Different American accents

[gymfresh]

Are you sure it wasn't more like "fesh and cheps"? I had the impression that New Zealanders conflate short "i" and short "e."

Yup. A few years ago I was flying through the Auckland airport quite a bit and initially was confused by the announcements asking so-and-so to appear at the "chicken disk". My last partner, an Auckland native, has lived in Melbourne and Sydney for 20-odd years and to me sounds vaguely English. But his mum is from mid-North Island of NZ and despite a lot of time in her presence, I can barely understand her.

 

[gymfresh]

Question for the Americans: Can you guys tell the difference between British accents at all? Irish is pretty distinct, and cockney - but Welsh, Scottish, Liverpudlian, Geordie (Newcastle) , Brummy (Brimingham) and Mancunian all sound pretty different too.

Yes and no. I used to go over the the UK all the time, about once a month for 5 or 6 years. My buddy in Hammersmith was teasing me one day when I asked about the accent of someone on telly. "You mean with all the time you spend over here you can't tell one accent from another?"

Well, I explained to him that I could discern every nuance of accent in the UK, but not being from there I had no idea which direction any of them were from. In other words, the problem wasn't that I couldn't hear (or even imitate) the speech patterns, merely that I had no clue where on the map to match each different sound I heard. That had never occurred to him.

He explained that "Northern" accents were often used in adverts because those people are generally perceived -- rightly or wrongly -- as more sincere and trustworthy, as I suppose a Midwestern accent is perceived in the US.

Now that I've researched it a bit more, I can actually pretty well distinguish and identify region-by-region, if not county-by-county, in England/Wales/Scotland/N Ireland.

Actress Amy Walker does a good job showcasing 21 accents in 3 minutes. Ironically, the first time I watched the video, the one accent I thought she did poorly was Seattle, and I later learned she's a Seattle native!

My speech seems to unnerve some people, because they search in vain to pin down where my accent is from. Lots of people think I'm Canadian because I speak clearly; it's probably just because I grew up in a State Dept family and we lived in lots of places (US and overseas), and my siblings and I had to speak to many people whose first language was not English. I also learned to simply mimic everything I heard, so I slip into any US accent and also speak Spanish, German and French with only the accent of where I've lived. No one I meet overseas thinks I'm American. My younger brother, inexplicably, sounded like a San Fernando Valley dude until he was about 10, despite never having been west of the Ohio Valley.

(Secretly -- my "native" speech, which I rarely slip back into, is similar to Richmond ["Richmun"], Virginia, or Confederate aristocracy)

 

[gymfresh]

I've been told I have a Northern California accent - (an over articulation of each syllable in words)....there is a difference between the Coastal Accent, SoCal Accent and the Central Valley accent in our state. I have some relatives who live in Fresno and they definitely have a trace of rural hick in their speech. Instead of saying "hundred" they say "hunerd" - perhaps it's from all the Mid-Westerners from Oklahoma that settled there after the great depression.

Very true. One thing I immediately noticed on moving to CA in the early 90's was that most Golden State natives ended their -ing words in -ine. So "going" sounds like "go-een" and "looking" sounds like "look-een".

You're right about NoCal generally, though the City (SF) is a little unique. I was told by a number of people when I first moved there that the native San Francisco accent can sound a lot like metro New York (where I had recently lived), even among San Franciscans who had never been out of the state. Weirdly, I found that to be true, which saved me from mistakenly assuming that many people I met were East Coast transplants.

 

[blg3floor3]

I can just about tell apart an East or West coast accent and a southern accent. Those of you in the US can you pin point an accent quite closely?

Not a chance. I suck at accents. I can't even distinguish UK vs Australian (yeah yeah, hang me from a tree, blah blah blah), let alone specific area codes in my own country. Just about all I can do is tell a generally southern accent (no mistaking those), and maybe a generally north eastern accent (or at least what I think is one). Anyone that sounds like me, I just assume they're from here (California), like me.

Beyond that, hell no. It fascinated me when I met this girl in grad school who could accurately pick out what state someone was from based on their accent.

Very true. One thing I immediately noticed on moving to CA in the early 90's was that most Golden State natives ended their -ing words in -ine. So "going" sounds like "go-een" and "looking" sounds like "look-een".

Interesting. I hadn't noticed that too much. Personally, I hear most people in my area omitting the 'g' in an 'ing' word. Fuckin', lookin', swearin', drivin', goin', etc., like I do.

 

[Calboner]

He explained that "Northern" accents were often used in adverts because those people are generally perceived -- rightly or wrongly -- as more sincere and trustworthy, as I suppose a Midwestern accent is perceived in the US.

Does that explain this "advert"?

YouTube - Cheezy Peaz

 

[2322]

Very true. One thing I immediately noticed on moving to CA in the early 90's was that most Golden State natives ended their -ing words in -ine. So "going" sounds like "go-een" and "looking" sounds like "look-een".

You're right about NoCal generally, though the City (SF) is a little unique. I was told by a number of people when I first moved there that the native San Francisco accent can sound a lot like metro New York (where I had recently lived), even among San Franciscans who had never been out of the state. Weirdly, I found that to be true, which saved me from mistakenly assuming that many people I met were East Coast transplants.

In fairness, you have a very neutral eastern accent. I couldn't pinpoint where you were from by accent alone but I recognized it as particular.

Let me know the next time you're in NYC. I'd love to get together again.

 

[gymfresh]

Absolutely, Jason. Maybe I'll make it to the next LPSG NY meet-n-greet.

Do New Yorkers find it odd to have a mayor with a Massachusetts accent? Michael doesn't sound a lick like Ed, at least to me. But hey, my mum's from Brookline and that sounds baseline to me.

Before home visits to the States to see relatives, Mother used to make us practice saying "I hahd to laugh to see the cahlf go down the pahth to take a bahth in a minute and a hahlf" with the drawn-out New England "a"... little did I know that we sounded more like Yankee rubes than proper Bostonians, but in her opinion it took off whatever "edge" we had acquired in English. I did slip up once and asked my great-aunt for some OR-ange juice and she freaked. Grabbed me by the ear and led me from the kitchen to the living room, asking, "Baahhbra, what aaah you teaching these children? What is an 'orntch'???" From that point on I said aahhrindge juice.

 

[2322]

Absolutely, Jason. Maybe I'll make it to the next LPSG NY meet-n-greet.

Do New Yorkers find it odd to have a mayor with a Massachusetts accent? Michael doesn't sound a lick like Ed, at least to me. But hey, my mum's from Brookline and that sounds baseline to me.

Before home visits to the States to see relatives, Mother used to make us practice saying "I hahd to laugh to see the cahlf go down the pahth to take a bahth in a minute and a hahlf" with the drawn-out New England "a"... little did I know that we sounded more like Yankee rubes than proper Bostonians, but in her opinion it took off whatever "edge" we had acquired in English. I did slip up once and asked my great-aunt for some OR-ange juice and she freaked. Grabbed me by the ear and led me from the kitchen to the living room, asking, "Baahhbra, what aaah you teaching these children? What is an 'orntch'???" From that point on I said aahhrindge juice.

Ah the tyranny of heritage! I'd love to meet your mother. She sounds like a fun person. Really though, you've neutralized it very well. You have a completely American voice of a particular type.

 

[Calboner]

Absolutely, Jason. Maybe I'll make it to the next LPSG NY meet-n-greet.

Do New Yorkers find it odd to have a mayor with a Massachusetts accent? Michael doesn't sound a lick like Ed, at least to me. But hey, my mum's from Brookline and that sounds baseline to me.

Before home visits to the States to see relatives, Mother used to make us practice saying "I hahd to laugh to see the cahlf go down the pahth to take a bahth in a minute and a hahlf" with the drawn-out New England "a"... little did I know that we sounded more like Yankee rubes than proper Bostonians, but in her opinion it took off whatever "edge" we had acquired in English. I did slip up once and asked my great-aunt for some OR-ange juice and she freaked. Grabbed me by the ear and led me from the kitchen to the living room, asking, "Baahhbra, what aaah you teaching these children? What is an 'orntch'???" From that point on I said aahhrindge juice.

Hmm. . . .

Bloomberg's accent is a Boston accent. To say "Massachusetts accent" doesn't make much sense, because there is no distinctive accent in the state once you get fifty miles or so away from the coast. In western Massachusetts, you don't "pahk ya cah"; you "park your car," just as in the rest of the US.

"Hahd" might represent a Bostonian pronunciation of the word "hard," but not of the word "had." No accent of English that has distinct phonemes for "a" as in "cat" and "a" as in "calm" uses the latter in forms of the verb "to have." A lot of people seem to get this wrong. I once attended a performance of a play by G. B. Shaw by American drama students, one of whose attempts at an English accent involved pronouncing the line "You have to, you have to" as "You hahv to, you hahv to." That would be to say, in English terms, "You halve to, you halve to."

The vowel in the first syllable of "orange," in Bostonian, is not "ah" as in "calm" or "park"; rather, it is the vowel of "cot" or "caught" (which are homophonous in such an accent). Unfortunately, it is impossible to explain these matters exactly without using phonetic symbols, which nobody would understand even if I inserted them here.

 

[D_Tintagel_Demondong]

One of the oddest accents I have heard is the back country accent of people in small towns in way upstate NY. I am talking about the region north of Lake Placid and west of Plattsburgh.

I can't seem to find a good YouTube example of it, though. I believe it has a heavy French Canadian component to it. In fact, sometimes French syntax creeps in as in the demonstrative, "I am going downtown, me.", or similarly, "Hey, ya going downtown there, you?"

I lived in that region about 30 years ago for about 5 years. I can still here an old guy I knew talking about his snowmobile, "Chroist, I took dat dere Artic Cat up ta tha flats aoutside-a Beekmantaywn and got er up about nuyndy muyles per owwer. Jaysus Chroist, yaas. Uy guess so!"

There is an odd way they pronounce words like fire or tire, where fire sounds almost like foyer, but maybe fuyer is more like it.

Colorful epithets, also. Such as "By the Jesus", when mildly emphatic, or when very emphatic, "By the jumped up Jesus Christ."

It is also laced with a midwestern component at the same time where a name like Dawn sounds more like Don.

Interesting. This seems like a blend of Great Lakes, Midwestern, Eastern American and Canadian Maritime! This sounds more like a New Brunswick vernacular to me; not only the word french word order, but also the phonology itself. As far as semantics go, I don't think that New Brunswicker's use the word "flats" in that context. Also, they are highly religious (Catholic) and I can't see them using such colorful metaphors as, "by the jumped up Jesus Christ!" Aside from these distinctions, they seem surprisingly similar!

I noticed "aoutside." Many Americans believe that this "aout" is part of a general Canadian dialect, but it's really only found in the Maritimes.

Hmm. . . .

Bloomberg's accent is a Boston accent. To say "Massachusetts accent" doesn't make much sense, because there is no distinctive accent in the state once you get fifty miles or so away from the coast. In western Massachusetts, you don't "pahk ya cah"; you "park your car," just as in the rest of the US.

"Hahd" might represent a Bostonian pronunciation of the word "hard," but not of the word "had." No accent of English that has distinct phonemes for "a" as in "cat" and "a" as in "calm" uses the latter in forms of the verb "to have." A lot of people seem to get this wrong. I once attended a performance of a play by G. B. Shaw by American drama students, one of whose attempts at an English accent involved pronouncing the line "You have to, you have to" as "You hahv to, you hahv to." That would be to say, in English terms, "You halve to, you halve to."

The vowel in the first syllable of "orange," in Bostonian, is not "ah" as in "calm" or "park"; rather, it is the vowel of "cot" or "caught" (which are homophonous in such an accent). Unfortunately, it is impossible to explain these matters exactly without using phonetic symbols, which nobody would understand even if I inserted them here.

I'm not familiar with his voice. Does he have Irish roots? Does he use the The low back chain shift (where coffee becomes CAW-fee?)

If you blend a British English and Irish accent, you come up with something fairly similar to a New England dialect; the most notable features being the non-rhoticity (r dropping) and the broad A (æ). Also, there is terminal r (the addition of the r at the end of words that end with a vowel). As with British English and Eastern American, China becomes CHI-ner and Brenda becomes BREN-der.

Transitions between Eastern New England and New York are not well defined. Providence retains R-dropping, for example, but does not merge O and AU (the so-called "cot-caught merger")

Aside from the r-dropping, NY and MA both share the short A split (e&#601 that is found in working class British English dialects. An example is where man becomes MAY-an.

Edit:
I'll look on youtube for a sample of his voice.

 

[MercyfulFate]

New England has many accents, including working-class Boston, High-Yankee (Kate Hepburn or Bette Davis) and DownEast (Maine). What I never understood is how Rhode Island manages to sound very New York when most of it's less than an hour's drive from Boston.

Connecticut, for whatever reason, has no accent of its own (aside from ten or so ancient Yankees who'll be dead very soon). FWIW, an Aussie friend, having heard me for the first time on Skype about three years ago, said I sound like the love child of Lauren Bacall and Ted Kennedy.

Connecticut has many NY transplants and has a mix of Bostonian and New York from my experience.

California has the weirdest accent to me, it's very lilting and slow compared to what I'm used to on the East Coast.

 

[molotovmuffin]

I love this thread!


I talk in a slow Mississippian southern drawl with definable Georgian components that is tainted by rural hoosier and upstate New York with a tad of Kentuckian and South Carolinian.

 

[D_Portelay Porquesword]

I have a southern drawl, a bit on the rural side as I grew up in the country there. People from outside of California notice it as being distinctly southern. My friends in Louisiana tell me I have a California accent.

Fiddle dee dee Miss Scarlet!

 

[Calboner]

I noticed "aoutside." Many Americans believe that this "aout" is part of a general Canadian dialect, but it's really only found in the Maritimes.

Shortening of the "ow" diphthong before voiceless consonants to something close to "o" is a feature of accents all across Canada. Even people from Vancouver have it, though in other respects their accent is different from those of eastern Canda.

I'm not familiar with his voice. Does he have Irish roots? Does he use the The low back chain shift (where coffee becomes CAW-fee?)

If you blend a British English and Irish accent, you come up with something fairly similar to a New England dialect; the most notable features being the non-rhoticity (r dropping) and the broad A (æ). Also, there is terminal r (the addition of the r at the end of words that end with a vowel). As with British English and Eastern American, China becomes CHI-ner and Brenda becomes BREN-der.

Transitions between Eastern New England and New York are not well defined. Providence retains R-dropping, for example, but does not merge O and AU (the so-called "cot-caught merger")

Aside from the r-dropping, NY and MA both share the short A split (e&#601 that is found in working class British English dialects. An example is where man becomes MAY-an.

Edit:
I'll look on youtube for a sample of his voice.

It's pretty difficult to discern distinctive Bostonian features in Bloomberg's speech: if I did not know where he was from, I would not be able to say anything more specific than that he comes from somewhere in the northeastern US. A writer in the Boston Globe once said that he sounded more Bostonian before he became mayor of New York.

YouTube - Michael Bloomberg - Origins of the Economic Crisis

You seem to know a thing or two about phonetics. I don't know if anyone besides you and me will understand what you mean by splits and mergers. Have you read John Wells's Accents of English? His lexical sets are expounded in an article in Wikipedia.

 

[MercyfulFate]

I have a southern drawl, a bit on the rural side as I grew up in the country there. People from outside of California notice it as being distinctly southern. My friends in Louisiana tell me I have a California accent.

Fiddle dee dee Miss Scarlet!

There are cool southern accents, and then there's the stereotypical horrible ones that sound like babble :biggrin1:. Oddly enough the really hard to understand ones sound a lot like some you hear in the UK, like from Northumberland that almost need captions to understand at times.

 

[JustAsking]

Interesting. This seems like a blend of Great Lakes, Midwestern, Eastern American and Canadian Maritime! This sounds more like a New Brunswick vernacular to me; not only the word french word order, but also the phonology itself. As far as semantics go, I don't think that New Brunswicker's use the word "flats" in that context. Also, they are highly religious (Catholic) and I can't see them using such colorful metaphors as, "by the jumped up Jesus Christ!" Aside from these distinctions, they seem surprisingly similar!

I noticed "aoutside." Many Americans believe that this "aout" is part of a general Canadian dialect, but it's really only found in the Maritimes.

I think you are on the right track. The Canadian Maritime influence might explain a lot of it, and it would have come in generations ago. These days, the locals would not identify with any Canadian heritage even though most of their last names are of French origin (although you would not know that by how they pronounce them these days.). Since Canadians are tourists in the Adirondack area, they see them as outsiders.

Also, they would have become Protestants generations ago and lost their aversion to religion-themed profanity. I never heard any of the Quebecois epithets such as "sti' tabernak', or 'chalaise' on this side of the border. It seemed like Jesus is invoked more often than not.

However, now that I think of it, the odd construction of the commonly heard "By the Jesus!", seems like a direct translation from the French, since the article is faithfully included.

Also, one of my favorite malaprops is how they refer to the "Pont Jacques Cartier Bridge", because the "Pont Jacques Cartier" sign is one of the first things you see as you cross into Canada on I-87.

 

[vince]

I have a tin ear for accents. I can tell you the general geographic region, but not down to an area code, that's for sure. My own is pretty neutral being from Vancouver. That test a couple pages back said-

""You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio."

We lived in a lot of places as kids and my siblings kind of got dropped off along the way. I was the only one that made it full circle back to Vancouver. So when the family gets together it's orally weird. We have North Florida crackers, L.A., a horrible grating nasal Wisconsin, my parents clear western Canadian, Ontarian, whatever I'm in the mood to imitate, and my sister-in-law's faux English accent. It's really fun to tease them about their acquired accents, especially my sister from Whiz-KHAN-sin.

My daughter says we're all mad.

 

[gymfresh]

"Hahd" might represent a Bostonian pronunciation of the word "hard," but not of the word "had." No accent of English that has distinct phonemes for "a" as in "cat" and "a" as in "calm" uses the latter in forms of the verb "to have." A lot of people seem to get this wrong.

The vowel in the first syllable of "orange," in Bostonian, is not "ah" as in "calm" or "park"; rather, it is the vowel of "cot" or "caught" (which are homophonous in such an accent). Unfortunately, it is impossible to explain these matters exactly without using phonetic symbols, which nobody would understand even if I inserted them here.

You're of course correct on these, but I had no other shorthand for transcribing the sounds without going into weird symbols from my freshman texts on phonetics and linguistics. My point was that "had" (and "laugh") in the phrase "I had to laugh..." were sufficiently different with a New England tilt than they sounded in my SAE dialect. Most definitely "softer", if I had to use an adjective. No question "had" and "hard" are distinct from each other with a Bostonian accent, but they also don't sound like "had" and "hard" as uttered by a Richmonder. I ought to know; I got rapped on the side of the head more than once for this offense. Other countries also distinguish the short "a"... my ex in Sydney bursts into giggles every time he hears a British or Irish tourist call out "Dad!"

My mother (Bostonian) and I say "have to" very differently.

As for cot and caught, I distinctly remember getting annoyed at my 3rd grade textbook for insisting that the 2 words were pronounced quite different from one another. The book went into great detail about how to pull back the corners of one's lips for "cot" but push out and round one's lips for "caught". Even at that age I knew full well who talked like that. "Crazy New York linguistic mafia" in charge of writing textbooks, I thought. A nice Southern school system (Virginia) that bothers to vet history books to make sure they refer to the War of Northern Aggression should be more vigilant about these little things.

I couldn't write "oh" for the sound in "orange" or "Florida", but you're right that it isn't the Bostonian sound in "park" or even "path". My point was that Bostonians say "orange" and "Florida" very differently from New Yorkers and their consonant syllable shift when they say Floor-ridda, or "Lawn Guyland" (where Islip is located).

 

[D_Tintagel_Demondong]

You seem to know a thing or two about phonetics. I don't know if anyone besides you and me will understand what you mean by splits and mergers. Have you read John Wells's Accents of English? His lexical sets are expounded in an article in Wikipedia.

I'm familiar with Wells' lexical sets, but I can't possibly remember all 24! I'm also aware of Wells because he was the president of the World Esperanto Association, of which I am a member. My profile read "Esperanto" for years (under "language"), but then I thought it was too pretentious and deleted it. It's a brilliant language! Wells, however was somewhat of a prescriptivist, which is linguistically contraindicative. He also advocated spelling reform, but in designing a scheme of spelling reform, there is a danger of insularity or parochialism. An America with a homogeneous set of phonemes would be much more boring.

Having read ManlyBanisters' "1,000,000 Irish Gaelic Declensions" thesis, I'm now officially an exhaustive expert, double entendre intended. I majored in linguistics, but unofficially concentrated in regional dialectology. This is why I find myself touring the U.S.--to learn the local vernacular dialects, colloquialisms and idiomatic English. Yes, I'm a nerd.

I find the waves of splits and mergers over the several centuries of Northeastern American English phonology to be fascinating, with an incalculable number of influences; from the industrial boom to the unprecedented immigration.

Edit:
No_Strings, from the U.K., once wrote something succinctly ingenious: "I do not have an accent." I got a kick out of that.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

I find myself touring the U.S.--to learn the local vernacular dialects, colloquialisms and idiomatic English ...

... all of pillow talk?