The air o’August alone adopts an aura of anticipation as ample admits are attracted annually to Swarthmore’s awesome arboretum.
This beginning brings brand new Swatties from around the bend, who bundle their bags, books, bits & bobs and board buses, boats, buggies, bikes, and big planes (Boeings?) on their way to the Keystone State.
Completely chuffed, the complex class of characters calmly collect themselves chez1 campus. Contemplating cooling, they capitalize on the College’s close-ness to our country’s quondam2 (cast-away?) capital, charter a car, conceivably, and chase a cold cup of wooder ice.
Di–did you just say “wooder” ice? Yes…?
Excellent.
For some students, their stint at Swarthmore may be the first time they encounter, for an extended period of time, a flavor of spoken English other than their own. Gathering a global group of students greatly increases the linguistic diversity on campus, ushering in dialects, accents, and regional speech patterns the world over!
Historically, I’ve always been interested in language; growing up, I watched my parents move away from our typical, general American speech each year as we visited my extended family in the Texas countryside—I often asked them why they did this, and each time, they were unable to provide me an answer, cementing my curiosity. In the summer before my Senior year of high school, I went abroad to Germany as part of an exchange program, where I encountered students who spoke dozens of languages natively, with each imparting its own spin onto the speaker’s pronunciation of English, ushering in a love of language, accents, and linguistic diversity.
Jumping forward to Swarthmore, I tapped into this curiosity and chose to formally study language, so during my first year, I registered for a course on phonetics and phonology, the study of speech sounds in language. Key to furthering my linguistic curiosity, this course allowed me to understand the theory behind why my peers spoke the way they did, and it allowed me to better understand a key part of the first year experience here at Swat: what I call Idiolectical3 Icebreakers.
Let me help you understand what I mean by asking a simple question—one which is particularly important to students who have just moved here—how do you pronounce Swarthmore?
Maybe you say the school’s name the way I do, with an audible “r” sound: SWARTH-mor, (or SWORTH-mor, depending on the day), or perhaps you, as is common in the Delaware County (Delco) area, choose to omit that sound, preferring SWATH-mor. No matter which pronunciation they choose (as both are equally valid, of course), first-years spend hours (well, I did, at least) discussing the various quirks, strengths, and differences of their English and comparing it to others’; like many who come from Texas, I have the pen/pin merger, which means I pronounce those words, and words similar to them, with the same vowel, which can lead to some confusion when I ask my peers to “pass me that pen, please” and am handed one of these: [image of a safety pin].
One may also find that in lieu of sub sandwiches, Philly offers hoagies, or that tennis shoes elsewhere in the US become sneakers. Perhaps you’ve been asked by a Philadelphian to pass you a jawn, or been told that a Delco native is off to get a shower or make a run to the Giant/Costco/Target/Chipotle4, or heard the ubiquitous wooder pronunciation of good ol’ H2O.
Quintessential Philadelphia terms aside, I can’t help but fall in love with the dozens of different dialects that, no matter their origin, find a home on Swarthmore’s campus.
Reluctantly, I’ll reel it in for now, releasing the remaining runes to you, dear reader: STUVWYXZ.
