Growing up in Greenfield in the late 1950s through the ’60s and beyond, we (“we” meaning those whose parents, grandparents and beyond spoke English) were introduced to foreign languages and English with idioms and accents previously unknown to us. I doubt I’m alone of my generation who can remember many things of our youth but can’t recall the first time we heard a Mexican or Swiss accent; or the accents from the South and Midwest. For most of my generation we became aware that some of our neighbors and classmate’s parents, and grandparents in many cases, spoke the English language, but it sounded different than what we heard at home.
As I’ve already indicated, I can’t state any determinate date or age when I first heard English spoken by someone whose first language was Spanish, but surely, I was very young as Spanish has been spoken in the Valley since before California was a state, long before. And I was no doubt just as young when I heard neighbors and friends whose families hailed from places that provided rich accents in their conversations; some from the Ozark Mountains area of Northwest Arkansas or Midwest Oklahoma and others from Canton Ticino in Switzerland.
The Greenfield people whose descendants came from Ireland and Scotland and settled in the Southern and Midwest states, Arkansas and Oklahoma among them, brought with them their culinary dishes, customs, music and particular usage of the English language that I heard spoken early on in life. And while I have since lived and worked in both those states, it would be hard to discern if the accent was spoken by, and here I resort to idioms used decades ago, an Arkie or an Okie.
Here I will interject this little blow to any language hegemony I may have held. While living in Purcell, Okla., I stepped into the local newspaper office and made inquiries about a few things that people who run newspapers know about, and just as I was leaving one lady asked me where I was from, and when I told her California, she said she thought so because “of your accent.” I informed I was unaware I had an accent, whereupon both she and the other person in the office had a bit of a chuckle. I guess accents are only noticed by those who think they don’t have one.
But the third accent heard in Greenfield was spoken by immigrants from an area two-thirds surrounded by Italy, and so we heard English spoken with a Swiss-Italian accent; and like the Mexicans in town, the Swiss also spoke often in their native tongue. (I digress here to say what we heard when our Swiss friends were speaking is a Lombardi-based language that is dying out, though there are efforts by linguists to keep it alive.) The Swiss families I knew seemed to all be from Canton Ticino (a canton being a member state of the Swiss Confederation, of which there are 26; Canton Uri was the home of William Tell, if you recall that story).
I heard stories from Ticino, knew some of the names of the towns, Robasacco, Ascona, Locarno, and have enjoyed food like polenta and gnocchi’s; and of course, Swiss sausage. Unlike Mexico (Tijuana, Ensenada and Cuidad Juarez at least), and Oklahoma and Arkansas, places I know and have been to, in some cases numerous times, the faraway European country of my Swiss friends was never going to be one of my destinations. At least that is what I thought until I landed in Zurich a few minutes ago and will catch a train to Canton Ticino very soon. See you folks in a few days.
Take care. Peace.
