Is there a Middle Peninsula accent? If so, where did it come from? Are there islands in the Chesapeake Bay or isolated communities in the Blue Ridge Mountains that have preserved a pristine Elizabethan accent?
The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard of the Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society will attempt to answer these and related questions at a presentation set for 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22, at the Middlesex County Historic Courthouse, 865 General Puller Highway, Saluda. The Rev. Dr. Prichard will draw upon such diverse resources as the observations on American speech by Alexis De Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” (1835-40); the notes on pronunciation in Virginia that appeared in the “William and Mary Quarterly Historical Magazine” in 1895; the “Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States,” which is based on intensive field studies in the 1930s; and the contemporary “Speech Accent Archive” at George Mason University.
Bob Prichard is the current vice president of the board of the Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society. Educated at Princeton (B.A.), Yale (M.Div.), and Emory (PhD) universities, he is an Episcopal clergyman and has served as both a parish priest and a history professor at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. He grew up in Fairfax City and lived in multiple parts of the state in his career as a clergyman, but throughout this time he regularly spent time in Middlesex, where his grandfather grew up and his grandmother owned a farm. Since 2000, he and his wife Marcia Prichard have had a residence in Locust Hill.
