Hard to imagine your accent, as I think of it, saying y’all! My Argentine husband sounds inebriated when he attempts y’all and speech-impaired when he tries all y’all.
When my granddaughter was 4, my stepmother passed away. She was living in Tennessee at the time of her death but her home state was Maine near the Canadian border. A friend and I drove to Tennessee to go through my mom’s house and bring back items I wanted to keep. We stayed three days with friends of hers who lived many years in Tennessee.
Arriving home in Florida, Anita and I were mimicking the East Tennessee accent. My grandchildren couldn’t understand what we were saying! My grandson begged me to stop talking like that but my 4-year-old granddaughter loved it and begged me to teach her Tennessee. And, I did. For years, she and I would take on a thick East Tennessee accent and talk like my mother’s friends. She called me memaw, which is an old Southern nickname for grandmother.
Once we were at a favorite small café with an atmosphere that encourages conservation with people at other tables. We met three women, one of whom spoke Spanish. My grandchildren are bilingual and spoke Spanish with her. She was quite impressed and made a comment about how useful it is to know more than one language. My granddaughter enthusiastically said, Actually, I speak four languages — English, Spanish, sign language (she knew a decent amount of sig language at the time), and Tennessee!
One of the women said, I was raised in Tennessee and didn’t realize we spoke a different language!
Oh, yes, said my granddaughter, It is a different language. When I speak Tennessee my brother and mother can’t understand anything I say!
Then, she and the woman preceded to talk Tennessee for several minutes.
The other two women, who’d never been to Tennessee, agreed they couldn’t understand much of what was being said so Tennessee must be a language of its own!
