New England, We Are Different!

An anecdote that I favor is about a trip to New York City in the mid-nineties. I was still working as an applied anthropologist, and I was going to do a fast consulting job in the Seaport District. I flew in and grabbed a cab right out of the airport terminal building to my friend’s house, where I’d be staying.

I don’t think there is a typical New Yorker. We are from all over, but within a generation or two, we are all New Yorkers – sometimes to the dismay of visitors. So I didn’t pay too much notice to my cab driver. From his license, I surmised he was probably from Pakistan, but as I said, we come from all over. And when he asked me where I was going, it was pure Bronx, a neighborhood I knew well from working there as a kid. It made me recall the Grand Concourse and also East 149th Street.

I told him where I was going, and we fell into an easy conversation about flights, the state of the economy, and such. Then he asked me where I was from. I easily replied that it was just a few miles away, Washington Heights in Manhattan.

I could see him looking at me in surprise in the rear-view mirror. “No way!” He stated. “You don’t sound anything like ‘us.” What followed was a five-minute-long exposition on how I moved away when I was eighteen and spent most of my life in New England. He’d never been as far north as Boston, and soon we were comparing Yankee versus New York English.

I think almost any linguist will tell you that regional variations in language are not uncommon. But the cabbie’s statement that “You talk funny.” set off a whole bunch of memories. Up here in New England, our flagship popular English variation would probably be “Down East” Maine English. It is not just an accent. It is an entire way of speech. And one I was inculcated with in the time I lived on the coast. I went “away” with some pretty permanent alterations to my speech, and if you drop me anyplace from Mid-Coast to Brooklin you’ll start hearing me use it within a few days.

On the last several extended trips Down East, I’ve noticed that regionalisms and local words and terms seem to be in retreat. Many of the older people I learned my coastal English from grew up before standard TV English and pronunciation swamped the hundreds of regional variations of English found in New England. But…it’s not all gone!

Fifteen years ago, I was waiting for the sun to rise over Naskeag Point on the Blue Hill peninsula of Maine. I was waiting to take a video for a project I was doing for a client. Somewhere in the fog near me were two fishermen. They were oblivious to my presence and chatting in coastal English. When the sun rose and burnt off enough of the fog that we could see each other, they greeted me in rather plain Television English.

I’ve come to miss the local and regional things I’ve picked up over the years. When my kids look at me oddly and ask what do I mean, I patiently explain what a “cat run across the field cousin” is, or what it means to go somewhere by going ’round Robinhood’s barn. Or that being “highly permuched” was to be spoiled. And that last one came over with settlers from England, and was a Mid-Coast thing. One of my favorites was on the Coast when it was warm in the summer, people might make a little aspiration like a tiny gasp and exclaim – ” Some Hot!”

Please, if you speak a local English variant, hold onto it, cherish it, and make sure your kids learn it. Don’t allow the “standard” TV junk to swamp the individual beauty of your voice. Pretty soon, you’ll only hear it on historical television presentations of old novels. That would be a terrible fate for our linguistic heritage.

So if you journey across the border into our little corner of the continent listen carefully for those bits of localisms. They are part of what makes us all Yankee, or New Englanders, wherever we originally came from.