Y'all

Accents have been following me around for my entire life. My father is from Memphis and my mother is from Atlanta so I have been exposed to their different accents all along.

I was born in Birmingham and my brother was born in Charlotte and up until we were 12 or 13 years old we also lived in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New Jersey, and Boston...all places with pretty distinctive regional accents of their own.

When we arrived in Boston, my speaking patterns were pretty much set - an amalgam I guess of all of those places which ended up sounding more or less neutral.

My brother however, was two years younger than me and his speech patterns were not yet fixed. Today he speaks with a moderately strong Boston accent.

Kind of interesting in a developmental timeline kind of way.

People occasionally wonder and ask why my mother sounds like Trisha Yearwood, my father sound like Fred Thompson, my brother sounds like Cliff Clavin and I sound like I was adopted.

Add my in-laws from Maine to the mix and I weep for Littlefoil’s linguistic future.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I just stumbled upon this video in which actress/singer/writer Amy Walker repeats the same sentence 21 times in 21 different accents. This thing “went viral” last year or some time but I only just found it. So here for your listening pleasure is a series of 21 accents, none of which sound like anyone in my family!