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Languages are made up of variants called dialects, and these can differ from one another in terms of their pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary. But why doesn’t everyone who speaks the same dialect sound the same or use the same terms?

The answer is that no two people’s language experiences are identical. When it comes to our linguistic histories, it seems that we are as unique as our fingerprints.

In 1948, the linguist Bernard Bloch coined the term “idiolect” to give a name to this idea. He defined it as language use that is “peculiar to one speaker." As terms go, it’s very well chosen, because it calls to mind the word “idiosyncrasy.”

And when it comes to language use, we all have our quirks. We may, for example, carry around with us fossilized remnants of our previous linguistic encounters, even if they occurred many years earlier.

Linguistic Mysteries

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the idiolect of my father, who celebrates his ninetieth birthday later this month. My dad grew up on a farm in northwest Ohio. Later, he moved to a small town near Toledo, where he owned a flower shop and raised a family. He still lives in the house he helped to build some sixty-five years ago.

During my childhood, Dad made use of a couple of terms that seemed to be unique to him. One of these was “chogi,” which referred to doing something now. “Let’s chogi,” for example, meant “Let’s leave right now.”

Another term was “skosh,” which, I learned, meant “a little bit,” as in, “Turn that screw a skosh.” I didn’t think much about any of this at the time: All kids know that their parents say lots of crazy things.

Years later, after the internet became a thing, I recalled my dad’s idiosyncratic expressions and engaged in some online sleuthing. “Chogi,” I discovered, was a Korean word meaning “early” or “beginning” (초기에). And “skosh,” I learned, derives from the Japanese sukoshi (すこし), meaning “a little” or “a small amount.” As an adult, I did hear people other than my father use “skosh,” albeit very rarely. But never “chogi.”

Learning the origin of these terms only deepened my curiosity, however. My dad had never traveled outside of North America, excluding a fiftieth wedding anniversary trip to Hawaii. Where would he have picked up terms from Korean and Japanese?

Answers From the Past

My father did, in fact, experience one absence from small-town Ohio. This was during the mid-1950s when he was in his early twenties. The excursion was underwritten by the U.S. government, which generously provided him with an all-expenses-paid sabbatical in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

In other words, Dad was drafted, and spent two years at Fort Lewis, not far from Tacoma. This was shortly after the Korean War and the U.S. occupation of Japan had ended. It seems likely that there were personnel on the military base who had served in both countries.

In addition to being a Korean word, I learned that “chogi” had been incorporated into soldier slang during the 1950s by veterans returning from deployments in East Asia. Used as an imperative, “chogi” meant “go there,” and this matched my father’s use of the term.

Dad has (mostly) fond memories of his stint in the military, as he married his high school sweetheart during that time. But it appears that he brought a couple of linguistic hitchhikers back with him to Ohio, and into my childhood memories of him.

I haven’t yet cracked all the mysteries of my dad’s idiolect—at least, not yet. For example, my father also uses the so-called “intrusive r,” when he refers to gourds as “squarsh” and his former military home as in “Warshington.” As a child, I remember feeling vaguely embarrassed when he uttered such words in public because they struck me as nonstandard.

However, I would find out—much later—that intrusive r’s are part of the U.S. Midland dialect. My father’s home is a bit north of the commonly accepted dialect boundary between the North Midland and Inland-Northern, but it seems likely that he had contact with Midland speakers early in life.

As the story of my dad’s idiolect demonstrates, all of us probably pick up linguistic souvenirs that reflect our interactions with different speakers in different times and places. This diversity helps to explain why no two speakers of a language are exactly alike. Our idiolects mirror our experiences and also serve as an important part of our unique identities.