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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

This is completely anecdotal, but I've noticed very little difference after moving from Iowa to Boulder, CO although they're considered different dialects here. However, I can pick out people who live here from Texas or California almost instantly as well as anyone from the south/east coast. Of course, I'm not refuting this at all, just giving my own 2 cents.

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I think all of these dialects are being lost and becoming the "TV/Movie" way of pronouncing things. IE, most people in Pittsburgh sound like most people in Chicago or Los Angeles (which all sound like the dialect we hear on TV), but you get certain types (especially working class) who have been more isolated (didn't go away to college, etc...) that have very strong dialects.

It depends on who you talk to really. I remember visiting Boston and talking to a girl selling t-shirts on the street and being completely unable to understand her. I asked a gas station attendant in Atlanta for directions once and same thing. My friends from Chicago have very discernible accents. My wife, who grew up in rural Iowa, pronounces "stock" and "stalk" differently (among other things).

This happened to me in Rhode Island. I'm very used to Boston, New York (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island), and various New Jersey accents, but the Rhode Island accent really had me mystified. I just learned about the Maine accent recently (the stereotypical Steven King accent).

That's interesting. I actually grew up in Chicago, but have most recently lived in Iowa. I don't have much of a "chicago" accent with the notable exception of saying "rough" and "roof" exactly the same way.

Oh, there is a very distinctive Chicago accent. One property of that is that 'chicaago' is more likely to be the pronunciation than 'chicogo'.

What got me, as an east coast transplant, was the use of "pop" versus "coke" or "soda." I literally wouldn't register it when people would ask me: "hey do you want a pop?" I'd be like, <pause> "wait, what about your father?" This is even though I knew they called it pop in the Midwest, and over a period of years. It would just catch me off guard.

There's a preponderance of call centers in the area within a couple-hundred-odd mile radius of Omaha, NE, as that's supposed to be the most "neutral" accent in the Continental US. Particularly, that includes the metro areas of Des Moines, IA; Omaha and Lincoln, NE; and Sioux Falls, SD. (I'm not sure if Kansas City, {KS,MO} is also included in that set. I grew up in one of the cities with a lot of call centers, and the MO accent, at least, is pretty clearly distinguishable to me.)

I always figured it was a timezone thing that they eneded up there. They'd end up at most 2 hours difference from all major time zones, and average about 1.33 hours across them all. That makes it much easier than getting people to work by 5am in california to be able to handle the east coast, or working until 8pm on the east coast to handle california.

Having lived in KC for 10 years, I never noticed an accent at the time. But then after living in the Northeast for a while, the KC accent seemed to have a very distinct Southern drawl. Not as much as e.g. Texas, but there nonetheless.

I'm not sure if my ears are just bad, but I notice very few differences at all, not even Texas or California. I've lived in Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles, and I've very rarely run into people who sounded like they had an identifiable regional accent in any of them. If you go to rural areas it changes—West Texas has some Texas accents—but suburban Houston sounded very close to suburban Chicago to me, except for a few lexical differences like "pop" vs. "coke".

Yeah, from my experience this map seems outdated and may only apply to some of the older generations (like 60+), and indeed, rural areas.

I'm sure you must have heard "ya'll" in Houston?

A little bit, but not very much. That one did differ in any case: most people in Chicago I knew would say "you guys" for the 2nd-person plural, while most people in Houston would say "you", with a minority usage of "y'all".

It's mostly accents I didn't notice, though. Some wording changes, yes, but nobody in Chicago I knew had a "Chicago accent", like the Superfans on SNL, and nobody I knew in Houston had a "Texas accent". I could be missing more subtle differences.

There's a bit of selection bias due to the fact that you are reading HN. I can promise you that the small percentage of people who work in the software field are a type of educational elite, and you are, generally, going to live in places and work in offices with other members of the globo-corporate elite. Also, just to be clear, MANY, MANY people who speak regional dialects at home or informally will shift into a northeastern, "business standard" dialect when in a work setting. I should know. I am one of them. My Appalachian accent does me few favors in business environments.

I'm young enough that I'm thinking more of people I went to school with in most of those cities, not really professional colleagues: elementary/middle-school in Chicago, and high-school in Houston. But it's true that they were middle-class suburban areas, and probably also had a lot of people who moved around (few of my Houston classmates were multi-generational Texans).

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