My accent is more of a clusterfuck than you might expect, and there’s a reason for that. I moved to Connecticut after 18 years in Rhode Island, and was repeatedly mocked for a Rhode Island accent I never knew I had. Returning to RI years later, I turned on a local station to get the traffic report and heard the same vocal cues my Connecticut buddies found so much humor in (or should I say “hyumah”). I stayed in Connecticut for about three years, and headed north to Western Massacusetts to complete college, where the accent probably got even deeper.

However, the real quirks began when Jim Krewson announced that our band was moving to Philly. Jim was from here originally, and did an outrageously funny imitation of the accent. It’s kind of difficult to explain the intricacies of the mid-Atlantic accent, so I’ll try to provide some examples. “Wooder” for “water”. “Cake” for “Coke”. “Balmer” for “Baltimore” “Merlin” for “Maryland”, and “Nerk” for “Newark”. “Youse”, “myuns”, “your’ns”, the whole nine yards. If a nude man went running up the street, a Philadelphian might say “Hey, he ain’t got nay clays on! Yous gotta git yer clays on Mister!”

Jim would imitate Philadelphians and Jennie and I would be howling with laughter. There’s no WAY people talk like that, I remember thinking. He’s gotta be exagerating. As if. I wish. I was standing in line at a photocopying joint when i first heard the accent up front and personal, and so help me God, I almost laughed in the woman’s face. The accent was so silly, so present, and so weird I began to imitate it whenever I could, just to entertain myself. I’d practice on my housemate, who was from Balti– I mean Balmer. “‘Fluffya’, right?” I’d ask. “It’s pronounced ‘Fluffya’.”

“Depends,” he’d answer. “In SowFlufflya, definitely. In Northeast Philly, it’s probably more ‘Phil’delphia’”. And we’d laugh.

Until one day I woke up and the accent wasn’t a put-on anymore. The way I pronounced “no” had changed, with the long drawn out “o”s that mark Philadelphianese. “Youse” entered my vocabulary. I don’t visit my family in New jersey and go to the beach anymore: like all Philadelphians, my summers are spent “downashore”. When I follow football, I root for the Iggles: “Eagles” are a a type of bird. And like all Philadelphians, I have a bad attytood that I think is just beauty-full.
More on Fluffya’s accents here.