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Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter (2019)
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoWow, extremely interesting! I must say that title goaded me into clicking the article. I had a classmate in 5th grade who went to Australia for the summer, and returned with a pronounced accent. It really gave us a thrill. I know lots of British English, but I find it difficult to speak unless I'm in a British environment.
- pard68 3y agoI am from northern Connecticut on the Massachusetts border. I had a fairly typical rural New England accent. As an adult I decided I wanted to own a farm and I hated the NE winter, so I moved to southern Missouri. I now sound like I was born here, but if I go home I'm back to dropping R's and calling milkshakes "frappes" within a day.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI grew up in S.E. Connecticut, and we called them milkshakes. First time I heard frappe was on a visit to Rhode Island. (A pretty short distance, granted.)
- pard68 3y agoOne of the wildest things about New England is how a short distance gets you a totally different culture. I used to go to New Britain (CT) a lot, what a different world from the Windsor area. I was really given a wake up call one day when I realized that the trip to the airport here in Missouri is longer than driving all the way across CT. Heck, I think to get to the nearest airport is about the same distance as driving to Portland Maine from the CT border (fourish hours)
- CoastalCoder 3y agoAnd yet, driving 30 minutes through CT is more boring than 4 hours through MO :)
- pard68 3y agoYes CT highways are soul sucking. The endless monotony of urban sprawl is mindnumbing. It is little wonder I hated driving anywhere as a child.
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- ashleney 3y agoI always get excited when there's a linguistics post on hackernews only to get disappointed by yet another analysis of the vowels of English dialects.
- floehopper 3y agoI spent 2 winters in Antarctica with people with strong accents, e.g. Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Scouse, Geordie, Cumbrian, and Devonian. On my return to the UK a lot of people said I'd developed a Brummie accent, although none of my fellow winterers were from Birmingham. My theory was that I'd developed an accent averaged across all the strong ones! It's interesting to see a scientific study showing how accents changed over an Antarctic winter!
- totetsu 3y agoAnyone can run praat and do formant analysis but understanding where and what normalization is needed is what makes this kind of thing really tricky.