Heynabonics

With our commercial analysis speech due in a couple of days, I've been thinking a lot about how I talk.

I'm from Simpson, Pennsylvania. The closest city anyone's ever heard of to Simpson is Scranton. Even then they probably have only heard of Scranton because of The Office. So basically it's one of those small towns in the middle of nowhere that no one ever leaves and even if you're lucky enough to escape your family's always trying to pull you back. Since we're pretty much isolated from the rest of the country we've developed a certain dialect. It's not very different from normal speech, but I'll notice that I sometimes pronounce ceratin words differently than others. For example sometimes I'll say "Mayan" instead of "mine."

The main thing I've noticed, however, is my tendency to run words together. For instance I'll often smash "did you eat yet" into something like "djeetjet." It's almost like I'm mumbling, but at a higher volume. In normal conversation my lack of enunciation isn't really a big deal, but when making a formal presentation or speech it's a problem. When speakers don't enunciate, they seem sloppy, like they don't care about the speech enough to even put effort into forming proper words. I want people to judge how much effort I've put into my speech based on the content, but if I sound like I don't care then why should you care? Most of the time, with enough concentration, I can remember to enunciate, but sometimes I still slip up.

Honestly I should be grateful I only have to deal with a minor lack of enunciation. Some of the people from Northeast PA sound like complete idiots when they talk. I once heard someone order "a couple two, tree hadags, two wit kraut one wit not" which in plain English would be "three hotdogs, two with sauerkraut, one without." Godda love da Valley, heyna?

The video explains a lot more about Valley speak.