When I was in elementary school, I remember having in fourth grade pronunciation tests in which the teacher would show us a list of words and we needed to read the words aloud and “correctly”.  I probably would completely have forgotten this except for one vivid memory surrounding the word “coyote”.  The “correct” pronunciation of coyote, according to my teacher was kai-oh-tee.  And I knew that.  I never missed words on the pronunciation test.  But I decided to experiment on this particular test with my teacher.  I had seen a movie recently, a western, where the speaker had pronounced the word without the final “tee” saying just “kai-oh” and I decided I would mimic his pronunciation just to see how my teacher would respond.  I knew this wasn’t the pronunciation he expected or wanted, but I had just had to see what would happen.  He never made a comment about the pronunciation at all, but simply gave me a minus one on the test, the only word I was to “mispronounce” the entire year.

This was my first lesson in dialect, my first lesson in linguisitic difference.  I learned that day that there were indeed multiple “right” pronunciations even if some refused to acknowledge certain pronunciations.