Maybe it's a reflection of my circumstances - but this reminds me more of a difference in class than language. I was born to two uneducated parents in a poor, rural coal town in Pennsylvania and then later married a woman whose parents were educated and wealthy and whose family had been at least upper-middle class for generations.

To me, at times, I feel her and I speak different languages, use different words, have different intonation and expressions and idioms - in both behavior as well as language. My 'pensyl-tucky' accent and manners, mostly worn away from living elsewhere, still betrays to other American English speakers that I may be of a 'lesser kind'. I have no idea of the author's background, but her description of it sounds closer to 'lower class' American - one in which persona hasn't been formed by years of restraint, discipline, obedience, and expectation. Whereas, her husband seems more like he would be from a wealthier, urban American family. And, inferring from his families' fleeing Spain during the Marxist revolution, maybe it goes back a bit.

When I travelled to Paris for the first time with my wife and her family, they asked me what I thought. I told them that it seemed more similar to any American city than that American city would seem to where I had grown up. And, they seemed shocked that I would say such a thing. But, having had to fit into their culture (not the other way around), I sometimes feel like a foreigner.