As I was musing over the Pho post (link), it occurred to me that the way we speak may fall into the same area.
That is, we all say things a little differently, but at some point we realize that someone says things differently in a way that makes them really different in a larger sense.
Small children, who speak English, don’t always notice that my Australian wife talks funny. They don’t seem to think that her different way of pronouncing things is MORE different than my different way of pronouncing things.
But then, at some point they do notice. When?
Maybe you can ask them about your musings in your two Pho posts… which amused me because in DC they call it Ph-OH and in Seattle, it’s Ph-UH and I think I read somewhere that no two people actually say it the same way… do you think there’s reasearch about that?