"Umm, what?"

Kenn was raised in Georgia and completed his undergraduate education in Alabama, so came honestly by the rather strong (some might say obnoxious) drawl he carried into his early 20s. He realized, though, that those raised outside the South would assume he was as slow of mind as of speech if he didn't do something about that accent, so over a couple of years trained himself to eliminate most of his drawl and speech errors. Having focused so intently on his own speech patterns made him interested in and sensitive to those in others - an armchair linguist, if you will.

In his estimation the fine folks in eastern Pennsylvania suffer from vowel confusion. To wit:

• The long "A" sound (as in "cake") is tinged with a long "I" sound. "OK" sounds like "oak-eye".
• The long "U" sound (as in "union") is tinged with a long "O" sound. "You" sounds like "yo" (this one's easy if you recall Sylvester Stallone's accent in Rocky).
• A "w" sound is added to the beginning of some words that start with a vowel. "On" sounds like "one".

It's not an abrasive accent, certainly not like those television shows set in New Jersey (apologies to my relatives that live there), just kind of odd. It just kind of make you go "huh"?

UPDATE, SUNDAY 30 OCTOBER 2011
Yesterday we learned the Philadelphia/South Jersey equivalent of "y'all", courtesy of our young female server: "yuhs". As in: "Can I get yuhs anything else to drink? OK, thank yuhs for coming into our restaurant."

Somebody smack us if they hear us say "yuhs". Please. Hard.