“Changing lanes? Use yah blinkah.”

According to an Associated Press story, this was the message that appeared on electronic highway signs in the Boston area just before Mother’s Day. It was an attempt by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to get the attention of drivers.

We hope it worked, because we found it an amusing method of reminding motorists to signal when they change lanes.

MDT’s philosophy: Spell the message the way it sounds. Many Bostonians talk that way, and we do too, to some extent, although Boston accents are unique.

When we were having our spelling lessons in our younger years, we somehow missed an important lesson in pronunciation, and for some reason, “r” is often ignored in our verbal communication, and “ah” substituted.

We’re sure some Boston area residents, and others, too, were probably offended by the electronic signs, and felt they were being mocked. They probably were being picked on to some degree, but not in an offensive way; at least, as a fellow New Englander, we didn’t take offense at it.

We remember the first time we actually heard ourselves on tape. We were in an English class at Katharine Gibbs in Boston. We’d been asked to do an oral theme and rather than stand up in front of the class and read it, we’d been asked to put it on tape and play it back for others to hear. When it was our turn and the instructor pushed the play button, we were flabbergasted. That couldn’t be our voice! We didn’t sound like that, and we certainly didn’t have an accent like the girl on the tape, did we?

For the longest time, we were gun-shy whenever we had to talk to anyone, very self-conscious about our New England accent, although we’d already been told by some of our fellow dorm students that we “talked funny.”

On our floor, we had a girl from Venezuela, another from Pennsylvania, and one from Halifax, Nova Scotia. There wasn’t much doubt, we certainly didn’t pronounce our words the same way they did. Each had her own accent.

Years later, when we were catering clambakes and serving bus groups from all across the country, our Maine accent no longer bothered us, and, in fact, was very popular with some of our guests. My husband’s Maine accent is even more pronounced than mine. We always swapped friendly barbs with those who had strong southern or western accents.

On one occasion at the newspaper office, a southerner called in a news story that we tried to take over the phone. Let’s just say it took a while. What was that you said? How do you spell it? The two of us had a great time pulling it together, but we finally succeeded.

We often wonder how those who speak another language ever succeed in figuring out what we’re saying. There’s not much in the pronunciation of “cah” which would tell you we were talking about a car, now is there? Or that “hahbah means harbor. We’ve noticed that years ago, many folks who hadn’t had much in the way of formal education often spelled words just the way they sounded. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

Maine itself has a wide variety of dialects. Some “downeasters” show a very strong Canadian influence in their pronunciation, while others don’t talk like that at all, nor do they have an accent much like ours. It’s sometimes hard to believe we all live in the same state.

Engaging in conversation with others who have a different accent is lots of fun. If they’re amused by the way we talk, so what? We’re probably secretly amused by their lingo, too.