My mother attended Brenau College (now Brenau University) in Gainesville, Georgia, from 1929 to 1931 and was a member of a sorority there. One of the few textbooks she retained throughout the rest of her life was Gertrude E. Johnson's Dialects for Oral Interpretation (published in 1922 by Century Co. in New York). A search of WorldCat, a tool used by librarians to locate libraries that have books in their collections, reveals that 317 libraries worldwide still have the book in their collections.

What makes this book so special for me is that my mother was a skilled performer of dialects. My older brother, several of my cousins, and I would clamor for Mother to do any one of the monologues for us. Mia Carlotta by T. A. Daly tells the story of Giuseppe the barber whose love is for a certain lovely Italian girl, Carlotta, and how proud he is of her. My Ain Fireside by William H. Hamilton is a Scottish dialect that celebrates the joys of home, while Sherman's Ride by William F. Kirk is a glorious Scandinavian tale about the U.S. Civil War. French, Negro (the term used at the time), Irish, French Canadian, and other dialectical vignettes explored the speech differences of each group.

Far from being patronizing, Mother taught us early on that people come from different places around the world, each with its particular language or dialect and with a wealth of cultural values and customs. She pointed out the richness of words and sounds in each one and shared the beauty in the differences. Having grown up in a small Southern town, these dialectical performances and my mother's commentary taught us about people whom we had never seen and about their cultures.

The mother tongue and (in many cases) the particular dialect spoken by our ancestors, and their choice of words and grammar may be indicative of their origins. This week I'd like to explore dialects and words, if only to get you started thinking about unusual occurrences within your own family's speech patterns that might provide another research lead...

Read More of This Article - Click Here.

• Read Past Articles