North American English Dialects
aschmann.net
aschmann.net
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 ... 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://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 - digital version: https://www.daredictionary.com (yes, its a subscription service)
https://people.howstuffworks.com/one-guy-responsible-for-pir...
> A British woman who I worked (from London) didn't have the 'r' sound "car park" sound to my ear like "ca pack".
Most English people don't pronounce the rhotic "r", with the main exception being the West Country. It's still widely pronounced in Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Wales.
Let me rephrase... the less wealthy parts of England had more rhoticity in their accent than the upper class parts. These poorer parts - either as indentured servants or immigrants to the new world (and Australia) had a stronger influence on what would become the American English accents.
Rhoticity can be understood by the further exaggeration that pirates displayed which was again exaggerated in popular media. Their accent was part of the West Country English which was in the poorer parts of the country - ship builders and young men with little to lose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country_English
> not because historical pirates actually spoke like that (although many surely did)
Blackbeard was presumed to have been born in Bristol. Francis Drake was born in Tavistock. These locations are both firmly in the West Country English dialect.
The guitarist Robert Fripp is from Wimborne, Dorset, UK. He's clearly rhotic—he pronounces the 'r' in 'Mayfair.' https://youtu.be/woRhyl4k6sc
... and looking it up... Dixon was born in Cockfield, County Durham... which is in Northern England as described.
Just interesting seeing these loose ends of things I knew tie together in other ways.
Its fascinating listening to Original Pronunciation Shakespeare and hearing how utterly rhotic it is, indicating that Americans and British use to sound alike before diverging
> The earliest traces of a loss of /r/ in English appear in the early 15th century and occur before coronal consonants, especially /s/, giving modern ass 'buttocks' (Old English ears, Middle English ers or ars), and bass (fish) (OE bærs, ME bars). A second phase of the loss of /r/ began during the 15th century and was characterized by sporadic and lexically variable deletion, such as monyng 'morning' and cadenall 'cardinal'. Those spellings without /r/ appeared throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but they were uncommon and were restricted to private documents, especially those written by women. No English authorities described loss of /r/ in the standard language before the mid-18th century, and many did not fully accept it until the 1790s.
This would suggest that it was on the rise during Shakespeare's time.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...
> Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home.
> It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.
> That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated.
> One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”
There's a cool video on YT called "A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries"[1] — I'm sure it's not meant to be definitive, but it's very interesting to note the presence or absence of the rhotic "r" during different periods.
--
Speaking of the New World — this is something of a side topic, but I think it's fascinating that "caulk" is commonly used in the U.S. and Canada; e.g: bathroom tiling. In my experience at least, you wouldn't really hear someone use the word in that context in the U.K. or Ireland. Most people I've asked associate it exclusively with boats.
I have a speculative pet theory on this — originally, caulk specifically referred to the materials used to fill the gaps between boards in a wooden ship.
Since practically everyone who originally came to the New World came on old wooden ships, it's not hard to imagine that "caulk" — once specific to ship building and maintenance — became well known to emigrant populations and took on a broader meaning over time.
In contrast, it's likely very few people who remained in the Old World at that time were ever in a wooden ship, and "caulk" remained less well known and retained its specific meaning.
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.
So "Je suis anglais" is pronounced as "Je sweez anglais". Compare "Je suis francais" ("Je swee francais").
I saw-r-a film today, oh boooy
Also, The Lincoln Lawyer has an Australian actor playing a character (Cisco) with a gruff, throaty American accident, but at one point it slips through and he says “Lisa” as “Liser”.
Why not "ka pak" or "ca pac"? I'm not native English speaker. Pronunciation is still mystery for me. Is it like in Dutch or Norwegian that two consonants are enclosing short vowel while one consonant makes long vowel?
And I'm ashamed to admit that I still do not know what is difference between "c" and "k" in English language.
They're the same sound, including when it's written "ck" as in "back". Although sometimes the "c" is pronounced like an "s", e.g. "face", "celery".
English spelling is highly inconsistent and it's often hard to tell how a word should be pronounced based on the spelling alone. Don't expect it to make sense.
It only makes sense if you know how the word entered the english language. Face and celery comes from french which pronounces these words with a soft c. So we pronounce it with a soft c. Coupe comes from french which pronounces it with a hard c. Hence why we pronounce coupe with a hard c. The 'strange' spelling and pronunciation of words with c is a result of loan words from many languages ( french, latin, german, spanish, etc ).
I believe in -ce- -ci- -cy- the c is an s, while in -ca- -co- -cu- the c is a k.
Perhaps the etymology is needed to know how to write a k/s sound you've never heard before.
No. You learn it through osmosis by being immersed in the culture. We all learn to pronounce face, celery, coupe, etc from our parents, school, media, etc. Etymology only comes into play if you want to know why we pronounce it that way.
> I believe in -ce- -ci- -cy- the c is an s, while in -ca- -co- -cu- the c is a k.
That probably works most of the time since I believe that's the rule the french use and so much of our vocabulary came from the french. But there are exceptions as others have noted. 'Boston Celtics' is pronounced with a soft c, while the 'celtic people', is pronounced with a hard c. As far as I know it's cultural. There isn't a rule which will help you out here other than you simply have to know it.
As advice for those folks learning English, don't assume spelling means anything.
The links in Everything2 go to the correct word if you're having difficulty.
----
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Thing is, in most cases when it's claimed that "spelling reflects pronunciation" for some language, it's not actually true - what it reflects is the phonemes of the language, not phones (actual sounds). To give an example in English, /t/ is a single phoneme, but it can be realized in a bunch of different ways ranging from actual [t] in words like "tea" to a glottal stop [ʔ] in words like "butter" (frequent in UK). Native speakers often don't even notice that these are two completely different sounds, because they are mentally mapped to the same underlying phoneme.
But because our brains are already perfectly capable of handling such mappings (so long as they happen according to consistent rules, which they almost always do), a phonemic spelling works great in practice. And when you deal with phonemes, the difference between various accents and dialects is usually much less than when you look at the phones.
English is problematic because its spelling is strongly inconsistent even with the phonemes, never mind the phones. And, yes, the rather extreme dialectal variety of English means that different dialects do have some phonemic variety as well. But, again, it's much less than actual pronunciation differences would make you believe, and it's certainly possible to come up with a canonical mostly-phonemic spelling that would cover, at the very least, British RP and American GA, and be reasonably adequate for most offshoots of those.
It's also possible to just adopt phonemic spelling based on specific dialects and expect the speakers to handle the differences at least for the popular ones (just like we already do with different words like "elevator" vs "lift"). This was the approach taken by Serbo-Croatian, where e.g. "vreme", "vrime", and "vrijeme" would all be valid spellings of the same word.
> Is it like in Dutch or Norwegian that two consonants are enclosing short vowel while one consonant makes long vowel?
Yes, that is generally the rule. Usually, a vowel followed by a consonant followed by e (/a_e, e_e, i_e, o_e, u_e) will produce the "long" version of that vowel. To signify that it's pronounced as a short vowel, many words have doubled consonants, e.g., "plate" (long a) vs "platter" (short a). When a word ends in a short vowel and a k, a lot of words unnecessarily double it to a ck, e.g., "trick," "back," etc.
However, this is more of a guideline than a rule; there are many exceptions to it. For example, "paste" has the a, then two consonants, then e; due to the doubled consonants, it "should" have a short vowel, but it actually has a long vowel. And many words with short vowels don't have doubled consonants; for example, the a in "magic" is short rather than long, and the first a in "Japanese" is short (you would expect "Jappanese"). The e in "medical" and the i in "amicable" are both tonic, short vowels.
> I still do not know what is difference between "c" and "k" in English language.
"K" always makes a hard /k/ sound. "c" makes a hard /k/ sound before a, o, and u (e.g., car, acorn, cute), but makes a soft /s/ sound before e, i, and y (celery, peace, cinders, cylinder). With Latin and Greek words, ae and oe are both treated as e, so Caesar, and coelacanth have soft C sounds. However, there are exceptions; sometimes it makes a k sound even before an e (e.g., sceptical, Celtic, loci), and sometimes it makes a soft c sound where a hard one is expected (e.g. facade).
English spelling is very irregular. Much of this irregularity is to reflect etymology, i.e., we borrowed the word without changing the spelling, or only changed the spelling a little bit.
Just adding, in the case of Facade, is very similar to the french façade.
So I guess the ç cedille was lost in translation. French uses the ç to make the ça and ço syllables change from /k/ to /s/.
One of the few notorious style guides the other way, for instance, is the more "upper-crust" New Yorker requires a diaresis mark in words such as "coöperation" (which is useful when discussing say a "chicken coop" versus a "chicken coöp" versus a "chicken coup", all things with very different meanings). To a lot of Americans diaresis marks look unnatural and that becomes one of the sillier markers that the New Yorker is "upper-crust" and "fancy", but teachers for decades have thought they would be a great addition to the language if adopted more widely.
" 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!"I had no idea the US funded an internal colonization effort! 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.
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.
(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.)
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.
If I try hard, I can make the two sound different. Just like I've struggled to be able to pronounce "Dawn" different from "Don".
- ink pens (aka fountain pens)
- biros (aka ball-point pens)
I would say that in my experience as a British person, 'ballpoint' is used frequently, 'biro' is probably the most common and has an almost colloquial feel to it, and 'bic biro' is used to refer to specifically to ones made by Bic, where people are usually imagining something like the Bic Cristal as a sort of 'standard' pen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to cover up my accent but I let her rip now. lol. Last of the Mohicans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hang up, and click! she was back to the local one.
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.
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.
The map lists various differences within each dialect region, including in Canada. How narrowly should we define dialects?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcrVeMYnOS4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...
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?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations
[2] 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/S2352250X1...
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.
Post-2000, SoCal usage is usually with the definite article: "the 101 or the 5" NorCal is usually with no article: "101 or I-5". The SoCal pattern is rooted in the named freeway usages of earlier decades, but while the style of traffic reporting may still use "the Golden State freeway", popular usage became terser over time, leading to "the 5". The entire topic and regional differences can easily produce animated discussions, both in-person, and online.
I always assumed that that skit was a great exaggeration. But last winter I cycled from LAX across Southern California to Mexico, and the local people I chatted with really were like that. “I love doing activity X or eating food Y, so sometimes I’ll take the [interstate number] to [place] and get off at [street name].” No one really grasped that as a foreigner on a bike, all those numbers were incomprehensible to me.
Those skits aren't about the number, they're about the word "the."
Elsewhere in the country, where the freeways were built later and didn't have as many old established pre-number names, people talk like "Take 75 and then go west on 285 to [whatever exit]. And surface street names, SoCal or elsewhere, rarely have "the" anywhere (nobody would say "go to The Sunset Avenue"); it's a specific history-of-freeways-in-Socal thing.
A foreigner not knowing local street names seems completely unrelated to numbers-vs-word-names or "the".
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.
They definitely do. Sometimes I do (30 years in norcal and 3 years in socal).
Edit: oh and "The City" === san Francisco drove me nuts, too.
It 100% has. When I read "name a freeway," the first thing that popped into my head was the 5...
This gave me an ear for accents. It was a game of mine to guess where someone was from. It was challenging because the subject almost invariably had lived in different regions and had picked up bits and pieces of a few accents, and whose parents likely had yet another set of accents.
I became pretty good at it, particularly with Southern accents (partly due to living in the South and Southerners enlisting at significantly higher rates than the rest of the country).
I could pick out someone from Dallas vs Charleston vs Upstate South Carolina vs LA and more.
But the next generation has lost a lot of accent distinctiveness, particularly amongst the middle to upper middle classes, so my powers are fading.
(Side note: in True Detective they describe Matthew McConaughey's character as Texan and make it a plot point that he's an outsider in Louisiana--and he does indeed have one of the Texas accents--but Woody Harrelson also has a pretty distinctively Texan accent)
Do you think that affected educational quality in any way? Like did kids fall behind in class because they moved around so often?
Kids were generally well behaved so there wasn't much in the way of disruption. Everyone has at least one parent (usually dad) in the military and I seem to recall serious behaviors like bullying could impact military careers, so there was an incentive to have some minimal level of concern about children. Incomes were relatively equal, and at the time (and probably now) racism and the like was not tolerated by anyone.
Everyone moved a lot so the awkwardness of a new school system was significantly reduced; pretty much everyone had been the new kid at some point.
If you were overseas (likely if you're in DoDDS schools) there'd likely be some sort of weekly local language and culture class that was mandatory. My school also offered full language immersion as an option.
There aren't many studies on military brats, unfortunately. I've seen a few that suggest higher college graduation rates than the general population, but a greater likelihood of starting or finishing a degree at some point other than directly after high school. More worldliness.
I'd wager that there'd be a difference on a few variables between children that stayed Stateside at one location (e.g. grew up in Norfolk around the naval base and stayed in the area), children who were stationed overseas and attended military schools, children who moved around the US and didn't attend military schools, and some combination thereof. Throw in peace and war as variables.
I can attest that moving from random US district to another with a different curriculum does make you both ahead of and behind the curve. I had to retake a number of classes I'd had in middle and elementary school to meet high school graduation requirements for the Nth new high school.
I was once ahead in math then behind due to differences in sequences.
I'm sure it impacted which colleges accepted me.
I've heard some post-9/11 changes may have helped with transfers but that wasn't my era, unfortunately.
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.
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
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/alabama-10 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/new-york-9 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/connecticut-8 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/massachusetts-9 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/nebraska-3
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/scotland-14 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/northern-ireland-6 https://www.dialectsarchive.com/wales-7
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-...)
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!
It seems to be a Brooklyn-only thing.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...
2. Guess where I'm from!
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?
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.
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
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232381 2013: 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.
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.
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.
But the midwest is not the western states...?
Original title is better.
I'd argue dialect continuity between parts of the upper midwest US and (primarily rural) parts of central Canada.
So I think the analysis is just lazy.
One dialect marker that immediately sets someone from northern or rural Ontario apart: "I seen" (instead of "I saw" or "I've seen") I never heard this growing up in rural Alberta, but when I moved here to Ontario it immediately stuck out to me.
There also seems to be a particular accent (that I noticed more when I was younger) for people who grew up speaking English in the Ottawa valley.
When I was 16 I did an exchange week where I spent a week in Walkerton (SW of Owen Sound) and that was the first time I ever spent time here. The 'youse' and 'seen' thing was something I noticed right away. Nothing like that growing up in the 80s in rural Alberta near Edmonton, though it might be there now.
... tangent... There's also a subtle but noticeable pronounciation difference between southern Alberta and central Alberta, which I've heard language specialists mention. Central Alberta was more heavily settled by German, Ukrainian and British populations (in order of increasing ratio); southern Alberta had a more heavily American influence, people who came over from North Dakota & Idaho, etc (like my great grandmother on my mother's side). Obviously that has blurred in the decades since, but it had a long term impact on both politics and language. Where I grew up west of Edmonton, a sizable quantity of the kids in my school were only second generation Ukrainian, with their parents often still speaking it at home.
Anyways, the English linguistic situation in Canada is a lot more diverse than it appears at first
Otherwise the differences I've experienced most are in word choices. Words like toque and chesterfield draw blank looks in the PNW.
>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/jo... https://coe.arizona.edu/person/sonja-lanehart
> 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.
And while people can theorize that some notably common Black speech patterns arose from West Africa because they can find similar things in some contemporary West African speech - this is a comparison that people were biased to make (black people imported from West Africa talk funny, must be West African influence.) Black people's accents as you quote here are generally the same archaic Scottish/Irish/English accents that everyone else they lived near had, but didn't continue identically because black people were physically separated from white people socially, and often living under enforced illiteracy.
Black people were brought here speaking a huge number of languages, and forced to live with other black people who didn't speak the languages they spoke, and forced to live under white people who demanded that they speak in a subservient manner and remain illiterate.
AAVE is honestly a joke. It's another way to designate black people as a designated foreign underclass. Black West Texans or Hill Country Mississippians don't sound like black New Yorkers. Black West Texans sound a lot like white West Texans, and black New Yorkers sound a lot like white New Yorkers. That they don't sound identical is due to segregation, past and current, not some foreign origin.
The reason they don't track black people's accents, or even recognize them, is because no one cares about black people. It's easy to see how the recognition of "AAVE" seems like a victory if one thinks that all black people are fungible.
edit: and of course, if you're white, talking "black" is a single thing, and white people can do it. It involves holding your hands in weird ways, pushing your chest out, making a mean face, and can only be used (and will almost always be used) when talking about partying, violence, or having sex. Pop music is minstrelsy.
The complexity of AAVE makes its simplistic presentation on the page all the worse.
The rest of your post does not warrant a response.