Courtney Giannini English 1103 Mr.

Wray November 13, 2013 A speech community is characterized as a group of people that possess the same dialect, and often times live in the same general area. Growing up, I never noticed that I was a part of a speech community. Everyone in my town talked the same and traveling I just thought that the other people spoke funny. When I arrived on the University of North Carolina at Charlottes campus, I started to notice that I was surrounded by people with all different kinds of dialects and accents. As we began your class, the blog assignments we were required to do made me recognize the importance of speech and how diverse everyone is from speech alone. Frequently my friends would make jokes about how country I sounded and they would attempt to mimic my southern accent. Since I was surrounded by students that constantly questioned the way that I talked, I became curious about what exactly set my speech characteristics apart from others around campus. Before even arriving here in the fall, I had signed up online after orientation for Panhellenic formal recruitment. A few months ago I received a bid to the sorority on campus named Alpha Delta Pi. After accepting the bid that was offered to me, I began spending a lot of time around girls that possessed the same speech qualities that I do. The assignments that we had done for your class and the ones that were still yet to come made me consider that I had finally found a speech community on campus that I could call my own. Not only am I a part of my sorority speech community but my family within that organization is a separate one in itself. I focused on my family in my sorority for my speech community project because it was the one I had the most qualities of. I received my big diamond sister almost solely because we both are from small country towns and have very similar speech characteristics. In all honesty, my whole family in ADPI is known from living in rural areas and having a Southern accent. Finally I had found some individuals on campus that understood me without making me repeat myself one hundred times. Being in your class, I began to think about what actually set my speech community apart on campus. I knew that the girls I was surrounded by all had a southern accent but I didnt know how to explain what made the way we spoke country. I began researching what characterized the Southern dialect and it spelled out in grammatical terms what that actually meant. It described pronunciations of words that I said but showed it using phonetics which made me visualize how the words would sound to someone outside of my speech community. Words like doesnt that I would say more like dudden or talking as tawkin. Also, many of the websites I visited commented on the fact that Southerners put heavy stress on vowels and add extra syllables into words. I am guilty of both of these qualities especially the stress on vowels. The vowel that almost all my peers would say that I put the most stress on is the letter I. Another thing that my resources pointed out was that people with a Southern dialect often talk much slower because they have a drawl. I completely agree because when Im traveling and other people are talking I often miss pieces of the conversation because I cant keep up with their speed talking. The video capture really

displayed the characteristics that I had researched and brought it all together for me. I paid close attention to precisely how my sisters pronounced certain words and the amount of time it took to say them. I compared their video to the way some of my other companions outside of my sorority would say the same phrases or words. It was such a dramatic difference of how the people in my video capture spoke and the other girls that were from areas further up north. Now I can understand why students around campus always give me strange looks when Im talking or ask me where I am from. It is because before being at college and having your class I never was aware of the fact that my dialect is drastically different from most others. This project has truly made me aware of the diversity of not only places that are long distances apart but also the drastic changes in areas that are not far from each other. I realized that dialect has everything to do with the places you grew up and that some people possess qualities of multiple different regions. I hope that one day I can travel around the world and visit numerous different areas that have unique speech communities that I can learn about. Although I feel that I will never be able to lose my born and raised southern dialect, I pray that I can at least be able to control it more. I feel like I am in more than just the speech community that I chose to research for my paper but I havent figured out what the other ones may be yet. This project has thoroughly sparked my interest in learning more about individuals dialect and why they speak the way they do. This assignment will make me pay closer attention to my surroundings and research the unique characteristics that make up the speech communities surrounding me.