With the slip of a ‘y’all’ from a southerner’s lip or by asking for a pair of trousers instead of pants, out-of-town University students can give themselves away with a single word or phrase.

Beverly Flanigan, a retired professor of linguistics at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, said there is an important difference between a person’s accent and his or her dialect. Accent refers to sound of vowels and consonants, whether or not they sound nasally; dialect is a larger range of lingual elements including pronunciation, words and grammar.

“Accent is basic I would say, but when you add grammar and word choice then you have the whole dialect picture,” Flanigan said.

Flanigan said habitants of different Ohio regions may use the same words with different meanings, which can be confusing for travelers and out-of-towners. The Bowling Green area, for example, refers to a toboggan as a narrow, wooden board used in the snow sport tobogganing, but in Central Ohio, they’ll tell you not to forget your toboggan if you’re hitting up the ski trails.

“Down in this part of the state a toboggan is a wool hat, like a ski cap … it’s very common down here [but] it was totally new to me … I didn’t know what people meant when they said ‘don’t forget your toboggan,'” Flanigan said.

Senior Jacob Lawrence, originally from Jackson, Miss., said he noticed a big difference in the way Ohioans talk when he arrived at the University.

“You say y’alls A’s different … the word ‘and,’ there’s a ‘y’ in it almost. It’s really flat,” Lawrence said. “So someone saying the word boss … if you’re really southern, some people say ‘baws,’ some people up here say ‘bass.'”

It’s not just the sounds of words, Lawrence said, word choice is different in Ohio as well.

“The ‘you guys’ thing is a whole lot different — we say y’all down south,” Lawrence said.

In the southern states, he said, everyone uses the word ‘coke’ instead of pop, soda or soda pop to refer to the popular carbonated beverage.

“And the ‘pop’ still throws me off … [in Mississippi] I’ll say, ‘do you want a coke?’ And then they’ll say ‘I dunno what kind?’ and they’ll say Dr. Pepper,” Lawrence said.

Flanigan said the Northern half of America generally uses the term ‘pop’ and the southern half uses ‘soda.’

“One word in that group that is distinctive is coke … it’s just become the generic term and that’s spreading into central Ohio,” Flanigan said.

The history behind the migration of dialects and accents throughout the country and in Ohio started with the migration of the original pioneers who came to America from Great Britain, Flanigan said.

She said a quick-paced society is cause for further and constant changing of accents and dialects throughout the buckeye state.

“We’re a very mobile society, but we move faster now … we move across the country quickly and we take our speech with us and if there’s enough of us that settle in an area … our speech may even take over,” she said.

There are three general divisions of dialect in Ohio, Flanigan said, which are not likely to change anytime soon. She said pronunciation is the most difficult and least likely to change in an individual’s speech, because it sets in during childhood.

If someone moves across the country, the first element of speech to change will be word choice, Flanigan said, followed by grammar and eventually, after a few generations, pronunciation.

But not everyone wants to adapt their speech to where they live, Flanigan said.

“[If people say] ‘Oh what a nice southern accent you have, I love the way you Mississippians talk,’ there’s not incentive to change that then because it’s accepted as cute,” she said.

Lawrence said it’s late at night or early in the morning, or just when he’s talking to his mom on the phone, that his southern roots come out in his speech.

“I start draggin’ out the words and talkin’ a little slower … [I’ll say] ‘turn off the lahgt’ instead of ‘turn off the light,'” he said.

Although he didn’t have a major southern accent when he arrived in BG, he has gradually lost some of his southern accent after four years in the Northwest Ohio area, Lawrence said. He said he grew up thinking those who speak with a Southern accent are often stereotyped as less educated.

“My dad was always like, ‘speak intellectually, don’t let people stereotype you, talk properly,’ so I tried to make a big effort to not sound like a hick who had no education,” Lawrence said. “Which is sad that you do get stereotyped but it’s inevitable.”

Flanigan said she doesn’t like stereotypes, but they do exist. Often they pertain to dialect rather than accent.

“I don’t think [people] judge very much on accent unless there are connotations of, let’s say ‘hillbillyness’ or cowboy twang like a Texan coming up here — it’s grammar they start making negative judgments about,” Flanigan said.

Chris Sims, a junior from London, England, said he noticed people from the Cincinnati area, as compared with Toledo, speak with a bit of a southern accent whereas Northern Ohioans speak with an accent that sounds “more general American.”

“The best way I could describe it [is] when I’m in England, on TV you hear the stereotypical American voice,” Sims said.

He said he is now used to using certain words in northwest Ohio which have a different meaning in his hometown, like replacing ‘trousers’ with ‘pants.’

Sims said he noticed Americans’ vowels are pronounced more specifically than the British.

“It struck me how different we actually speak, like how we say different things differently … you say ‘aloominum’ and we saw ‘aluhminyum,'” Sims said. “Because of how we say the letter the whole word changes … in England we drop a lot of letters.”

Sims said Ohioans, when compared with other Americans, talk a little slower and put more emphasis on certain words.

“When I go home, everyone says I sound very American. That might be because I guess I’m trying to talk slower because I have to so people understand me here,” he said.