Map:
Lindsay:
Mildred:
Adam:
Gabrielle:
Having been born in Charlotte, North Carolina and raised for 17 years just down the street in Concord, North Carolina, you would probably assume that the way I talk comes from one speech community but think again. There are many factors and different speech communities that play a role in the language that I have learned speak today. Although the people who I have grown up around in Concord do have southern accents, I do not and neither do either of my parents. My father was born in Rome, Georgia and moved around a lot when he was growing up. His family did not stay in one location for long because my grandfather was in the Navy. Because of this, my dad never picked up on an accent from any of the states he lived in. He lived as far North as Connecticut and as far South as Georgia. My mom was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and moved to Burlington, North Carolina when she was eight years old. Although my mom’s parents have strong Northern accents, she does not have an accent at all, which leads to me. Some of my peers claim that I have a Southern accent in some of the words I use, such as y’all or not adding the “g” when saying words that end in “ing.” For example, the word “feeling” I say “feelin.” When I was younger, I learned what I said on how my parents spoke around the house or to me.
Another huge speech community that influenced me would be my peers. I spent most of my days in public school, around children my age. At school or on the bus, it was a whole new world when it came to language. I heard some kids saying words that I got in trouble for at home (or that I did not even know were bad words), some using slang words, some speaking broken English, and some even making up their own words. I picked up on some of this when I was at school speaking to other kids, because it was something that we all could understand. Even today my peers seem to inffluence my speech. A lot of people that are my age like to use slang words and "texting language" such as the words "ratchet, lit, dope, lol, brb, and bbl." Most of this language has rubbed off on me when, but only when I am speaking to my peers. I still use the language my parents taught me when speaking to them. Although I do not use the language that I have developed from my peers all the time, they still have played a big role in shaping my speech.
I was born in Houston, Texas and I moved to North Carolina when I was two so I did not have a speech community in Texas. I grew up in Hickory and then I moved to Indian Trail so I have always been around that southern type of accents. I never really caught on to the southern accent because I did not like it. The speech community that I came to adjust to is to more educational and professional one. My teachers always tried to correct me when I was speaking so I would always pick up on the right way to say things. Both of my parents are from Colombia so they don’t speak very good English. My mother has gone to English courses and she has learned so much grammar that she even corrected me at times. She has also been the one to encourage me to read and write better. I know she has taught me some things that I would have never learned if she was not a second language English speaker.
I have lived near Charlotte my whole life, Cornelius actually which is a town a few miles south of charlotte. So being from the south I have been influenced by the speech I have been around. My mom’s parents are from Thomasville NC so I am influenced by their rich southern accent. My dad’s parents Lived in Hickory also one of the more “southern talking” areas of western NC. I have been told by some that they hear a southern accent when I speak, but to me I just sound normal, it was not until I meet a few people from Wisconsin that I realized I did in fact have a bit of a southern accent . I have grown up around “southerns” my whole life so obviously I was influenced by them, so meeting someone completely outside of my speech community helped me realize I had been affected by those around me. My mother was a huge factor in how I developed as a speaker. She did not want to talk like her parents she in fact made a point to not draw out the letters and words of those around her. So hearing her speak like that encouraged or prompted me to do so as well. That being said I developed a small accent on certain words but overall my speech is not a drawn out as your typical southerner.
I was born in Chesapeake, Virginia and I moved to Camden North Carolina when I was in second grade. When I was younger I grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia; in Chesapeake I was beginning to learn English, and I was apart of a speech community with my peers, who were learning the beginning stages of English as well. Around second grade my family moved to Camden, North Carolina. When I moved into this town I instantly became apart of an entirely different speech community. The people that inhabit Camden, North Carolina are mostly seen from others as country, or redneck folk. Of course I didn’t immediately become country or a redneck, but from becoming apart of this new speech community I picked up on new words, or ways to say words I already knew. My mother was born and lived in Germany for four years, then she moved to Illinois and grew up there with her family. She grew up with German speaking parents, so that accent sometimes carried over when she was learning the pronunciation of specific words. To this day I can hear that slight german accent in some of her vocabulary, but it never carried onto to myself or my siblings. My dad grew up in Florida with his family. He never had a noticeable accent in my opinion. Growing up with my parents, and learning how to speak in their house, I of course picked up a little bit on the way they talk, but for the most part I learned English without an accent of any sort.
During grade school I was is my school’s speech community where I read, wrote, and spoke in English. It enhanced my English skills heavily and I also learned that we don’t drink “soda” for lunch. The educational speech community was not diverse. Many of my peers were from North Carolina in the community. Although there was little diversity it caused me to use English more often. I must say learning English is quite challenging. I think Spanish is an easier language just because it is easier to pronounce things and to read and write, words are not pronounced differently than they are spelled. Writing in English is hard as well because the spellings of some words are different. In Spanish many words are spelled the way they sound. I prefer Spanish rather than English, even though I use English a lot more than I do Spanish. Some words that I say differently from others are the following; Pecan I say peacon vs peecan, the word saw I say saw vs sall, leg some people say lag vs leg, crayon some people day cran vs crayon, the word syrup vs seerup, and the word carmel I say carmull vs karamell. Those are only a few examples that I have heard that can be said differently. Thinking about my accent is a challenge because some people say they can hear that very lightly that I have a Hispanic accent and other times people are completely clueless to the fact that I came from a Spanish speaking household.
My speech community has changed a decent amount throughout my life time, just like the rest of us. Mine has not been because of a move, more an advancement that slowly happened throughout time. It has changed because the older I grew the more developed and “full” my speech was .I would say I went through three major changes in speech from elementary to middle then finally high school . The groups of people I hung out with changed greatly through these times. In elementary school one does not fully have a grasp of their soon to be developed speech. Certain words of phrases do not come out with ease as they would to an older person. Therefore conversations air on the simple side due to lack of development. Vocabulary is slim so to speak. In middle school I was around a group of guys that always had this sort of unspoken competition with everything from sports to who knows the most about “this” and that . This competition drove us to learn different words, definitions Middle school was a speak community fueled by competition. While in high school after freshman year the competition had dwindled off and people had come and gone from the school I attended. So during high school I started hanging out with people I knew, but never really got to know them and become great friends with them. When we first started hanging out together I would notice some of their “sayings “or things they would say often. Weeks passed and the more time we would spend with each other the more we started to say what the “group” said, we as individuals had adopted what the people around were saying.
It’s evident that in our society we all speak differently. The reason behind the diverse dialect that most Americans along with everyone else in the world is because we grow up with different speech communities. We grow up with different ways of learning, speaking, hearing, talking, seeing our specific language. For myself I have had specific speech communities from my childhood to now. I’ve realized that from the day I was able to hear sounds, and determine what words sounded like to now in college, and being apart of different schools, having different groups of friends, and the different styles of music have all contributed to my way of speaking and interpreting my first and only language, English.
UNCC
Like we have said before, UNC Charlotte's speech community is so diverse. You can see a lot of diversity throughout our group, and we are only four people out of 27,200 students here at the university. Because UNCC is so big in number, it would be hard to classify as a speech community as a whole, so we believe that there are many speech communities here at Charlotte. We contribute to UNCC's speech community by being different culturally, and socially as individuals.