The Maine Accent

We've lived in Maine for 10 months now, which is weird to think we've been here this long. Time has flown by. Over the past few months I have noticed something odd about the Maine accent. While people tend to take the "R" sound off of words so that "Mainer" is pronounced "Mainah" and "Bar Harbor" becomes "Bah Hahbah" they also add "R" sounds to words without them. I have noticed this mostly when people say "idea." It becomes "idear." This drives me crazy! The other day though, someone did this to my name. I definitely heard someone call me "Golder." AHHH!! That. Is. Not. My. Name!

Another peculiar thing I have noticed is that people add "the" to names of things such as roads and schools. The road near our house, which goes in the direction of the town of Bucksport, becomes "The Bucksport Road" (even though it has a proper road name, I can't even tell you what it is since no one calls it by it's real name). Likely, the road headed towards Surry is "The Surry Road." I think in Bucksport they refer to the same road as "The Ellsworth Road" since, well, it goes in the direction of Ellsworth, our town. This confuses me because sometimes I'll be driving on it, towards our house, and I don't know if I'm supposed to call it The Bucksport Road because that's what we call it or The Ellsworth Road because I'm headed towards Ellsworth.

People also call the old Elementary school here The Knowlton School. It would be like if I the elementary school I went to "The Lee School." Weird.