Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

eastern seaboard
, and so the 
strength of the southern accent in my voice has dimin-
ished considerably. Uh, I fi nd myself sort of in a, in an 
intermediate position now with recognition of my accent 
because when I live here on the East Coast, uh, people’ll 
say things like, “You’re not from around here, are you?” 
because they detect that trace of southern accent still in 
my, in my diction. But when I go back to visit friends in 
Arkansas, I’ve lived on the eastern seaboard long enough 
so that they tell me that I sound like I’m a damn 
Yankee
.
INTERVIEWER:
No kidding
!
MAN:
Oh yeah, yeah. Th
ey say . . .
INTERVIEWER:
But you went to graduate school in North 
Carolina?

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Impr
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MAN:
North Carolina—still the South, true, uh, still, 
certainly North Carolina has very strong southern, uh, 
dialect—but I’ve lived in D.C. now for almost thirteen 
years. . . .
INTERVIEWER:
Right.
MAN:
Um, and also I’ll admit I have, I have intentionally 
tried to lose some of the, uh, stronger elements of my 
southern accent.
INTERVIEWER:
[
Like? 
]
MAN:
Intentionally tried to. Um, well, I, uh, I 
prefer not to pronounce words the way they tend to be 
pronounced in Arkansas sometimes. For, an example is, 
uh, is the verb 
going
, 
g-o-i-n-g
. In Arkansas, it’s slurred 
into a long diphthong frequently, and many people pro-
nounce it “goeeng” as if it were the s—, you know, uh, 
yeah, pronounce it “goeeng.” And I prefer to pronounce it 
“going,” and so I’ve made an intentional eff ort now to say 
“going” rather than “goeeng.”
INTERVIEWER:
Right.
8. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Th
e hardest thing? Um, the hardest thing, I would say, 
the hardest thing in-in-in America, to learn English—
American English—would be to, uh, um, assume a love 
for the culture. Now, that may be diffi
cult coming from, 
say, Italy-Ita, it-it-it may be diffi
cult, and it’s been diffi
cult 
for every immigrant over here to assume a love for the 
culture that you have all of a sudden moved into and-and-
and must-must-must assume the culture, but you have to 
have that, you have to have a love for it. If you don’t have 
a love for it—I mean, you can have a practical reason for 

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