18 ms·
North American English Dialects
- f5ve 3y agoThis is cool. My first thought is the choice of dialect rather than accent. I'm from NC and the Lumbee Indians had a way of speaking that was unique and endearing. It feels like many places in the US are losing that identity and the language of most areas is merging. Especially in the west, the differences between peoples' idiolects is usually greater than the differences between regions' dialects.
- CommieBobDole 3y agoI guess that's a consequence of media, global communication and mobility. Which raises the question, what's up with the UK? Modern country with internet access and a good transportation network, not to mention a century-old central media establishment with basically one accepted dialect, but they've still got almost-mutually-unintelligible dialects in places fifty miles apart.
- xeromal 3y agoJust a guess, but UK's accents have been developing for a 1000 years while the US has only had a few hundred at the most. Probably just less sticky. That said, bums me out because I love my region's dialect. I grew up in N. Georgia in the boonies and I love coming home to hear the accents. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YYx51ZrSn3g https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YYx51ZrSn3g
- peterleiser 3y agoLove that kid! I live just south of Nashville, but I'm originally from rural Northern California. When we moved here about 10 years ago Southern folks were far more comfortable speaking with their local accents around us transplants. But there have been tons of people moving in from all over our country. Now a lot of folks "cover up" their accents. It's a super bummer. I also realized it's the same thing I do. I sound different when I go back home to rural farm country in California.
- xeromal 3y agoYeah, there's a mass of outsiders moving into my hometown and while it has been good for the local economy, it has really eroded the culture in a big way. It's gentrification, but on poor whites. It was gonna happen eventually, but I do hate watching it happen for selfish reasons. I used to cover up my accent but I let her rip now. lol. Last of the Mohicans.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoPerhaps some of it has to do with class rivalries, which are more acrid in the UK than in the US? In the UK, the wealthy adopted a supraregional standard (Received Pronunciation) through their schooling. Therefore, by retaining one’s regional accent an ordinary person was emphasizing that one was not one of that detested class. This is a pure guess. But I have heard that features of London’s “Estuary English” are now spreading to other UK cities. That accent is not an upper class one.
- zdragnar 3y agoReceived pronunciation is typically spoken by a very small percentage of Brits- a quick Google search claims around 3%. There are class differences, but even within classes there are very wide variations- thinking Geordie v Yorkshire vs West country vs scouse vs South London.
- avgcorrection 3y agoClassic HN to make everything about the UK about hereditary class.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI don't know where you live, but as someone who does live in the UK, I think everything really is about class here! It affects every almost interaction, and where contemporary fashion usually masks class, it is one's accent that usually gives it away.
- hcho 3y agoThe century old central media establishment stopped pushing a single dialect decades ago. There's no accepted dialect.
- kzrdude 3y agoMaybe geographical mobility is that much higher in the USA? Are there any studies on this, how likely people are to move to different regions?
- denton-scratch 3y ago> with basically one accepted dialect Oh, I'm not sure what this "one accepted dialect" is. For example, Scottish English is widely accepted in Scotland; it's a true dialect, not just an accent. When I was a kid (I was raised speaking RP) I couldn't understand a geordie accent at all. I lived and went to school for some years in Liverpool; I could understand a scouse accent, usually, but I certainly couldn't speak like that. And sometimes scousers would put it on strong, so that I couldn't understand a word. Nowadays all the accents have become more restrained; geordie, in particular, has become much softer, and is nowadays quite acceptable for e.g. TV and radio presenters. I never hear a really thick scouse accent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- petercooper 3y agoI think it's an overstatement to suggest mutual unintelligibility but they can be extremely distinctive though. I don't know if this happens in the US, but in the UK it's not uncommon to adopt the accent of an area. I had a cockney accent as a child but now live in the north with a softer, hybrid northern accent. I tend to switch back when I am in London. I am also familiar with people who have moved to places like Newcastle and Liverpool and picked up the accent to some extent. I even know a guy who has an Australian wife and some of his vowels slide into the Australian accent despite having never lived there. Not to mention all the young British techies who've spent more than 2 seconds in the US and start dropping their "t"s to "d"s.
- lordnacho 3y agoDistinctive for sure. Here's a story about me at uni: Me: how about that Steve guy, eh? He's somehow overcome his speech impediment to become a professor of engineering at this world class uni. Friend: oh yeah he's Brummy Me: never heard of it, is it some sort of palsy? Friend: no it means he's from Birmingham Me: what's that's got to do with how he talks? Oh.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoHey in graduate school one of my classmates seemed normal until her mother called. Then she'd put her feet up on the desk, talk much louder and adopt her native Texan accent, so thick I could barely understand her. Hang up, and click! she was back to the local one.
- jgwil2 3y agoLonger historical isolation. But I'd guess that most of these dialects are converging under modern influence and are a lot more similar to each other today than they were a century ago.
- jccooper 3y agoDialect can include pronunciation, vocabulary, word choice, grammar, semantics, and other ways of speaking where accent refers only to ways of pronunciation. Academics almost always go with "dialect" for "different ways of speaking" unless they're specifically meaning only pronunciation. And sometimes not even then. The differences covered here do seem to be mostly accent (though some might consider sound changes to be more than accent), but calling it dialect allows for broader consideration if warranted.
- bsimpson 3y agoOne of the things I've wondered about my whole life: Does anyone know how to describe the R sound that millennial girls from the west coast make? You can hear it in the word "either" for the intro to The Button [1]. In my mind, it's prominent in the Pacific Northwest and in the speech of Lizzie Caplan (she's from L.A.). It's almost like they swallow the letter. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@cut/videos https://www.youtube.com/@cut/videos
- crazygringo 3y agoA timestamp link for others, just because I was having trouble at first figuring out where you were talking about: https://youtu.be/Gip8tatY2-w?t=14 https://youtu.be/Gip8tatY2-w?t=14 I definitely know what you mean, it's exactly how Lizzie Caplan speaks. It's different for sure, but for the life of me I can't tell if it's placed further backwards or further forwards, or if it's a question of elongation/tempo as well? Or possibly raising the palate?
- bkazez 3y agoI think it’s just a retroflex R, but when it’s preceded by tongue-forward th in “either,” it comes out almost like a flap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcrVeMYnOS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcrVeMYnOS4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_and_flaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...
- Lammy 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fry_register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fry_register ?
- jmclnx 3y agoWhere I live, it is pretty much gone. No one under 40 knows the few common words we used in our youth.
- faut_reflechir 3y agoyes, it seems clear to me that there is much less dialect variation in the US, outside very rural areas, than there was 30 years ago. Even then, the adults had much more variation than the kids.
- xeromal 3y agoI'm from N. GA which has a flowery dialect and all those expressions my grandparents used are dying. I think 1 or 2 more generations is all that's left.
- clbrmbr 3y agoThere tends to be the most variation in the country where a language originated—-the “center of diversity”. Taiwan is the CoD for the Polynesian languages including Indonesian and native languages of Madagascar. (As per Guns Germs and Steel)
- pessimizer 3y agoBritish people also sound more American than ever. Nearby, in Ireland, there are rich (suburban, I think?) Dubliners who have never left Europe that, with their normal accents, can briefly pass for Americans to Americans.
- int_19h 3y agoBetween schools teaching some form of standard pronunciation (in most countries, at least), and routine exposure to the same through mass media and intermingling in large cities, most languages seem to be on the trend towards less dialectal variety.
- irrational 3y ago
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoVery weird to lump all of Canadian English in together. I'd argue dialect continuity between parts of the upper midwest US and (primarily rural) parts of central Canada.
- euroderf 3y agoCanada is vast and undifferentiated. If your research is lazy and US-centric.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI always find it amusing when maps like this, or for weather, etc. have a nice even line at the 49th parallel and it's like... "here be dragons" after it :-)
- greenbit 3y agoTrying to understand the weather from maps that just grey out Canada is like trying to figure out what's going on in a chess game if you can only see half the board.
- lukas099 3y agoBut it is differentiated on the map.
- euroderf 3y agoBasically just two zones for English ? Seems improbable in reality.
- lukas099 3y agoLook at all the colors and lines and dotted lines and little text boxes... there are way more than two.
- yellowapple 3y ago
- tejohnso 3y agoUnfortunately 4/5 video links I clicked on were bad. Original title is better.
- clbrmbr 3y agoIs there a quiz somewhere where I can learn what accent I have? (Of course it would be epic to do this with EnCodec embeddings, but a “does X rhyme with Y” quiz would suffice.)
- munk-a 3y agoThere's a good (but old one) available from the NYTimes[1] - a lot of it actually centers on which words you use for certain things (i.e. roundabout vs. rotary[2]) and rhyming like if you pronounce aunt and aunt as onht or ahnt or pronounce each one differently. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz... 2. Guess where I'm from!
- clbrmbr 3y ago1. Thanks (but paywalled) 2. Hmm idk I call it a “circle”.
- Varriount 3y agoThat quiz was surprisingly accurate - the three cities it listed for me are less than an hour away from where I live.
- HDMI_Cable 3y agoI took the test three times and got wildly different results each time. First one said I'm from Florida, second one Kansas, third one Ohio. Weird.
- rahimnathwani 3y agohttp://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey/ http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey/
- irrational 3y ago> In order to process your responses, we need to know where you acquired your dialect features. This usually means that you should answer the questions below based on where you were raised I honestly have no idea what to say. Between birth and 21, I never lived anywhere more than 2 years and I lived all over - Texas, California (3 separate parts), Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, North and South Florida, Indiana, Montana, Puerto Rico. Is there a particular age I should shoot for and put where I lived when I was that age?
- munk-a 3y agoAs a mass-hole I'm always tickled by these examinations especially because there's so much local variation within Boston due to how varied the individual neighborhoods can be. The non-rhotic accent isn't pervasive as a lot of people have trained themselves out of it outside really historic urban centers - but there is a wide variety of bizarre terms we use.
- nicole_express 3y agoThere's definitely a "suburban Boston accent" where you have most of the terminology and vowel inventory of a traditional Boston accent, but since it's rhotic the speaker thinks they don't have an accent.
- bknight1983 3y agoI hope you agree then it’s not a water fountain but rather a water bubblah
- cecida 3y agoI haven't been to Boston in 15 years, but I remember it having two very distinct accents when I was there. There was the very Bostonian Irish accent with rolling R and very soft H. My mother always said Kennedy had it, but I can't pick that up in recordings apart from the use of lots of adverbs and a general flair for speaking. The other is distinctly WASPish. It's the New England received pronunciation style. It's more Yankee.
- aristus 3y agoArchie Bunker and Thurston Howell. You don't encounter them as much today in the wild, possibly because of how they were caricatured on TV.
- yuppie_scum 3y agoI think you’re much more likely to hear a foreign accent than a waspy one these days. Charles Emerson Winchester III isn’t walking thru that door.
- schwartzworld 3y agoThat's a Brahmin accent, and it's completely dead. Maybe a couple of old ladies at the Athenaeum talk like that.
- imbnwa 3y agoWhere does Bill Burr fit in there
- dogmatism 3y agoKennedy more had the wasp-ish accent. The other you could hear from some priests But these days, it's all drowned out by Matt Damon and Ben Afleck's version. I feel like Bostonians talk like caricatures of themselves
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoI did always wonder why she sounded like she was from Minnesota. " Sarah Palin talks like she’s from (northern) Minnesota! The original link, now dead, was sent in by Annie Wang (thanks!), but this search link shows the vast amount of discussion on this subject. On another web site it says she talks like she’s from Fargo, North Dakota (actually, like the people in the movie Fargo, actually filmed in Minnesota)! In fact, it turns out that the area of Alaska around Wasilla and Palmer is much more like the North Central dialect than it is like other Alaska dialects. [32] On the web site above linguist James Crippen describes this dialect as Mat-Su Valley English, after the Matanuska-Susitna Valley where it is spoken. James Crippen has now kindly provided me with information that allows me to set its borders fairly accurately. He says that it probably extends no further west than Willow, no farther northeast than Sutton, and is probably dying out in much of the area anyway, because of a continued influx of people from other parts of Alaska. So why do they talk like this? Because this area was almost entirely settled during the Great Depression by people from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan as part of a federal project. Historical info can be found in this Wikipedia article, and on this page sent in by contributor Susan Alexander. Thanks!"
- eesmith 3y ago> as part of a federal project. Historical info can be found in this Wikipedia article I had no idea the US funded an internal colonization effort! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matanuska_Valley_Colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matanuska_Valley_Colony . Over half of the original colonists left within 5 years, they didn't have the right skills and the valley wasn't as good for farming as planners thought. > By the end of their second month, 25 of the 200 colonists had returned home. On June 16 a group of colonists sent a telegram directly to President Roosevelt that read: "SIX WEEKS PASSED NOTHING DONE NO HOUSES WELLS ROADS INADEQUATE MACHINERY TOOLS GOVERNMENT FOOD UNDELIVERED COMMISSARY PRICES EXORBITANT EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES FOR SEASON DOUBTFUL…" ... There was only one doctor and a few Red Cross nurses in the colony. More serious cases had to be sent by train to Anchorage. Polio, measles, chicken pox, and pneumonia quickly ran through the community, especially affecting the children who made up half of the population. With the media spotlight on the colony, the government was forced into providing medical facilities.
- sudosteph 3y agoYeah, I don't buy that Boone, NC has the same dialect as Odessa TX. The Western NC / E. TN Appalachian accent is quite a distinct one.
- kcplate 3y agoDefinitely. I can generally tell the difference between Texas, Louisiana/Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee/Alabama/Georgia, NC, and SC accents, but I can see how some damned Yankees might not.
- adamrezich 3y agothis is still one of my most favorite website on the Internet, <map> tag and all.
- woodruffw 3y agoLinguists seem to disagree, but I swear that I can tell the difference between a Manhattan/Bronx accent and a Brooklyn/Queens one (to the extent that they exist anymore, which is barely).
- acuozzo 3y agoI grew up in Brooklyn. The #1 difference I hear is that elsewhere in NY they don't do Yuge, Yuman, Yumor, etc. It seems to be a Brooklyn-only thing.
- MockObject 3y agoBut Trump does this, and he's from Queens. I don't actually think there are regional differences in the five boroughs.
- imbnwa 3y agoTrump and Christopher Walken have Queens accents, they sound very different from Bronx or Brooklyn.
- arrowsmith 3y agoBernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn and has a distinctive accent (possibly influenced by his Jewish heritage?), see e.g. this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waeXBCUkuL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waeXBCUkuL8
- MaciejR 3y agoYou’re absolutely right, it is distinguishable as a person who’s grown up in the area.
- jccalhoun 3y agoI remember when I was an English major in college and I took a class on linguistics and on the first day of class we introduced ourselves and the prof could tell where we were from and which part of the state we were from. I don't remember much about that class but I remember that!
- tkgally 3y agoI was a TA for an introductory linguistics course at UC Santa Barbara in the 1970s. On the first day of class, the instructor would have the students answer a few questions intended to show if they were from northern or southern California. (Few were from out of state.) The two I remember were: (1) If someone tells you they are going to “the city,” where are they going? (2) Name a freeway. The other TAs and I compiled the results. For (1), the northern Californians almost always answered “to San Francisco,” while the southern Californians gave a variety of answers, including “Huh?” For (2), the northerners gave a number, like “the 101,” while the southerners usually answered with a name, like “the Golden State” or “the Harbor Freeway.” (I haven’t been to California for a while, but my impression is that SoCal usage has shifted since the 1970s to numbers, too.) The instructor of that class was Marc Okrand, who later created the Klingon language.
- davidw 3y agoThe + freeway name is a southern California thing. https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-5-the-101-the-405-why-southern-californians-love-saying-the-before-freeway-numbers https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-5-the-101-the-405-why... IIRC, in the Bay Area, they don't put 'the' before freeway names or numbers. We certainly do not here in Oregon. It's a dead giveaway that someone is from CA.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoI have heard traffic reporting in Portland call 26 “the sunset” and 84 “The Banfield” though. So it’s not completely unheard of.
- lukas099 3y agoI was in the San Francisco area for the first time recently, and I noticed that people sounded like they were from the Midwest. I'm glad to see this agreeing with me. Does anyone know why this is?
- shadowofneptune 3y agoSan Fransisco is the main port of the west coast. The Oregon Trail gets all the fame, but ship was usually how newcomers came to California and the other western states. During WW2, that role was naturally even a bigger deal than in peacetime. It's also where you got dumped if you were dishonorably discharged. That's why the gay community of California was so unusually concentrated into one district of one city.
- wizofaus 3y ago> the other western states But the midwest is not the western states...?
- shadowofneptune 3y agoRead what I said again. People went from east and mideast to west by ship, and SF is the best port.
- cwalv 3y agoIt's not. Not sure what the official boundary is (if there even is one), but Midwest is far east of Western. It would better be called 'Norcentral' these days, but the name is probably left over from times when St Louis was considered western
- mistrial9 3y agohistorically lots of mixed-heritage from the Latin lands, too.. German-Mexican and such.. San Francisco used to be a large Catholic landing pad.
- davidw 3y agoSilver City having its own subdialect seems odd. It's a town of like 10K people in SW New Mexico.
- yellowapple 3y agoThere's some random town in Texas with its own German dialect, so I'd believe it.
- linux2647 3y agoI’m not sure the pin/pen merger is a thing in the California San Joaquin Valley. I’ve only lived here for a few years and not heard the merger, and my wife–born and raised here–says them differently
- shagie 3y agoThe bit I find neat is the rhotic 'R'. Most of the US says 'R'... not quite as strong as pirates did (I'll get to that) but the 'r' is there. A British woman who I worked (from London) didn't have the 'r' sound "car park" sound to my ear like "ca pack". In England, the rhoticity was found in the poorer and rural parts of the country during the age of discovery. The ship builders, the people who were on ships, the poor people who got sent to the new world... and pirates. A map of where non-roticity shows up in American English: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Non-RhoticityUSA.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Non-RhoticityUSA.png ... and you've got a map of where the upper class of England lived in the 1700s in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English ---- https://www.waywordradio.org https://www.waywordradio.org is a podcast on the English language and dialectical differences are frequently found as topics. They also make reference to Dictionary of American Regional English - https://dare.wisc.edu https://dare.wisc.edu - digital version: https://www.daredictionary.com https://www.daredictionary.com (yes, its a subscription service)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jbjohns 3y agoInterestingly, at least British and Australian people tend to make the 'R' sound when the word ends in a vowel sound (e.g. "dater" instead of "data").
- arnsholt 3y agoThat’s called an intrusive r: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R Originally comes from a final r being pronounced before a word starting with a vowel, and then that cropping up in places with no final r.
- arrowsmith 3y agoAs in the Beatles song A Day in the Life: I saw-r-a film today, oh boooy
- munificent 3y agoI love dialects and grew up in New Orleans. It's an absolutely fascinating city if you have an ear for accents since there are so many distinct ones. People often tell me that I have "no accent" even though I grew up in the South. The answer is that I used to have a very strong east Texas accent. When I moved to the New Orleans area at ten, I was surrounded by so many distinct accents that I guess my brain didn't know which one to latch onto and I ended up with a sort of generic American one. I have a distinct memory of a classmate in fifth grade referring to a pen as an "ink pen" (as if there is any other kind) and realizing it was because in his accent, "pen" and "pin" are otherwise indistinguishable.
- WorldMaker 3y agoI also grew up around an interesting mixture of Southern and Midwestern accents and wound up with what people receive as "no accent". It may not be as "generic American" as you think, though. I've found in my own case that my own accent is just naturally incredibly accommodative (also the fun technical word for it) and I reflect back the accent of the person I'm talking to more and more the longer I talk to them. It's generally not a conscious thing and it's weird to try to catch it consciously or consciously trigger it. When I do try to consciously watch it, it is very subtle (it's not trying to mock or parody the other person, as you might if you were trying to consciously "put on" an accent). (Also, I don't think it is necessarily restricted to cities with mixtures of accents. TV has done a lot to build both a rather homogenized "generic Middle American accent", but also I think has been one of the forces for creating the very accommodative accents from hearing what diversity there is between local/regional accents and the TV generics and how those influence each other, particularly because TV hasn't been intentionally homogenizing things in a specific direction.)
- munificent 3y ago> It may not be as "generic American" as you think, though. It definitely is. I've had people from a variety of US states tell me I have "no accent" (which roughly means, "American standard West Coast television actor accent"). > I've found in my own case that my own accent is just naturally incredibly accommodative (also the fun technical word for it) and I reflect back the accent of the person I'm talking to more and more the longer I talk to them. My brother is like that. His speech patterns are chameleonic and follow whoever he's talking to. He does it totally unconsciously and naturally, and it seems to work well for him. I'm too self conscious to do that to the degree that he does. I would notice myself doing it and it would feel inauthentic (even if it wasn't). I have a fairly consistent accent regardless of who I'm talking to.
- ummonk 3y agoI've definitely noticed that SF lacks the NorCal accent which I grew up with in Walnut Creek, and this map shows that.
- Lamad123 3y agoThe map is atrocious.. Too much detail at that scale!! And I think I might've heard of the existence of an Appalachian category in Places like WV and parts of Tennessee. I'm a foreigner and even when I could barely tell the difference between dialects, I could very clearly see the huge difference between how people in WV and Eastern PA accents vs NJ and NY on the coast. Also, it seems odd that the "Canadian" dialect-s are so neatly aligned with the border!! I feel like people in much of Alberta speak some generic North American English and not a lot of "aboat". North of Ottawa in Quebec, Hull specifically, almost nobody speaks English!!! I lived there and everything was in French. Some people couldn't and did care to speak English even as a second language. The English that people speak in Quebec and particularly Montreal seems to also differ from the generic Canadian accent you know!
- chromatin 3y agoYes, there is a terrible lack of nuance in the south; and Southern Mountain speech is not at all considered distinct in this analysis. http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/784 http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/784
- asah 3y agoreally fun: https://www.dialectsarchive.com/globalmap https://www.dialectsarchive.com/globalmap https://www.dialectsarchive.com/alabama-10 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/alabama-10 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/new-york-9 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/new-york-9 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/connecticut-8 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/connecticut-8 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/massachusetts-9 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/massachusetts-9 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/nebraska-3 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/nebraska-3 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/scotland-14 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/scotland-14 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/northern-ireland-6 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/northern-ireland-6 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/wales-7 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/wales-7 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/fiji-3 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/fiji-3 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/uruguay-1 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/uruguay-1
- rayiner 3y agoI grew up 20 miles west of DC and now live 20 miles east of DC. The difference in accents and dialect was quite surprising, so it’s interesting to see the clear delineation on the map. My 10 year old daughter’s friends point out she doesn’t have a “Maryland accent” which I find hilarious. Funnily enough it’s sensitized me to other mid Atlantic accents and now I can immediately pick people out from New Jersey (even DC transplants with quite subtle suburban Jersey accents).
- robk 3y agoThen drive twenty or forty miles south and you'll hear even more variants once you hit Charles and St Mary's counties.
- azangru 3y agoI am curious, since there seem to be many linguists in this thread, could anyone place Ken Schwaber's (one of the co-creators of scrum) accent? The most noticeable characteristic about it is that his /æ/ in words like "have", "past", "perhaps", "backlog" sounds very narrow/high. The /ei/ in "take" is also more narrow/high than usual. Is this something characteristic of any of the American dialects? Google says he was born in 1945 in Wheaton, Illinois. Is this typical of that area? Speech example: https://youtu.be/xm4X7Hv_GOs?t=711 https://youtu.be/xm4X7Hv_GOs?t=711
- robk 3y agoSounds like southern Wisconsin influenced. Wheaton is not far so perhaps he moved there or had family there (or the Wisconsin accent extends into wealthier Chicago suburbs)
- underlipton 3y agoIt does not escape attention that AAVE is relegated to a small blurb in the "Special Interest" section, with a number of inaccuracies. >African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the dialect of most African Americans in the United States, is derived from Classical Southern, and shares its main features and many other features. However, it also has a number of distinctive features. I have not generally included AAVE in this study, since its geographical distribution tends to be independent of “white” dialects, primarily because after the Civil War large numbers of former slaves moved to all parts of the U.S., and tended to form their own communities, retaining their unique dialect. However, in many areas of the Lowland South no such migration occurred, and in these areas AAVE and “white” dialects share features and clearly have developed together, so in these areas I have sometimes included AAVE samples. AAVE tends to retain r-dropping more than “white” dialects do, even among younger speakers, and throughout the United States in African American communities. >I have not generally included AAVE in this study, since its geographical distribution tends to be independent of “white” dialects This is like saying, "I have not included black history in this survey of American history, as it tends to be independent of "white" history. >primarily because after the Civil War large numbers of former slaves moved to all parts of the U.S. Mass movement of American blacks out of the South occurred in the early 20th century; the Great Migration was spurred not by the Civil War, directly, but instead by mass terror. >and tended to form their own communities They were forced into small communities, largely into poor conditions or predatory housing arrangements, and generally barred from entering white communities except as menial labor. AAVE is one of the most important American dialects. It's had a major influence on American cultural output, and has done so for more than a one hundred years. It's also itself heavily influenced by West African speech patterns, miraculously preserved despite centuries of persecution of its speakers. Rick, if you're reading this: you need to do better. Your work is unfortunately incomplete and inadequate without giving AAVE it's just due. I would suggest contacting subject-matter experts for guidance and revising this page appropriately. Some suggestions: https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/professors-at-large/john-rickford/ https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/professors-at-large/jo... https://coe.arizona.edu/person/sonja-lanehart https://coe.arizona.edu/person/sonja-lanehart
- anonacct37 3y agoYour comment: > Rick, if you're reading this: you need to do better. Front and center of Rick's page. > This is just a hobby of mine, that I thought might be interesting to a lot of people. Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect dialects. - Rick Aschmann. (Page last updated: May 2, 2018. In fact Rick is apparently a professional linguist who's day job involves researching "amerindian" or indigenous languages so he's devoted his career to studying the dialects of people of color. Consider cutting him some slack on his hobby.
- ddxv 3y agoI couldn't figure out, what is the difference between "on as in dawn" vs "on as in don"? I watched several examples but felt like the all sounded the same?
- kaashif 3y agoI think the examples on this page are clear: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger where cot/caught is the same difference as don/dawn.
- wcedmisten 3y agoDoes anyone know if this data is available in a structured format for the regions? E.g. geojson? It would be really cool to transform this into an interactive map on top of an OSM base map to make it easier to use. It looks like all the boundaries are part of an <area> tag, so I could reverse-engineer them back into coordinates, but that seems a bit awkward.
- YossarianFrPrez 3y agoIf you are interested in this, there are two related books -- American Nations [1] which was inspired by The Nine Nations of North America [2] as well as the data presented in the link above -- that explore geographic variation in American subcultures. There is also some recent work in personality psychology that aims to get at regional variation in culture (see [3], for example.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer... [3] Geographical Psychology, Peter J. Rentfrow. Current Opinion in Psychology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X19301733 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X1...
- minedwiz 3y agoCool, but kind of US-centric. People in rural Ontario sound pretty different to people from Vancouver, yet they get the same colour on this map.
- ipcress_file 3y agoThat's what I came here to say. You can hear the differences when people from various parts of British Columbia speak, much less Saskatchewan and northern Ontario.
- AlchemistCamp 3y agoAgreed. People in Vancouver sound practically indistinguishable from people in California but Ontario is unmistakably Canadian. I understand how the Maritimes came up so much more, though.
- ksenzee 3y agoInteresting. As someone who lives between Vancouver and California, I can tell them apart quite easily.
- brightlancer 3y agoRight, because everyone in The South sounds the same. Or The West. The map lists various differences within each dialect region, including in Canada. How narrowly should we define dialects?
- eesmith 3y agoDon't fret that much. New Mexico English doesn't sound like Idaho English either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_American_English#New_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_American_English#New_M... refers to NM English as a "subdialect", so it's likely more a matter of how you define some pretty fuzzy borders.
- dubcanada 3y agoNova Scotia for example is wrong… as is New Brunswick. A decent chunk of New Brunswick is French speaking. Some pockets of Nova Scotia are Frenchish speaking. Cape Breton is closer to NFL then Halifax. Newfoundland is not even close to Labrador. And all of Newfoundland is Gaelic/Irish sounding, not just St. John’s. Yet they included the extremely small France owned island. Not only that North America includes Mexico actually it’s 9 countries large. Yet only Canada and USA are displayed. Rest are “Spanish speaking” or something. No Greenland, Bahamas, Bermuda, etc. there are English speakers there as well.
- Brendinooo 3y agoIf yinz are looking to vibe with some ladies from dahn South Side, this one's a gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SruMKGoj71M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SruMKGoj71M
- was8309 3y agopgh in the hause!
- underlipton 3y agoAn additional note on AAVE's deletion from the author's conception of "American Dialects": this page has been posted to HN before, and each with more than 100 comments has a root comment questioning AAVE's absence. 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232381 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666736 To go 10 years with the same complaint repeated over and over seems to indicate a fundamental failing.
- mig39 3y agoI grew up in Newfoundland. We have several dialects, and a whole bunch of accents. I find the Hiberno-English ones the best!
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThere was a documentary about this: https://www.pbs.org/speak/ https://www.pbs.org/speak/ Interestingly, I've noticed the decline in {low,in}land south accents in Texas gradually over that past ~20 years. It was much more pronounced, but now mostly only elderly people speak with this accent. PS: My mom would come back with a southern accent for a month or 2 when she visited family. She lives here full time now and has only a mild accent, if any.
- aryehof 3y agoOne of the ways I identify many young Brits, is their insistence on saying “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there”. Or, “He was stood there” instead of “He was standing there”. Perhaps the high proportion of incorrect traditional grammar is a new generations need to sound more “street”?
- toastal 3y agoWhat stands out to me is the way “three” & “free” have become indistinguishable among all classes now with the dental fricative being lost. It’s a shame since it’s a unique sound only a few languages including English.
- int_19h 3y agoWell, there's a reason why it's rare as a phoneme - it's not only more difficult to articulate than more common sounds, but also more difficult to distinguish when you already have a voiceless stop and a voiceless fricative articulated nearby. Many other Germanic languages lost it for the same reason, and the same process is ongoing in Arabic. The sound by itself is not quite as rare, usually as an allophone of /t/ or /s/ in some contexts where it's easier to articulate.
- gdprrrr 3y agoIt's not new https://english.stackexchange.com/a/68983 https://english.stackexchange.com/a/68983
- gameman144 3y agoOne sound that I've noticed a lot recently is an "r" pronunciation which sounds like the tongue is all the way back in your mouth (if you pronounce an 'r' then pull your tongue upward and back, that's the one). It usual appears in "ar" sounds either before or after "g" or "k" sounds. You can hear it in words like "marker", "park", "craft" and the like. You can hear it in the words "guardrail" and "crack" at just after 1:35 in this NPR segment (https://www.npr.org/2023/03/10/1162713293/rockslide-repairs-are-underway-on-californias-pacific-coast-highway https://www.npr.org/2023/03/10/1162713293/rockslide-repairs-...) I've noticed that only some people I point it out to notice the difference, but I've heard it becoming more and more prevalent over the past few years. The only downside is that I have no idea how to Google it to learn more about its roots!
- int_19h 3y agoIt sounds like you're describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_consonant
- rabbits_2002 3y agoReally surprised to see pin=pen anywhere in California
- m3047 3y agoMy father's family has been in the Pacific Northwest since the 1800s, particularly Seattle and Corvallis. There is one word in particular, "peaked" which was pronounced "pekkid" (not to be confused with "peckish"!). Dunno why. Have gotten lectures from both dialect deniers and fascists over the years.
- meristohm 3y agoGrew up in rural Minnesota (now in rural WA south of Seattle) and am familiar with "peaked" pronounced "peak-id" as in "tuckered out" (but just now checking M-W dictionary I see "being pale and wan or emaciated : SICKLY", so I've been wrong about it for awhile). I'll listen for pekkid, thanks!
- m3047 3y ago"pekkid" meant "off your feed"