First Blog Post

Jennifer Conley

Mrs. Hughes
English 1101
21 August 2009

Throughout my life I've been exposed to many languages. Does that mean I understood all of them? No, more than half the time I could not understand what any of the people were saying. I have taken a beginning course on French but that was six years ago and all I can remember is the alphabet and I have also taken Spanish 1 and 2, but only because I had to in high school to graduate. Spanish helped a little when I went over to my friend Abel's house once in a while and it even helped me in a few soccer games, but because I have not tried to keep learning or using the language I have pretty much forgotten mostly everything. Now outside of what I cannot remember from the classroom, there is an abundance of languages I have heard or people talk to accents I have heard. I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and was raised there for seven years and a lot of people down there have a French background. Because I was so young then, I really do not remember if anyone spoke French around me, but I do however remember their accents. Yes, they are from the south but they have a whole different type of accent. From there I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia. Honestly the people there just had regular voices. Virginia is considered a southern state but I never heard anything close to a southern accent there. I am not sure if it is because of how far from the "deep south" it is or maybe because of the location of where I specifically lived, so I consider that to be a neutral area when it comes to accents. The only time I heard any type of accent there was if I went to see my dad on the Navy base, where there are many different people with different dialects and accents. Then when I moved from there to Georgia I was surrounded by southern accents. And now I have grown accustomed to the southern accent and it is weird to hear people with other accents. Even through the exposure of different languages I feel that my life has not been impacted by any of them except for the English language because it has gotten me to where I am today.