Y'All Think It Is An Accent I Am Speaking?

From Paul Greenberg:

When my older sister entered the public schools of Chicago, Ill., at the age of 5, she spoke only Yiddish. But she soon picked up the rudiments of a pure, nasal Chicagoan. When the family moved to the South a few years later, she acquired both an overlay of Ark-La-Texan and some piquant Arabic phrases - because many of the other shopkeepers on Texas Avenue in Shreveport were Lebanese, then referred to as Syrians. We all lived above our stores in those days, and my sister still goes home (which for her will always be Shreveport) several times a year to visit her Syrian girlfriends, Imshallah, Lord willing.

And when she married a Yankee during the war - he was stationed at Barksdale air base outside Shreveport - and moved to New York, she would adopt the sharp vowels of any other Lung-Island matron.

The result is a linguistic combination you've got to hear to believe, and be delighted by. Her enunciation underneath all the layers is still Yiddish, her Y'all and manners in general Southern-sweet, her Arabic mainly pious imprecations - Haram! - and her New Yorkese tough.