North American English Dialects | Hacker News Reader

North American English Dialects

aschmann.net

164 pointsskogstokig94 comments

New Orleans drops mic... I'm from River Ridge in the Jefferson Parish suburbs ( within the city area ) and if I meet a stranger somewhere else in the country they, after one or two sentences, usually think I'm from New York. But slipping into one of the many dialects we have here is never far away, depending on who you are conversing with. Only locals will understand, but my wife used to tell me that after 2 sentences my dad and I would start talking like we were "from Kenner" and she couldn't follow the conversation. To non-locals, Kenner is directly next to River Ridge.

Yeah, when I lived there, a lot of native New Orleans dialect had a lot in common with Brooklyn to my ears.

Started work there at the same time as a school classmate who grew up in Jacksonville. Spent a lot of time doing engineering work on offshore drilling rigs. Told my friend I really had trouble understanding people a lot of the time. He said he did as well :-)

Also a lot of Chalmatians still possess a strongly related 'yat accent. Is there a "River Ridge, brah" joke too?

No, that would be a union violation. "Kenna, brah" is an institution. And I can't believe I just read "Chalmatians" on HN. Full disclosure, I went to Holy Cross when it was still in the Ninth Ward. Chalmatian has been part of my vocabulary since the 80's. I'm sure every big city has its neighborhoods with individual cultures, but our heavily mixed population combined with insular land masses tend to create very distinct niches that all have the common thread of "The City that Care Forgot".

I lived across from where the old Patton’s plant used to be until a couple years ago and then I moved to Mid-City.

Ha, grew up in Harahan. When I left the LA for college, people were shocked to find out where I was from based on how I talked. I would hear areas of New England, 'no discernible accent,' and also Canadian. Apparently the Canadian comes out when I say words like out, about, and house. I can't hear it but my friends all swore up and down they could.

There are so many unique dialects hyperlocal to New Orleans, it's amazing.

Fred Armisen does a great bit on North American accents

https://youtu.be/G72tZdjnS2A?si=oMaLfGgJAZxaoAHn

Appreciate the link - enjoyed it

Is anyone archiving these accents ?

As much as I’m happy that kids now have access to YouTube, and thus can use the neutral influencer dialect, something about our culture is being erased.

I grew up speaking both a neutral California accent and bits of AAVE. AAVE itself is drastically different depending on the part of the US you’re in. I can barely understand southern AAVE. NYC AAVE is much faster, but I think NYC people think faster in general.

I really do believe YouTube can bring gaps. If your a kid in Albania you can see life though the eyes of someone in Oakland.

And hop on a zoom 30 minutes later to chat. This would be unimaginable 50 years ago.

They have audio samples if that’s what you mean. The ones from where I grew up were spot on but rare even when I was growing up in the 90s.

https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#AudioFilesOfLocalDialects

Radio followed by television has done a lot of homogenization even if you don't have the more formalized received pronunciation you had/have in the UK. Even something stereotypical like a "Boston accent" was mostly a Southie accent on the one hand and an essentially English (Boston Brahmin) on the other. Most urbanites in particular never had others and many weren't even from Boston.

I looked through and found one rejected video from Montreal. It's crazy to me, to reject someone with a French accent. It's how people talk here! Many consider themselves perfectly bilingual and grew up speaking both languages. Even the more Anglo-Quebecois have a very specific vocabulary and accent heavily influenced by French.

I used to visit French speaking Canada when I was in college. I found it interesting to see people who could switch between an Anglo-Canadian accent and a French-Canadian accent, to my ear sounding native at both. This wasn't everyone obviously, but there were people like that.

> And hop on a zoom 30 minutes later to chat. This would be unimaginable 50 years ago.

It was pretty easy to imagine 50 years ago. For example, Star Trek started airing 60 years ago. The Jetsons started airing a few years before that.

And it would be basically free and accessible to anyone? Two 50$ cell phones can Zoom using library WiFi across the globe

It was on the way there even before Star Trek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T...

The next one down is a home system on a subscription, though just after Star Trek and expensive at the time.

I think the conflict is on the term unimaginable. People back then definitely imagined the equivalent of Zoom and it being free even if they didn't know technically how it could happen.

Remember when long distance calling was really expensive.

It was for serious business, not small talk. If you somehow knew Zoom would happen you could have created Zoom and you’d be very rich.

TBF, unimaginable is a strong word. Impractical would be better.

Back in the 80s, Zortech was located in London while I lived in the Seattle area. International phone calls were too expensive, so we would communicate by fax. Late at night, sending a fax cost about a dollar a page. (No email then.)

An unanticipated result is I have a record of our conversations, which would have all been lost if it was phone calls.

Picturephones were developed in the 30s and demoed at the '64 world's fair.

The video call sequence in 2001 from 1968 comes to mind too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwo6JpMceg

Some of the YouTube links are broken or have moved Private. Too bad.

I am the type of person to notice accents a lot, one interesting thing I've noticed is how much NYC AAVE has the vowels of other NYC accents, like the stereotypical "cawfee" vowels. A lot of AAVE across the country sounds kind of like the south to my ear, but NY is one place where the local AAVE has a lot in common with other local accents.

This is even more true if you find old recordings.

Check this out if you haven't seen it before:

https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=find&lan...

Wikitongues is doing this with languages.

https://www.youtube.com/@Wikitongues/videos

Yes, this is being done, and has been done. A variety of linguistic atlas projects record audio and make written phonetic transcriptions: https://www.linguisticatlasproject.org/ There are also many dialect and accent arechives, such as https://www.dialectsarchive.com/ and https://accent.gmu.edu/.

Reminds me of the awesome (old) New York Times dialect quiz, which was weirdly accurate: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...

Paywalled, but I am reminded of people who study dialects being able to discern where someone is from using a kind of binary tree approach. In some cases a single word differentiating which side of a specific hill they were born.

You could try this gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...

If you liked that the person who made it wrote a book called Speaking American that I enjoyed: https://bookshop.org/p/books/speaking-american-how-y-all-you...

This has missed the Atlantic Canadian Cape Breton dialect, which if you listen to some age 70+ people who've lived their whole lives in the Sydney, NS area is significantly distinct from Halifax or other areas in the south/southwest of Nova Scotia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Cape_Breton

Most of Newfoundland being lumped in with the Atlantic Provinces too. For the most part you can tell where on the island someone is from based solely on the accent. Hell, I've lived & worked with people from the south coast and I still have a hard time even understanding them sometimes.

Yeah, was saying this in my own comment generally, it's extremely weak on Canada generally. Definitely showing his lack of education on the topic.

These are fun relevant videos:

Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part One) | WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A&t=271s

A recent series of Alone was won by a guy from Goose Bay, Labrador. To my ear, as a Brit, it just sounds Irish, right down to saying 'tree' for 'three'. I can only imagine that's where the initial settlers were from and the isolation meant it never changed much.

Spoilers! That season/series was a really fun watch.

In previous seasons/series they didn't have the formula down yet, so 2/3rds of the episode were one literally starving person after another, just sighing into a camera about how hungry they are, how cold it is, and how nothing is changing.

Whereas in this one some people did incredibly well, others tapped out after setbacks, illness, or made thinly-veiled excuses about illness (even though they just lost the drive to stay in it). 5/5 would recommend.

Great show. There were some series which were a bit sad and just became about who was the poorest and most desperate to stick it out for 500k.

Being cold, miserable, lonely, wet, dirty, uncomfortable, and hungry for 60 days just seems hellish. And then, as #2, you came away with nothing.

The curious thing is they all claim to be survival experts, but they don't know how to build a proper fireplace (either burning down their shelter or asphyxiating themselves). None of them who used a fish net would take it out of the river during a storm, so it isn't destroyed. And there were always contestants who would spend all their calories building a log cabin, and then starvation would force them out.

I suspect the showrunners intentionally put in people who are bad at survival or mentally/emotionally weak (which comes out during internal testing), so that they can eliminate a few people in the early episodes.

You want at least one or two people to hear a bear and tap out in ep 1 or 2. And it has to be guys tapping out: if you include women, they have to be the hardiest contestants, so they don't tap out too early.

That is my biggest problem with these survival shows. So many claim to be skilled survivalists but then make elementary mistakes on the regular. And then people with a year in boyscouts worth of knowledge are touted as survival geniuses as they starve.

That said I haven't watched the newer Alone seasons so maybe they got a few better people. They definitely do throw a few people in that they expect to fail though.

I feel that the Maritimes are somewhat simplified here, especially Newfoundland and Labrador which has some of the most distinctive accents on the continent, at least among older people.

I'd agree completely but this could just be due to logistical constraints of the ANAE, I took a course with Charles Boberg (one of the authors of the ANAE) and he was definitely aware of that, I vaguely recall learning from him that the Newfoundlander accent traditionally doesn't have t/d flapping which is totally unique in North America. Great class, he definitely has an incredible knack for precisely imitating accents.

It's absolutely oversimplified, someone from a small coastal town in Newfoundland does not sound at all like a person from much of the same area labeled "atlantic canadian" in Nova Scotia, or in larger cities like Fredericton or Moncton in NB. Putting basically all of NB, NS and NF as one large pink blob on the map is a drastic oversimplifiaction.

It also seems that whoever created this kind of gave up when figuring out Canadian speech patterns spanning longitude from east to west. Somebody from Kenora or Dryden or Timmins Ontario does not speak like a person from North Vancouver, BC. Vancouver region English is much closer to general west coast as it's spoken in a big city in WA, OR or California.

I'm from Ontario and its very simplified in my experience as well. Maybe the problem is the sample audio clips they have are all 'posh', its not how most people speak. Two large examples I can think of that even have their own wikipedia pages are the Ottawa Valley Twang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Valley_English) and the 'Torontomans' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_slang). I grew up in Toronto, and the latter isn't just something funny you see on tiktok, people actually talk that way.

It's oversimplified for any region whatsoever. You're citing right here what people speak like in big west coast cities but I grew up in California and would have been able to tell apart people who grew up in Anaheim versus San Gabriel Valley versus San Fernando Valley versus West LA, let alone LA versus San Francisco. I couldn't have explained what the difference is but I could have heard it. Everybody will be more attuned to the tiny regional differences of the place they actually come from, but a map like this would be impossible to make if you tried to draw out the boundaries and explanations for 400 million separate regional dialects.

And right next door, the Maine accent is lumped in with Boston. The differences aren't worth correcting anybody unless you're talking about a project like this.

I'm not an expert on accents or anything but I think you can hear it in "dinner". Boston is the typical "R's don't exist" thing. Maine is more like "dinnyah" - your jaw kicks back a bit.

I am not American but can hear slight differences between Maine and Boston. Urban accents are often different to their hinterland, let alone those with different formative influences.

Maine has multiple distinct accents, though like the parent said, it's not worth making the distinction unless it's for a project like this.

In southern Maine, the accent is moderate and is more of a general northern New England accent. Yahd = yard, that kind of thing.

The iconic Maine accent is the Downeast accent and is still kicking up/down there. It's kind of nasally and has a lilt to it. You have to dig through a morass of influencer content on youtube to find an authentic example of it, but this is a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc

But there are a number of different accents throughout Maine. My favorite without a doubt is the accent in way northern Maine, from the Allagash Valley. It's just a pleasant accent. This is a good example: https://soundcloud.com/mpbn/troy-jackson-allagash-logging

Just an update to this. I realize I misspoke and misnamed where that last accent comes from. It's too late for me to edit the original comment, so I'm just going to drop it in here. There's no such thing as the Allagash Valley, only the St. John Valley.

At Microsoft TechEd in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft bought out SeaWorld for the attendee party. I wound up getting really wet from the orca that they used to have there splashing people and met 3 other guys on the bench in same state. We went wandering around laughing and drinking. There was an Australian from NSW, New Zealander from Auckland, a French Canadian out of Ontario, and me, a fresh off the boat immigrant from Russia. I couldn't understand half of what was said! Aussie and kiwi were giving each other lots of good natured ribbing. The canuck was having fun and so was I as we got progressively more silly. One of the best parties at an industry conference I've had. Ahh the joy of dialects!

I've seen this before but I object to the treatment of Canada.

Firstly, there's regional dialects of Canadian English, and I don't just mean Newfoundland vs rest of Canada. The Ottawa Valley for example has some strong dialect markers. There's marked differences between central and southern Alberta (often not noticed by people living there, but there). Between coastal BC and Ontario, etc. etc.

Secondly because in fact the upper midwest of the US is contiguous and overlapping with much of various Canadian dialect markers. In fact many of the things people consider to be stereotypical Canadian are even more pronounced in upper midwest US dialects than they are here.

TLDR he could pay more attention to Canada :-) There's 40m of us after all.

My daughter (grew up in California) wondered what the "Kansas accent" was (I grew up in Kansas). I often called it a drawl.

She goes to college in Kansas now and is still confused. Perhaps growing up with me it just sounds "normal".

I'll point her to the band, "The Embarrassment" in various interviews:

[1] https://youtu.be/0gyChDSjrXc

[2] https://youtu.be/kJBDRdDjgWY

I grew up in a poor rural part of Michigan. Day to day, you didn't meet many people who lived there by choice so the demographic (and Midwestern accent) was pretty homogenous. In high school, our class had a new kid who moved up from Kansas and to us, he sounded _extremely_ southern. His first week at school was pretty much everybody asking him to say stuff in his funny accent.

There's variations on the southern accent. My dad was from South Carolina and he could tell which southern state someone was from by their accent.

Goose language? Or yankee doodels?

I was taught British English. I think America English is in many ways simpler, but my brain is wired to british spelling as well as pronounciation for the most part. Now it depends who has good spoken british english. One of my all-time favourites is Rowan Atkinson, but his english is kind of more theater-trained really; if you compare it to the Monty Python guys for instance. War criminal Tony Blair also has a good spoken english - not that I like the guy or find anything useful he said or did, but british english wins. Or we could go scottish - I don't quite like it as much as british english (Patrick Stewart also has a good intonation, but it's also more theater-trained than "real", per se), but one of the coolest thing ever is Gerard Butler teaching people scottish. What keeps scots apart from English is the language really. (Though, I also have to say, Sean Connery's dialect was nowhere near as funny or entertaining as Gerard's dialect. Guess even in Scotland there are diffferences.)

Irish english sounds more melodic - no wonder they kept on winning Eurovision. Paul David Hewson's voice in his prime is a great example.

I've also found African American english very interesting. One thing that keeps on tripping me up is "asking" versus "axsking". To me only the british pronounciation works, but I hear sooooo many axxing examples on youtube that I concluded that this must be widespread in the USA. I always have to think of an axe when I hear it though.

>Now it depends who has good spoken british english.

My favorites are David Attenborough and BBC in general.

The BBC actually has an official "Pronunciation Unit", which tells people like newsreaders the "proper" way to pronounce words and placenames. Unfortunately, particularly in the latter case they often get it wrong. For example, my late Dad was born in a small West Yorkshire town called Sowerby Bridge, which the unit insists should be said Sourbee Bridge. Everyone, without exception, who lives there knows it is Sorebee Bridge. Writing in to the BBC complaining about this and many other similar errors is a popular hobby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Pronunciation_Unit

Local pronunciations of place names are often different from what's expected, and whether intended to be such or not, are often used as shibboleths to distinguish locals from outsiders. The examples of Couch Street (/ˈkutʃ/) in Portland, Oregon and Tchoupitoulas Street (/ˌtʃɑp.ə.ˈtuː.ləs/) in New Orleans, Louisiana come to mind in American place names.

Lancaster PA (LANG-KISS-TER) checking in

Tchoup is just unpronounceable to most outsiders; the shibboleths are the streets that are pronounced very differently from what it would be anywhere else. Like Calliope (rhymes with TALLY-hope) or Burgundy (emphasis on second syllable).

Or Chartres ("Charters") or Melpomene (/ˈmɛl.pə.ˌmiːn/), I get it. My wife has corrected me on quite possibly each and every one of the streets with a locally specific pronunciation.

Ooh, thought of another good place name like that: Quincy (/ˈkwɪn.zi/), Massachusetts! Massachusetts has a fair number of those, owing to its English settlement heritage.

Fartown? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartown%2C_Huddersfield

I wasn't referring to place names that sound like dirty words (as Couch St. sounds like "Cooch"); an uncountable number of Gropecunt Lanes in England would certainly qualify. I was rather referring to place names with counterintuitive pronunciations locals are expected to know, so that outsiders are immediately clocked by pronouncing it wrong. Couch St. definitely qualifies in both categories though.

In this LLM age, I guess that would be Gas Town :-(

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

Oh, we have a TON of placenames in Michigan that are pronounced much differently than they are spelled. A lot of these are just Native American and French names/words that most people don't know how to pronounce anyway, but a few are just special for no apparent reason.

Examples:

Orion = "or-ee-un", Ionia = "eye-ON-nee-ah", Charlotte = "shar-lot", Milan = "MILE-an", Saline = "suh-LEEN"

Patrick Stewart is from Yorkshire not Scotland, by the way.

> Patrick Stewart is from Yorkshire not Scotland, by the way.

I thought the House of Picard was from France…

Acting!

"Arksing" is also present in Caribbean English and came to London via there. This and other 'incorrect' pronounciations come from slavery-era creole dialects, I think.

I like people who speak a more modern English from my part of London. Check out TV personality Big Narstie or football pundit Clinton Morrison. You'll love 'em.

A fun follow is Scots Word of the Day by Len Pennie.

https://youtube.com/@misspunnypennie

One on my favorite podcasters is Mike Hurley (London) from Relay.fm. He is a very eloquent gent, at least compared to me.

He says “whivf” instead of ”with” “teevf” instead of “teeth”, things like that, and some other idiosyncrasies that I can’t exactly remember but it was like adding to or replacing the last letter of the word with an “r”.

Is that a London thing or a person thing?

This page/project itself is another proof of the cultural significance of YT, one of the very few positive things brought by the Internet post-2010.

Glad to see the special mention of the Mat Su Valley in Alaska. Lived there for 10 years, originally from Wisconsin. And yes, the two are VERY similar. Not the exactly the same, I did notice a difference when I moved back to WI, more nasal. But the Mat Su Valley was populated by Midwestern farmers during the Depression, so it makes sense.

The title says "dialects" but most comments here are only about accents.

Can people here give examples of non-standard grammar or vocabulary (that goes beyond some temporary slang or subculture words)?

'mensch' and 'schmuck' are commonly used words in NYC that are not known to people in the South, unless they have studied German (and yes I had to fight capitalizing them.)

Another example... 'they're all' is shorthand for 'they're all gone' in Pennsylvania.

Never heard that second one, which part of PA? I'm Philly burbs.

between Pittsburgh and Altoona

schlep too. To a much lesser extent mishegas and tsuris. There's a continuum for knowing Yiddish words where at one end it's "lived in NYC" and then passes through "had playdates with a Jewish friend" through sequentially "have 1/2/3/4 Jewish grandparents." All of these things possible anywhere in the world, but I agree very much an NYC thing.

Biggest two I can think of are

1) AAVE's use of Copulas. In most English you form present progressive with a copula and the present participle: I am walking, I am driving, I am working. The copula contains no information on its own. In many languages, a low information word is dropped. In Spanish you say "(yo) soy Americano" meaning "(I) am American." There can be no doubt of the subject of the verb "soy" because it is inflected to match the subject, so the pronoun "yo" communicates nothing in a normal sentence and is dropped. In Russian you take the opposite tack: you say "ya Amerikanets" meaning "I (am) American)" so you drop the copula. You either need the pronoun or the verb to communicate who is American, and in this case the pronoun won. Well in AAVE you drop the copula in those present progressive sentences: "I walking," "I driving," "I working." But then there's an opportunity to put a higher information in all of these sentences: you can use "be" as a copula to express the habitual aspect. "I be walking," "I be driving," "I be working" (usually with emphasis on the "be") mean "I am in the habit of X, but don't assume that is what I am doing at this moment." Degrees can be expressed here: you can replace "be" with "stay" to get more habitual and less present. It's a trip! I'm scratching the surface here but that's a big one.

2) Related: "Needs" + past participle vs "needs" + present participle. I was working with a handyman from Colorado and he said "This sink needs sealed" or something like that. I (Northeast) would have said "this sink needs sealing." Colorado has always had over 50% of the population born outside of the state, so I don't know if that's a thing from there or from wherever his parents are from (not sure and didn't ask).

There are lots of minor (and fuzzy usage) of regional vocabulary.

"pop" vs "soda" is a commonly discussed one. (Google to see maps).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English_regional_voca...

I'm from Indiana. I'm not an expert, but I do travel across the US for work, and here's a few things that are normal to me but weird to others.

"Your car needs washed" instead of "you need to wash your car"

Replying "You're good" after someone apologizes.

Adding an S to the end of brand names, especially grocery stores.

I don't do this one, but my extended family in Ohio just says "please" when they mean "could you repeat that?"

More directly, "Your car needs washed" is "Your car needs [to be] washed" dropping the passive infinitive "to be".

Another very close variant would be "Your car needs washing".

Really hard-core, old-school Charleston accent missing: https://youtu.be/rxNZrFyl2DA?si=VV7OWi-fY2m3twIA&t=1835

Charleston is displayed on the map as a “transitional or anomalous area”…

A slightly less cultured and different but nonetheless entertaining Carolina accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtQCUrMZWOc

Brit who was raised in Milan (Italy) and speaks Rexieved Pronunciation and lived in New York: status is “throughly confused”.

I think it would take a mighty sensitive ear to tell the difference between someone who is in Charleston, versus Savannah.

Nope. Southern Drawl is very distinct from Appalachian Hillbilly. To me it’s as clear as Boston versus Long Island.

No good on mobile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com