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As someone from SoCal, hella was always a NorCal colloquialism. I grew up around actual 'valley girls' and the associated slang, lots of silly things. Even afte
by annoyingnoob 6y ago
As someone from SoCal, hella was always a NorCal colloquialism. I grew up around actual 'valley girls' and the associated slang, lots of silly things. Even after all of that, hella always sounded off to me.
- edoceo 6y agoLike. Totally.
- Stratoscope 6y agoMy favorite north-south California variation is whether we use "the" on a freeway name or number. In the north, it's "highway 101" or just "101"; in the south it's "the 101 freeway" or just "the 101". I've always wondered where the terminology changes over. I think it may be somewhere around King City?
- tanseydavid 6y agoLOL -- here's a clip from 30 Rock with Liz Lemon doing a flashback to her time in Los Angeles (during the Rodney King riots) and making a joke about referring to freeways in the SoCal manner of "The 10" rather than "10" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo
- tkgally 6y agoIn the 1970s, Marc Okrand, who later created the Klingon language, taught an introductory course in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As an exercise to make students aware of language variation, he distributed a questionnaire that asked what terms the students used for various concepts. It also asked where the students were from. I was a TA for the course and helped to compile the students’ responses. As I recall, some of the questions were about well-known differences within American English, such as soft drink vs. soda vs. pop or sneakers vs. tennis shoes. But a few were specific to California and were intended to show differences between the dialects of the northern and southern parts of the state. For example, to the question “If you’re going to the city, where are you going?,” most southern Californians responded “to a city” or something similar, while northern Californians responded “to San Francisco.” There might have been one or two East Coasters who answered “to New York City.” Another question was “Name a freeway.” The northern Californians almost invariably gave a number (“101,” “5”), while southern Californians gave a name (“the Harbor Freeway,” “the Golden State”). I moved away from California a couple of years later and have lost track of linguistic trends there. Have southern Californians shifted away from using names for freeways to using numbers?
- dehrmann 6y ago> Name a freeway You'll occasionally hear people call parts of (the) 101 the Bayshore Freeway, or 880 the Nimitz Freeway.
- Stratoscope 6y agoOr even just "the Nimitz", especially if it's a radio traffic report. And of course there is the MacArthur Maze, not to be confused with The Stack. https://www.google.com/search?q=macarthur+maze https://www.google.com/search?q=macarthur+maze https://www.google.com/search?q=los+angeles+the+stack https://www.google.com/search?q=los+angeles+the+stack
- kuang_eleven 6y agoLiving in West LA, it varies; but it's usually the number. There are a few exceptions, but they are specific to the freeway, like most people would take the PCH, not "the 1", although people would know what you are talking about. The big 3 freeways down here (405, 5, 101) are all referred to exclusively by number.
- csa 6y agoThis article (https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/geolinguistics/northern-californian-english-hella-different.html https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/geolinguistics/northern...) says north San Luis Obisbo county for coastal CA, so maybe Paso Robles? My guess is that it’s a fuzzy boundary, and King City is the northern side of that fuzzy boundary. Great guess!
- Stratoscope 6y agoThat is a remarkably interesting article, thanks for posting it. And looping back to the original topic, the title is: Northern Californian English: Hella Different?
- chiph 6y agoI'm now seeing occasional usage of "the" in the southeast: "Sorry, traffic was backed up on the I-77." I'm not sure if that's the influence of much of the media we absorb being created in Los Angeles, or California expats spreading it. I'm not really a fan of it.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoHaving gone to a college in California, a UC where most kids were also from CA, this was a dead giveaway for who was from where. In the same vein, I love the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards where Michael Fassbender's character orders 3 drinks and holds up 3 fingers the English/American way (index, middle and ring) as opposed to the mainland European way (thumb, index and middle) and it's a dead giveaway. I don't know if that had been used in literature before, but whoever wrote that scene (Tarantino?) really picked up on a subtle difference that's a dead giveaway.
- gnicholas 6y agoMy theory on this (as someone who studied linguistics and who has lived all over CA) is that the freeways in socal used to be called by non-numeric names. My grandparents told me that what is now referred to as "the 10" used to be "the Santa Monica freeway". "The 405" used to be "the San Diego Freeway". When all these freeways were given numeric designations, my theory postulates, people would still start referring to them by their old names, starting with the "the", but then saying the number.