Hey, you guys!

"Do you guys want to watch some Dr. Who this weekend?" I said before class last Thursday.
"You guys?" my friend laughed, mocking my turn of phrase.  "You're not from around here!"

Naturally, one of my biggest fears is that now that I've moved to Texas, my second-person-plural pronoun will change.  I'm sure this is everyone's greatest concern when they move somewhere with a dialect different from their own.  Right?

I actually already use both the east coast "you guys" and the southern "y'all", thanks to my mother, who grew up in Chicago (long story).  "Y'all" is a useful pronoun, and it sounds nice!  I feel very uncomfortable using "you" to refer to a group of people, even in formal writing—but "you guys" sounds just informal enough that sometimes I substitute "you all" or "y'all".  In fact, sometimes I use both "you guys" and "y'all" in the same sentence.  I know, it's weird.

But I can't give up "you guys" entirely!  Just because I'm moving to Texas doesn't mean I have to re-define my linguistic identity.  So I have a goal to keep "you guys" in my vocabulary.  You guys, dear readers, can keep tabs on me.  If there isn't enough "you guys" in this blog in the future, call me out on it!

I also figure that during my time in Texas, my vowels are going to shift.  Not drastically, because my brain isn't as plastic as it used to be—but enough that people might notice.  It's only natural to pick up the speech patterns of those around you, and my accent already has a tendency to shift just a little when I'm around someone with a strong midwestern accent—so let's hope Texas doesn't similarly corrupt my beautiful Maryland vowels.  (Just kidding—actually, I think southern accents are quite beautiful.)

In this way, I am like a Hobbit.  According to Tolkien in Appendix F after the Return of the King, hobbits like Frodo (and wizards like Gandalf and dudes like Aragorn) are prone to adapt their speech patterns to those around them.  I'm not as excellent at this as Frodo and Sam, but I do adapt to some extent, sometimes on purpose and sometimes without realizing.  Often, I pick up phrases or words, or even intonation patterns.  In undergrad, one of my roommates used to sometimes randomly sing instead of speaking—thus, our room sometimes turned into a strange, whimsical musical.  So it would be no surprise if Texan speech patterns are a bit contagious for me.

Let's just hope that I never say the word "milk" with five vowel sounds, as some southerners are wont to do.  It might be a little hard to understand me if it comes to that.