouth
when he gets old.
Wen bet there's plenty of Yankee
accent in Vermont still. II there isn't,
our Burlington friend should visit,
say, the Jerseys, In good, fiat, nasal,
twanging genuine Yankee speech the
Jerseys outshine many of their neigh.
Scene and landscape seem to
affected the vocal organs.