Welcome to Floor-dah, or adventures in pronunciation.

Well, I made it 4 days without crying. Admittedly, I had had a few beers this time, which didn't help in the slightest, but I think tears are probably likely to surface occasionally. I did, after all, just move continents.


The whole moving continents thing makes you look at the world around you in a totally different way. By that I mean, instead of when you're on holiday (I so nearly said vacation there, which is horrendous and is exactly the sort of thing I'm going to talk about!) you notice the big things that are different - like driving on the right (and not necessarily correct!) side of the road, currency, accents, etc. It's only when you spend a lot of time in one place - or know you are going to - that you notice all the smaller things that are different.


Here is an example. I went to the bank this afternoon to cash a check I'd got in the post. I went to the counter and asked to cash the check. I was presented 5 minutes later with several hundred dollars in notes. It turns out I had to specify that I wanted to deposit the check - if you ask to cash a check in this country, you will get exactly that back - cash.


Part of the reason for this is that the old cliche is true - the British and the Americans really are two nationalities separated by a common language. There are occasions where different words are used to mean the same thing - bathroom and toilet as an example. The really confusing bit is, like my fun times at Wachovia earlier, where the same word means different things. This is particularly true when it comes to slang and I've got myself in a lot of trouble in the past thanks to misadventures in slang - don't even ask what 'pulling' means in the US. (For any American readers, 'pulling' in the UK is a slang term for making out)


Then there's accents.


 A clear example - Florida. I say it with 3 syllables (flo-REE-dah). When my friends on this side of the pond say it, I hear 'FLOOR-dah'. Where we Brits have a short vowel sound, the Americans have a long one (repeat: ruh-PEET / REE-peet). Generally this is easy to decipher, but occasionally it can get messy - I had a complete misunderstanding with a friend of mine a couple of years ago due to the way each of us says the word garage.


I'm very predisposed to pick up accents of the people I'm with, and did return home from my six months working in the USA with a bit of an American twang and a lot of American terms (don't even ask about the 'stick shift' incident, I'm still paying for it 3 years late). But now I am here, and here for good, I can already feel myself fighting in my head for the survival of British English, which feels like one of the cornerstones of my 'Britishness' and which, now I'm ex-patriated, feels much more important than before. I've often read about how language becomes a huge part of a person's identity when they move abroad - I just didn't realise the same issues applied between two English-speaking countries.


I'll sign off for now with an apology for geeking out on this - but as a linguist, I think about this stuff all the time :)