This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
weatherwax: I know it's a bit contentious, but can we remove "The Closer" example from the "Dixie" accent example? Anyone who has ever lived in Georgia, particularly metro Atlanta, knows that the main character's accent is nowhere near a dead ringer. More like a yankee trying way too hard and failing beautifully. The accent grates on my poor Southern ears.
Yougottawanna: I'm not sure if the characters in American Psycho qualify as having the preppie/conneticut accent. I associate that with old money (the East Egg of the Great Gatsby) rather than the me-first eighties bankers portrayed in that movie, who probably would have more of a normal New York accent due to the setting.
Looney Toons: I'd just like point out that I've spent all (harrumph) years of my life in New Jersey, and have never encountered the "media" version of Jersey accent — even in the urban Newark/Irvington/etc. area, which is presumably its native habitat. In general, the people here speak with what sounds to my ear as the same as "Newscaster English".
Red Shoe: A big part of that is that, thanks to the newscasters, most of the American regional accents are softening and converging. I've lived quite a few years in Baltimore, another place with a fairly distinctive regional accent (Albeit one you rarely hear in any media outside of John Waters movies), which you hardly ever hear from anyone under seventy. Now, I have run into some people with the classic "Joisey" accent (went to school with lots of expatriate New Yorkers), buy not many.
Looney Toons: We stepped on each other's posts... <grin> Here's my original second paragraph to the above:
An additional trivia item: Some linguists maintain that the "Hillbilly" and/or "Down East" accents are actually fossil remnants of British accents circa the 17th-18th centuries; British speech carried onward with the Great Vowel Shift
that started in the 15th century to result in the modern British accents, while the American branches "froze" without the same social/cultural forces to drive them along.
Red Shoe: I've heard of this before, and consider it a pretty good reason to laugh whenever an American decides that playing a part in a Shakespeare play requires that he fake a (contemporary) English accent.
Gus: Just as a further note on the differences between TV and reality: I participated* in the Seattle leg of a study in the early '90's in which conversations were recorded in public places (coffee shops, etc.) in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Houston, and Miami and the accents were categorized. In all those cities except Seattle, the predominant accent was something dubbed "Hispanic". That is, by statistical measures, you are more likely to contact someone who speaks English influenced by Spanish in an urban, public place than any other accent.
* collected and mailed off audio recordings
//I have read that, due to demographic and cultural changes in that particular geographic area, the accent we used to think of as Brooklyn / Bronx / "Archie Bunker" / "Bugs Bunny" hasn't really existed in the real world since 1970 or so (and was very much on the decline since 1940 or thereabouts). Does anyone who lives in the Northeast have any observations on this? It seems to me that I've heard it, back in the 90s, in a recording, where in the background a male voice is saying "Yo, I'm Frankie from Bensonhoist" (Bensonhurst, perhaps?) but it was only audible for a moment and there was static.
LTR: Can't comment on the Bronx accent, but the New Jersey one still exsists, maybe not as strong as it once was, but it's very easy to spot. I live in a college town that has a lot of students from the Jersey area, and you could tell it in how they talked. Now, I'm sure that there were plenty who were from there who didn't have a noticable accents, or were just transplants from other areas, not native speakers, but there was a steady rate of guys who would say "You buncha Joiks!"
Ronfar: As far as I can tell, the "New Joisey" accent must be limited to regions of New Jersey very close to New York. I attended Rutgers for a long time, and never once heard it. I think it's really a Nu Yawk accent, not a New Jersey one.
Looney Toons: Removed the Winchester/MASH reference from Prep because he's not Prep/Connecticut. he's Down East/Boston.
Cambias: There are no Cajuns in the Florida Everglades, unless they're visiting Disney World and taking an airboat tour. I'm cutting it down to just Louisiana.
Fast Eddie: Someone swapped in British Received for "pommy" in the description of Prep/Connecticut. I don't believe this holds up. My understanding of "pommy" is that it describes over-cultured to the point of affectation and is associated with an over-class; and that "received" is merely a standard usage, primarily associated with the mid-to-upper class. Certainly no one is encouraged to use a prep accent in the States other than students in certain Northeastern private preparatory schools, or those born to the accent. Not that there is much difference between the two sets.
Robert: That was me. As I understand it, 'pommy' is a mildly derogative Australian term for the British, which in this context refers to the stereotypical English accent, received pronunciation with the false implication that those who talk like that are trying to sound superior. I suspect that's not an accurate description of the American accent, and a more neutral term is probably appropriate anyway.
HeartBurn Kid: Actually, that is a pretty accurate description of the American accent. The Connecticut/Prep accent is the universal accent of snobbery, at least on TV.
Fast Eddie: Wasn't aware of the Aussie sense of the word. Is there a British term for the accent I'm thinking of — "posh", perhaps?
Robert: Posh is close enough; it could refer to any accent people associate with a claim to high status. 'Pommy' is the same kind of word as 'limey' or 'yankee': it may sometimes be well meant; it can also be decidedly unfriendly.
Fast Eddie: After consideration, the term is meant to be unfriendly. "Neutrality" might be better employed at Wikipedia.
Robert: In some respects, certainly, but not all — unless you think trope pages that are politically and religiously partisan would be a good thing, not just an incitement to edit wars.
Use an unfriendly term by all means, but preferably not one that takes a sideswipe at a third party.
Fast Eddie: <grumbles> Ok, I'll go with "snob". Any equalities a Colonial might discern between that term, pommy, and the the British at a large are between that Colonial and his sheep.
Seth: Youve gone past that point but we call it "The queens english" or Toff
Ununnilium: Actually, I've heard that accents are getting more distinct than they used to be.
jketchum31: Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what to do with Yooper. It's a very specific accent/dialect spoken in the upper or northern peninsula of Michigan... it's a lot like Minnesotan but I'm not sure if it's distinct or not. It's pretty obscure, but I can think of at least one movie (Escanaba in Da Moonlight, not sure how to wikify/link that) that uses it, and it may be worth a mention.
Fast Eddie: Belated response. Yooper is obscure. Not sure I've ever heard it in any media. Never heard of it until I met a Yoopie transplant in L.A. and had to ask her where she was from. It would go under the Minnesotan bullet, I think, even though it is really from northernmost Michigan.
Licky Lindsay: I've heard of it because I was a fan of Dr Demento back in the late 80s and early 90s and remember "2nd Week of Deer Camp" by Da Yoopers being in the Funny Five.
Becky Blue: That song IS funny. I've heard a sort of Yooper-ish accent in the north woods of Wisconsin to.
jketchum31: Belated response to belated... responses? Should I edit the main article to add the line "People from Michigan sometimes call this accent 'Yooper,' referring to the upper peninsula of the state"? I know a lot of Michiganders who aren't into language study will get confused if you lump yooper under Minnesotan. Actually, I have a neighbor who'd probably punch me if I ever said she sounded Minnesotan...
Fast Eddie: Add it as a new item in the list. It is at least as big an accent group as Luso or Philly.
Licky Lindsay: Somebody give me a concrete example of a character who speaks with the "City Girl Squawk" accent. I'm having a hard time guessing what this refers to.
I can also tell you that there are more variations in the South than just "Dixie" and "Hillbilly". The only way you're going to hear them on TV though is if you travel to a smaller city where the local newscasters don't even bother trying to not sound southern.
Fast Eddie: Fran Drescher has a bad case of it. She's from Queens, NY.
Licky Lindsay: oh, that accent. Like Chandler ex-girlfriend on Friends, too, right?
Fast Eddie: Yup. That's probably a better example, too. The voice pitch is closer to human. ;-)
Dark Sasami: You mean like Larry, Darryl, and Darryl's girlfriends from the final episode of Newhart? "WEyah from Lun GUYlind!", that thing?
Looney Toons: Well, that's Long Island, but the Affect is closely related. Lindsay, re: the Southern accents, I have a friend who grew up in Atlanta, and has three different Southern accents that she trots out as needed: Something that's actually close to Newscaster but has a few Southern-style vowels in it, which she normally speaks in; a flat, fast kind of "worker's" Southern that she has a name for but which I can't remember; and a honey-dripping Magnolia Blossom "Why, ah do declare" accent that she usually puts on for humor's sake. If we are going to subdivide Southern further, that last is a natural first addition.
Licky Lindsay: The "I do declare" accent is what I assumed was meant by "Dixie", since that is what actors usually try to emulate. I'm not sure I'd recommend splitting things any further... because we'll never hear the end of it until every little town has its own entry. (I assume the South is not unique in this) FWIW, I was just reminded that Paula Dean of the Food Network was an ant otherwise unattested on TV.
I think what confused me about the description of Affect accent was the words "upper-middle class". I do not associate any of the characters with that accent as being "upper" anything.
Looney Toons: It does seem to be categorized as "upper-middle class", though — see this article, which is pretty much the first hit I get in Google when I search on "city girl squawk".
Fast Eddie: Holy Cow, Shifty. All that discourse made me feel like I was reading Wikipedia. I'll move it off to one side in American Accent Influences, for those who are interested.
Fast Eddie: removed this parabomb...
- (Ironically enough, they will also assert that all other countries actually do have a single accent, and that some accents actually cover many countries).
Fast Eddie: Sorry for the storm of minor edits on this. Formatting was tricky.
Fast Eddie pulled ...
- While for the most part the accent as done in movies is identical to real life, nobody in real life actually says "Joisey" or uses the "oi" sound for Rs, except for people from Pennsylvania that think they're being witty when you tell them you're from Jersey.
Fast Eddie: The stereotype "townie" added to the Boston bit needs a little explanation or something. It must be local usage of some sort. //Later: Looked it up. Evidently, it is Boston local slang for "Bostonian." Not very useful as a stereotype. Anybody got a stereotype to go with the accent? When I hear it, I just think "Bostonian."
Spider I take issue with the description of the Philadelphia accent. I was born in Philly and raised in the near suburbs, and I can tell you we don't turn our "TH" sounds into "D"s — in other words, all those "da"s in the description are inaccurate. Yes, it's widely regarded as true that we say "Iggles" for "Eagles," that's fine. But the Philly accent is identifiable by its nasal long O sound (say "eh-oh" really fast and you've got it) and its swallowed long I ("light" sounds something like "luh-ight"). To me, the Philly accent is fraternal twins with the Baltimore accent, and only vaguely related (if at all) to the Bronx or Pittsburgh accents. //However, I dug up this article
, which I think is generally fantastic....and they claim we do turn the "TH" sound into a soft "D". So...I don't know. I don't hear it, myself. Anyone care to argue with me?
//Editing AGAIN to say that the article I linked to mentions the Philly pronunciation of words like "beautiful" and "gratitude," in which we turn that short I sound into a long E sound (e.g., "beyouteeful"). Interestingly, I've heard Welsh actors use the same pronunciation, and there was a large Welsh immigrant influx into the southeastern Pennsylvania region in the 18th and 19th centuries (evident in many of our town names, like Bala Cynwyd, Bryn Mawr, Tredyffrin, etc.), so I'm wondering if that's were we got it from.
- This troper lives just outside of Philly, and has never once heard the Rocky Balboa accent spoken. Will Smith is a much better example, although his has been toned down and made family friendly for TV. In recent years the accent has shifted to more closely resemble a halfway point between Urban and Newscaster.
Star Bright: How is there no actual entry for the Brooklyn accent? I'd add it, but as a native Brooklynite I have no idea what a Brooklyn accent is; it just sounds normal to me.
Prfnoff: I agree that the Brooklyn accent needs to be a separate entry for this. (I've heard it jokingly called "Kings English.")
Does anyone else think that Sarah Palin (John Mc Cain's Vice Presidential running mate in the 2008 United States Presidential race) sounds a lot like Hollywood's version of the Minnesotan / Fargo accent (especially when Tina Fey does her exaggerated version)? Does that accent apply to Alaska? Am I hearing things?
Janitor: Evidently the accent does apply to some parts of Alaska. Palin's family moved to Alaska from Idaho, which is mid-western-y, accent-wise. Maybe that is the larger element.
Nornagest: Where would Northern California go? The linguistic studies I've read on the subject often mention a distinct San Francisco accent, but I (raised in rural NorCal near the Nevada border, but now living in the San Francisco Bay Area) haven't noticed such a thing. It's certainly not the same accent as the SoCal accents mentioned under "Surfer" and "Valley Girl", although some of our idioms are, like, the same.
- Is it not part of the Pacific Northwest grouping? It seems like the major distinction between it and, say, Newscaster English, is the complete lack of distinction between "ah" and "aw", such that pairs like "don" and "dawn" sound alike. The further north you go, it also takes on more Canadian elements, like the raised "long I" and "ow" diphthongs before unvoiced stops, as in "night" and "about", though I don't know how prevalent those aspects are in relatively southerly California.
- ...On the other hand, The Other Wiki seems to treat California as a whole as a distinct dialect region. Make of that what you will.
Fast Eddie: Apropos of nothing, a thing I noticed on my visits to Washington State ... Nobody is from Seattle. They live in the U District, or on Capitol Hill or in Green Lake or Fremont (district names) — or one of the satellite cities (Bellevue, Kirkland, etc.). I stayed with a friend who lives in a high-rise in the center of the city of Seattle, surrounded by its skyscrapers. When asked where he lives, he says "Pike Market." I think Londoners may also have a similar linguistic tic.
Zetaseal: Hope you guys don't mind me cleaning this page up, it was a bit of a mess. I'm not quite certain on the relevance of the various pronunciations of Oregon, but I left it in. (I'm from Washington and I have honestly never heard any pronunciation besides "organ." You learn something new every day!)
Fast Eddie: Looks great! Thanks for making the effort. —- Fast Eddie: Moving this in for discussion. BTW, we don't use first person in the articles.
- Fresno: Specifically Fresno, CA (in California's Central Valley, not to be confused with Southern California). Stub entry. I have been told by local Hispanics that Fresno's "white people" speak with a distinctive local accent, which I suspect has influences from the Hispanics, the "Oakie" diaspora, possibly the Russian Germans that immigrated here over a century ago, and others. I leave it to others more knowledgeable than I (and/or not a native speaker of this dialect) to clean up this entry... or possibly delete it.
PD: Background on me: I'm from the suburbs of Chicago, and for high school went to a magnet school that drew from all over Illinois, plus I'm a linguistics major.
PD: Chicago and its environs have a separate dialect pool from, say, Detroit, partly because of its proximity to Upper Midwest and Midwestern regions. Generalizing the 'a' rules from Detroit to Chicago is a very bad idea and will make linguists yell at you, because Chicago is the go-to example for a place with a three-way distinction between these phones. "Caught" has an "aw" sound /?/, "cot" and "impossible" have an "ah" sound /?/, and "Chicago" and "father" have the forward "ah" /a/ that makes the region so famous. These examples should make it obvious it's not due to assimilation to place, either, because it would go totally the opposite way - these are actually different, recognized phonemes.
PD: Also, Midwestern differs from "Standard American English" in that its "ih"s /?/ lower to "eh"s /?/. This is a fairly common and easy change to make, and is also found in parts of the Southwest. ("I spelled melk on my pellow in Ellinois.")
even more PD: Plus, the reference to dropping the "t" in "often" in the Pacific Northwest entry is ridiculous, as no dialect in the history of American English has ever pronounced it. That's directly analagous saying somebody drops the "t" in "listen," which was formed by the same morphological process.
- I have duly eliminated the offending passage in Pacific Northwest, as it was rather ridiculous. However, I don't entirely agree with your assessment about Midwestern. While there are certainly parts of the midwest that alter /?/ to /?/, this can also be viewed as due to the encroachment of the Inland North dialect region, where this often occurs. (I suppose you could also say it's shifted a bit from the version that was appropriated as "General American", the same way that modern Tokyo Japanese differs quite a bit from the Standard language based on what was spoken there 100 years ago.) The 3-way vowel distinction in Chicago is news to me, though—you're welcome to create a category for The Windy City as a city dialect, if you'd like.
- PD: According to the other wiki Inland Northern retains a phonemic distinction between /?/ and /?/. In fact, it's doubtful that speakers at any stage of the Northern City Vowel Shift would conflate /?/ and /?/, since /?/ moves back before /?/ does. Plus in my personal experience (which I know doesn't matter but indulge me anyway), at my high school there was a "hick" social stigma attached to pronouncing /?/ as /?/ that was severe enough that some students consciously altered their speech patterns to avoid it, e.g. a friend of mine from Dixon (who did eventually pick up the rest of the school's accent, but explicitly told me she was trying to conform to the /?/-/?/ distinction because she didn't want people to think she was dumb. In different words of course).
- A little more wikiing suggests that the /?/-/?/ conflation I observed may have blown in from the south, not the west.
- PD: According to the other wiki
Patroklos: Some of the things illustrated in the Texan accent description aren't unique to Texas (/?/->/n/ is common across America and has been in English in various forms for hundreds of years). The description of the magical disappearing 't' (/t/-> Ø % /n/) I suspect doesn't even have anything to do with either Texas or the develarization, as I drop /t/ all the time ('prinner'=printer, 'Innernet'=Internet) and my dialect is Standard Northern Suburbanite (Minnesota flavor). American English does funny things to /t/ all the time, especially around /n/ (for example, turning it into a glottal stop before syllabic /n/). I'll also be changing the Sarah Palin reference; she "talks Minnesotan" because the dialect of the part of Alaska where she was raised was highly influenced by an influx of Minnesotans during a 1930's WPA relation thingymabob.
Asael: Just a little thing, but as a Seattle native I've never heard 'Issaquah' pronounced 'iss-SOCK-quah' as the page says (and if someone did they'd be assumed to be non-native, and probably laughed at and mocked thoroughly). I'm willing to believe that it might be correct pronunciation of the Indian word (I wouldn't know), but in my experience I've only ever heard 'is-uh-kwah' or 'iss-uh-kwah' in reference to the town.
banjo2E: I lived for three years in Utah's Salt Lake City suburbs, and I didn't hear any "cowboy" accents at all. It sounded more midwestern, actually. Probably the same can be said of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. If anyone knows which region those states are in, it'd help the article.
