Dialects

Sitting across from his teacher, Edgar Martinez repeated the word he couldn't quite pronounce: "situation." "Sit-oo-a-shun," he said. "What happens with the tu?" asked the teacher, Lisa Mojsin, hired to help Martinez reduce his accent. "Chu," Martinez responded. "Yes, like chewing your food," Mojsin said, saying the word slowly: "Sit-chew-a-shun." "Wow -- that is another new one for me," said Martinez, 37, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager and lives in Los Angeles.

Onstage, the actors who portray the students in Alan Bennett's "The History Boys" learn the heady poetry of Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden and Walt Whitman. Offstage, they recite a different sort of poetry, more like Dr. Seuss gone mad: My heart is part of the far part of the yard. The way May made that cake is fake, Dave. Mike likes to ride his bike inside, wining and dining all the time.

Carson Hom's family has run a thriving fortune cookie and almond cookie company in Los Angeles County for 35 years. And for much of that time, it was a business that required two languages: Cantonese, to communicate with employees and the Chinese restaurants that bought the cookies, and English, to deal with health inspectors, suppliers and accountants. But when Hom, 30, decided to start his own food import company, he learned that this bilingualism wasn't enough anymore.

Dialect coaches have been working overtime this year thanks to the overwhelming presence of actors from Across the Pond or Down Under in lead roles for films set in the American South. Tim Burton's "Big Fish," for example, stars an Englishman, Albert Finney, as a tall-tale-telling Alabaman, whose younger incarnation is played by Ewan McGregor, a Scotsman. "Americans can do various Southern accents really well," says Carla Meyer, who coached the "Big Fish" cast.

'Mur-der-er." Ivan Borodin pronounces it slowly, looking around the classroom and singling out students to repeat it after him. "Come on, Frenchy," he coaxes. "I've seen you stick your lips out further for a piece of brie." An instructor at Beverly Hills Adult School, Borodin is leading a class of foreign-born students in accent reduction. For some, the course might be more appropriately titled Tongue Twisters 101. A French doctor, a Thai businessman, an Indonesian paralegal . . .

Remember how television, that mighty social sledgehammer, was going to pulverize our language? Nothing would remain of our distinctive accents and dialects; we would all be bland, chattering like so many weather announcers. It seems, however, in the event you haven't been listening, that the contrary is happening. Far from disappearing, those distinctive manners of speaking that vary from place to place and people to people are in profusion.

To the old-timers who gather for afternoon coffee at the Redwood Drive-in, there are few pastimes sweeter than sharkin' a bright-lighter with a slib of Boont. Take the yuppie in his BMW, up from San Francisco for some weekend wine tasting. He approaches the men with a smile, asking directions to a local bed and breakfast inn. The response is quick--and earnestly polite: "Take your wee moshe, pike toward the Deep End and you'll deek on the Big Crick chiggrul and sluggin' region. And jape easy!"

Growing up on the west Kansas plains, he was taught self-reliance by his mother because "wadnaanybodygonnadoot" for him. During 3 1/2 decades in Congress, he's prided himself on cutting the "def'sit" and, at the same time, "gittin more s'port for aggerculter." If he wins the presidency, after having been a loyal Republican for "minetire life," he will finally have a "drek line to the Kremlin." The way Kansas Sen. Robert J.