It was my best friend’s daughter’s birthday, and though I’d remembered she’d recently switched from a bunny-dollhouse phase to a trucks-in-dirt phase, I’d forgotten the most important part of the gift—well, at least the most important part for the memory box her parents are undoubtedly keeping for her future self . . . probably.

The birthday card.

“I’ll be right back,” I called over my shoulder to my husband. “Running out to get Mags a card.”

“Cord!” he yelled back, laughing and imitating the way the word emerged from my Cajun mouth. “Yes, go get that birthday cord.”

I laughed with him too, caught, and surprised that that sound could slip through the mental filter I’d started building years ago, after moving from South Louisiana to Texas right out of college and realizing that saying certain words the way I always had invited a near-automatic follow-up Q&A session starting with: Where are you from?

I learned quickly that sometimes, when you’re just trying to get through a CVS checkout line or make your point in a meeting, it’s easier to assimilate than explain your whole geography and migration.

So I practiced keeping my mouth more open, giving my vowels less shape, forming words differently than how they’d naturally emerged back home. 

And yet, after seventeen years away from South Louisiana, that sound still slips out on occasion.

The thing is, words with “ar” and “or” have never sounded different to me. Words like car, bar, and char can drift toward core, bore, and chore. Both spellings send a signal to my brain to start with “oh” and finish with “are” even when I try really, really hard—hord—not to.

Oddly enough, other words pull in the opposite direction, leaning deep into the traditional “ar” sound when they aren’t necessarily “supposed to.” Horse, fork, and short can come out sounding like harse, fark, and, unfortunately, shart.

The first time I noticed  this distinction at all was in college at the University of Louisiana. I was taking an international communications course with students from around the world—China, Haiti, Colombia, and India to name a few. During the guest lecture about agricultural work at a nearby horse farm, my classmate from India nudged my elbow and pointed to a note he’d scribbled in his notebook.

“Harse?”

At first, I was confused.

Then I laughed and wrote back: It’s our accent here. Horse/harse. Same thing.

We both giggled.

Now, almost twenty years later, as I scour Paper Source’s birthday card section in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I find myself wondering: why do we sound like that?

Is it a remnant of French?

When I reached out to my cadre of Louisiana culture experts, none of them were quite sure the sound was even a thing. They claimed that they didn’t really make that noise themselves when it came to ar/or words.  So for a moment, I buffered: Was this something my family did? Some weird tic that had nothing to do with the larger culture at all? Oh God, this is embarrassing. 

Eventually, I was pointed to the right  subset of linguistics experts—people who have heard of my people. One search led to another, which landed me with Katie Carmichael, associate professor and director of language sciences at Virginia Tech, and Aaron Dinkin, a linguist at San Diego State University, who are both studying these exact vowel patterns. The answer, as it turns out, is complicated.

Carmichael told me there’s no definitive evidence that this particular “ar/or” sound comes from French. The vowel sounds before “r,” she explained, are known to be slippery in English and so have all kinds of regional variation. Dinkin said that South Louisiana isn’t alone. Similar patterns show up in pockets of St. Louis and even Utah, while older Boston English once split these sounds into even more nuanced distinctions.

The takeaway, Carmichael shared, is that the experts are still figuring this stuff out. What they do know now is that while these or/ar sounds are not unique to Louisiana, they do seem to differentiate Louisiana accents from surrounding areas like Texas and Mississippi, opening up more questions about how they developed and also why they are found in both rural Cajun and urban New Orleans accents—when the people of those cultures and dialects and backgrounds are usually quite different from each other.

In other words, only time will tell if there will ever be one neat historical explanation. Languages, like people, are constantly shifting, after all.

There was something that Carmichael said, though, that stuck with me.

South Louisiana is one of the most “native” places in the United States. She didn’t mean native in the Indigenous sense, but in the sense that it has retained a local identity that still feels distinctly its own, at least compared to the rest of the country. You would expect that kind of depth to have sparked a robust program around linguistics in the region, the way places like Philadelphia have been academically studied down to its every vowel shift. And yet . . . we know way more about how Philadelphians say the word “water” than we do about why many South Louisianans say “harse.”

In a nation where our collective American culture has often bred sameness, it makes me proud to think that South Louisiana remains one of the few special places where speech carries the weight and richness of the place.

As Dinkin put it when I asked why anyone—the average person who doesn’t study language for a living—should care about the variants and origins of speech, it all comes down to identity. It’s why I cared, after all, enough to track down these experts and interrogate them about why the words “horse” and “farce,” to me, rhyme. 

Dinkin admitted he had intentionally worked to preserve traces of his own Massachusetts accent after moving to California. Sometimes the way we pronounce a word is simply our way of staying close to where we came from.

I asked my husband Rick what it makes him think when he hears my accent slip out, when he hears me say things like birthday cord.

“It sounds like you’re resting,” he said. “It sounds fully you. Not crafted.”

And maybe that’s the real answer to “why do we make this sound?” Maybe it’s simply about feeling at home—home as  less of a physical place than a person, or a community, who makes it safe to sound like yourself, no matter where you are.