First draft of My Family’s Speech Community We definitely all have experienced one or more speech community in life. I have encountered a lot growing up with separated parents, through school, work, just everywhere | encountered them. There are also many different ones. If someone can’t find them or notice them at first, just sit back and listen to the people around and then go somewhere else with different people and listen to them. Try and distinguish the differences in wording and dialect. Do they use different slangs? It is that easy to notice how people speak.
Just go out and step into the world of speech communities. The one I’ll be talking about in this paper is, one specific side of my family, the household of dad’s brother’s side. First we will distinguish, who are these people? Where are they from? What do they and where they are from look like? The genders in the household? The races? The average age range of people in the household? And so on to what their speech community is more about. What is the language register? Why is it more casual or formal? What language is used within the house hold?
How do they communicate and some examples of what they say? My dad’s side of the family consists mainly of: head of house Mamaw, then there are Aunts and Uncles, then their children who are my Cousins. The few names of this little speech community are: Mamaw Hilda, Uncles and Aunts: Wesley (Connie) and Michael (Jessica) and an Aunt Angela, then Cousins: the kids of Wesley (Connie) are Hillary, Mary Lynn, and David, and then the child of Angela is Angel. There is two other people in the household, but Tam unsure what they are to me if they are anything.
I have just always called them part of my family. I say this because it is a little confusing where they live because my Uncle Michael is married to Jessica, who is his cousin. They don’t call it kissing cousin Kentucky for nothing! Also some of them have different mothers than fathers but they all live together and it gets confusing who is what and who is not my family. These people are relatives of mine some by blood some by marriage. These people are hunters, partly auto mechanics, and a little bit of a druggie/crime family.
They live in Hart County, Kentucky. The house hold is in Cub run, Kentucky, a little country town. These people are probably some of the most redneck country speaking hillbillies I have ever met and are not the brightest people either, except for hunting and wilderness smarts. Now have to explain this household and why there is more than an average family in it. What I am describing isn’t actually one house of people but, a circle of houses in the back end of woods where they own about a mile in every direction.
In this circle there is a main medium size house, there is a road going through the circle, but going around it there is then a trailer and another trailer not far from each other, then there is a small RV maybe suitable for one person. The road in between the houses is the entrance to the circle of houses to going for maybe a bit over a mile before anyone hits the river and their campgrounds they made in the surrounding woods. They didn’t refer to the different homes as different homes; they referred to them as a little circle of where we live, and we live together.
For instance yes one aunt and uncle lived over here but they also lived over here in this house, too, just the first one had their clothes and stuff in it. These homes where old and rusted like when people see old cars in a junkyard, with holes that have rusted with the beautiful dark reddish brown color. But there was still some color on the homes. When I was there it would always smell of the earthy ground mixed with the river and other times I would smell the firewood from bonfires.
The firewood was my favorite memory of scent. Growing up with people who had rusty houses, or with someone who had roaches, or had not kept their house nice and clean like anyone else would think an average house hold did, or with kids running barefoot around in the dirt, I got used to being around my different families in this position and felt to me, it was normal. They look of an average human except they may not have the best of dental, and they also wear things that may look a little bit more country and not things like blouses, fancy pants and high heels.
What they and I consider professional is jeans and the nicest clean shirt we have. They consist of males and females, about equal amount of both. Their house hold is mostly Caucasian except for my one cousin Angel who is black/ white mix. Their age range goes until death but the average person is around their 40 to 50’s or there is a group of us young adults around the 20’s to 30’s. The language register they have is definitely casual. Why is it casual?
It’s because they don’t really care what they say. It is not very well-educated/intelligent person will be going to their house in the little run-down town to talk to them. Just like me they speak before they think. Plus they use slang. Just because its Kentucky people may say that’s not the south but it is. They grew up talking English, redneck, country slang so it stuck with them. They are also more the type that has a dirty slang than normal country speaking folks, because they aren’t just normal.
They cuss as well. Some examples of things they say: Y’all, ain’t, ass (ice), folks, crik (creek), don’t getch yur panties up in a bunch, let’s go fishin, let’s go catch us sum dinner, warsh, your so full of shit your eyes are brown, I’m busier than a 2-dollar whore on nickel night, I gotta piss so bad my eyeballs are floatin, let’s go gut us some, skinning a bambi, that was as useful as tits on a bull, you grease monkey, that was some bag of shit, light me one (cigarette)”.
Some of those mean for example the bambi one is just simply saying we are about to skin the deer we just caught, or the eyeball floating one means literally when someone has to pee really bad. At one point someone came up with a stupid saying. It was “why is your neck so red (then they would smack someone else as hard as they could on the back of their neck knocking them over and making it bright red then say) I know why it’s cause you’re a fuckin redneck” and then laugh. They are really good at hunting pretty much anything, From deer, squirrel’s, fish, duck, bunny rabbit, and turkey to anything.
My uncle Wesley also carves wood, and made me a walking stick when I was younger. He had also made tomahawks to use and also put on his wall as decorations. The last time I saw anyone skin a deer was in Hart County. The first time I went deer hunting with my dad I was pretty little and everyone always said I kept telling my dad to not shoot it and he said for me to be quiet and he had to, if we wanted a good dinner that night. But I would help when I got older skin it and cut it. I remember holding the knife while my dad was digging through the still warm deer of what he could get out with his hands (guts).
I didn’t like that feeling when I got to cut some of the skin off and I felt the lifeless but warm body of the deer, it just felt gross but I did it anyway. It was good meat! In conclusion, we all have different speech communities even within our families whether they are great or as other people would classify as inappropriate communities like this one. I have a family community where they speak country and have their slang that goes along with it. Thave people all the time look at me and ask why I talk so funny? Or where am I from? And I don’t have that much of an accent that I notice by myself just talking.
Since I grew up partially and have most of my roots from Hart County I have sort of adopted the accent and a bit of the slang. But I feel I can’t hear it as much as other people who speak heavily country and slang in their house every day. I grew up partially there because my parents were split. But if someone talks to me long enough and I’m in the middle of talking and I’m talking quick I will start to babble a little and then sometimes the next few words that come out sound as if I lived with these people my whole life. People or my friends will go what was that? And I would say that’s my country side coming out.
Being around the different speech communities can impact us differently as well. even though I am not living with these relatives I still have blips in my accent that remind me of them. Speech communities can make you think differently whether its “oh, that’s cool” or “oh, that’s offensive. ” I feel we shouldn’t try to change the way we speak, because it always finds a way back into our life. Meaning what we started out with speech community-wise will always be the way we speak. Though it changes tiny bits over our years, it’s still our “mother language” that we will have within.