The bit I find neat is the rhotic 'R'. Most of the US says 'R'... not quite as strong as pirates did (I'll get to that) but the 'r' is there.
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.
FYI the stereotypical "pirate accent" is in fact a West Country accent - that is, it's from the southwestern region of England known as the West Country. And the reason this particular accent became associated with pirates is not because historical pirates actually spoke like that (although many surely did) - it's almost entirely due to a string of popular movies about pirates in the 1950s starring the actor Robert Newton:
> 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.
> 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.
It's also why West Country accents, and accents from the southwestern part of England (Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire) are generally easier to understand for USA citizens than, say, a Geordie accent from Northern England or a Cockney accent from the east end of London.
The guitarist Robert Fripp is from Wimborne, Dorset, UK. He's clearly rhotic—he pronounces the 'r' in 'Mayfair.' https://youtu.be/woRhyl4k6sc
The first time I heard "Geordie" was in the song "Sailing to Philadelphia" ( live - https://youtu.be/GtxuWycNgfo ; studio - https://youtu.be/GGgZ5aimDbM ) which referred to Jeremiah Dixon as a Geordie Boy and immediately describes him as upper class.
... 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.
>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.
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.
> 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.”
My favorite parts about the Original Pronunciation reconstructions of Shakespeare are how many lost puns keep getting discovered, even in the most serious plays, because most of them are quite ribald and directly tosses to the groundlings. It's a fun reminder that Shakespeare was dirtier than people today like to think and that he was never writing strictly for the upper crust and high society (like a lot of today's Shakespeare Companies seem intended for).
Very interesting! Many poor people in Ireland emigrated or were sent to the new world too. The rhotic "r" is prevalent in the Irish language, and it is a distinct characteristic of the sound of Hiberno-English (and other accents with a Celtic influence of course).
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.
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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.
French pronunciation has something like this. They can't abide a word that ends in a vowel-sound smooshing into a following word that starts with a vowel-sound. So, for example, the word "suis" is pronounced "swee", unless the next word lacks an initial consonant, in which case the trailing 's' is sounded.
So "Je suis anglais" is pronounced as "Je sweez anglais". Compare "Je suis francais" ("Je swee francais").
Another example: there's a French children's song with the line: "Pendouillez moi avec" ("hang me as well" - don't ask). I have a recording of this song, and it's pronounced "Pendouillez moi za vec" (equal stress on each of the last three syllables). What's interesting is that the intruding consonant isn't an otherwise-silent 's' that is being sounded; it's completely spurious.
This is called “faire la liaison” (“make the link”) between the two words. If the first word ends with a consonant, and the next word starts with a vowel, then do pronounce that last consonant.
Or Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova” sounding (to my American ear) like “supin’ over”.
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”.
I'm extremely underqualified (non-native speaker) but first time I heard this and paid attention was from Dave Chinner (linux developer) who is australian and he was using a very pronounced linking r.
I've taken Andrew Ng's coursera courses. I'm almost blind to American dialects (compared to Norwegian dialects the changes feel extremely subtle), but I noticed that one! "Dater science" was definitely on the "agender"! But I don't feel like all Americans have it that strongly.
Common in the States too. I'm from Eastern MA and work in Boston. If I order a "vodka, soda" it sounds normal, but if I say "vodka AND soda" then "vodka" becomes "vodkar". My accent is a pretty standard Eastern New England accent.
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.
> 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 ).
> Is the etymology really needed in this case to know how to pronounce "c"?
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.
The links in Everything2 go to the correct word if you're having difficulty.
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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.
I find it fascinating that the writer uses “aafte” for “after.” Clearly their accent was non-rhotic, which isn’t something we’d have any idea about otherwise.
Spelling does reflect pronunciation. The attempt to standardize spelling is rather new, though. It's actually more surprising that there should be canonical spellings when the pronunciation itself varies between speakers and dialects, and it changes over time.
Dialectal variety is true for many other languages, though, which nevertheless manage to do some kind of standardized spelling.
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.
It's a common convention for words that end in a "short vowel" followed by a hard /k/ (IPA) sound to be spelled with ck, e.g., "back," "block," "stick," "truc." It's not a convention always followed, though; see "book," "music."
> 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.
Yes, you're right. It used to be more common to write it with the cedilla/cedille, but over time it's become more common to write it as a normal c. Similarly, for the phrase "deja vu", it used to be more common to write it with the accent marks (déjà-vu), whereas I usually see it written now as deja vu. And I see same thing with café being written as cafe.
English in general seems to "abhor" accent marks and they are seen as "style" rather than orthography/punctuation. It's interesting because it came up recently that the New York Times had to apologize that their style guide required the removal of all accent marks and that drastically changed the meaning of a bunch of Vietnamese names and words they printed in an article (insultingly so).
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.
I did always wonder why she sounded like she was from Minnesota.
" 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!"
> as part of a federal project. Historical info can be found in this Wikipedia article
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.
I love dialects and grew up in New Orleans. It's an absolutely fascinating city if you have an ear for accents since there are so many distinct ones.
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.
I also grew up around an interesting mixture of Southern and Midwestern accents and wound up with what people receive as "no accent". It may not be as "generic American" as you think, though. 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. It's generally not a conscious thing and it's weird to try to catch it consciously or consciously trigger it. When I do try to consciously watch it, it is very subtle (it's not trying to mock or parody the other person, as you might if you were trying to consciously "put on" an accent).
(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 may not be as "generic American" as you think, though.
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.
The so-called traditional New Orleans accent (“Yat”) is almost by now entirely confined to the suburbs of Kenner, Chalmette, Arabi and parts of the Northshore.
That was before fountain pens became almost exclusively hobbyist. Also, Americans don't say "biro"— that's something that I've only heard from English people or people from Commonwealth countries. Yanks would probably just say "ballpoint."
'Ballpoint' was the term used in the first patent for such a device. Later, the name 'biro' was coined from the name of László Bíró, who created the first commercially successful ball point pen. Finally, there is of course the famous company Bic, which was named by its founder Marcel Bich after himself.
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 do know Americans that colloquially use "bic pen" as their preference for "ballpoint pen", but that's partly pressure from the other direction of the genericization that they associate "bic" alone more with lighter. So "a bic" is a lighter and "a bic pen" is a ballpoint pen.
We would mostly just say “pen.” If we had to specify, it would be “ballpoint pen,” including the “pen.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard “ballpoint” used as a noun. It would be like saying “fountain” for “fountain pen.”
This is cool. My first thought is the choice of dialect rather than accent.
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.
Dialect can include pronunciation, vocabulary, word choice, grammar, semantics, and other ways of speaking where accent refers only to ways of pronunciation. Academics almost always go with "dialect" for "different ways of speaking" unless they're specifically meaning only pronunciation. And sometimes not even then.
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.
I guess that's a consequence of media, global communication and mobility.
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.
Just a guess, but UK's accents have been developing for a 1000 years while the US has only had a few hundred at the most. Probably just less sticky. That said, bums me out because I love my region's dialect. I grew up in N. Georgia in the boonies and I love coming home to hear the accents.
Love that kid! I live just south of Nashville, but I'm originally from rural Northern California. When we moved here about 10 years ago Southern folks were far more comfortable speaking with their local accents around us transplants. But there have been tons of people moving in from all over our country. Now a lot of folks "cover up" their accents. It's a super bummer. I also realized it's the same thing I do. I sound different when I go back home to rural farm country in California.
Yeah, there's a mass of outsiders moving into my hometown and while it has been good for the local economy, it has really eroded the culture in a big way. It's gentrification, but on poor whites. It was gonna happen eventually, but I do hate watching it happen for selfish reasons.
I used to cover up my accent but I let her rip now. lol. Last of the Mohicans.
Perhaps some of it has to do with class rivalries, which are more acrid in the UK than in the US? In the UK, the wealthy adopted a supraregional standard (Received Pronunciation) through their schooling. Therefore, by retaining one’s regional accent an ordinary person was emphasizing that one was not one of that detested class.
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.
Received pronunciation is typically spoken by a very small percentage of Brits- a quick Google search claims around 3%.
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 where you live, but as someone who does live in the UK, I think everything really is about class here! It affects every almost interaction, and where contemporary fashion usually masks class, it is one's accent that usually gives it away.
I think it's an overstatement to suggest mutual unintelligibility but they can be extremely distinctive though.
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.
Hey in graduate school one of my classmates seemed normal until her mother called. Then she'd put her feet up on the desk, talk much louder and adopt her native Texan accent, so thick I could barely understand her.
Hang up, and click! she was back to the local one.
Longer historical isolation. But I'd guess that most of these dialects are converging under modern influence and are a lot more similar to each other today than they were a century ago.
Nova Scotia for example is wrong… as is New Brunswick. A decent chunk of New Brunswick is French speaking. Some pockets of Nova Scotia are Frenchish speaking. Cape Breton is closer to NFL then Halifax. Newfoundland is not even close to Labrador. And all of Newfoundland is Gaelic/Irish sounding, not just St. John’s.
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.
Agreed. People in Vancouver sound practically indistinguishable from people in California but Ontario is unmistakably Canadian. I understand how the Maritimes came up so much more, though.
That's what I came here to say. You can hear the differences when people from various parts of British Columbia speak, much less Saskatchewan and northern Ontario.
I came here to comment on this too. I’m from Edmonton but live in Seattle now. I can definitely hear a difference in people from Vancouver versus those from Edmonton. I was hoping to see more detail on the Canadian side.
One of the things I've wondered about my whole life:
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.).
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?
Not sure they're talking about fry, there. With the vocal fry you can hear some serious hang time while the speaker grinds out that croaky noise. But this other thing sounds almost choked off, definitely not drawn out.
One of the ways I identify many young Brits, is their insistence on saying “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there”. Or, “He was stood there” instead of “He was standing there”. Perhaps the high proportion of incorrect traditional grammar is a new generations need to sound more “street”?
What stands out to me is the way “three” & “free” have become indistinguishable among all classes now with the dental fricative being lost. It’s a shame since it’s a unique sound only a few languages including English.
Well, there's a reason why it's rare as a phoneme - it's not only more difficult to articulate than more common sounds, but also more difficult to distinguish when you already have a voiceless stop and a voiceless fricative articulated nearby. Many other Germanic languages lost it for the same reason, and the same process is ongoing in Arabic.
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.
If you are interested in this, there are two related books -- American Nations [1] which was inspired by The Nine Nations of North America [2] as well as the data presented in the link above -- that explore geographic variation in American subcultures. There is also some recent work in personality psychology that aims to get at regional variation in culture (see [3], for example.)
I remember when I was an English major in college and I took a class on linguistics and on the first day of class we introduced ourselves and the prof could tell where we were from and which part of the state we were from. I don't remember much about that class but I remember that!
I was a TA for an introductory linguistics course at UC Santa Barbara in the 1970s. On the first day of class, the instructor would have the students answer a few questions intended to show if they were from northern or southern California. (Few were from out of state.)
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.
That SoCal people refer, and refer often, to freeways by number is the basis of the SNL skit “The Californians”[0].
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.
> That SoCal people refer, and refer often, to freeways by number is the basis of the SNL skit “The Californians”[0].
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".
No, the skits are, per interviews with the writers, about the fact that SoCal conversations bring up driving instructions far more than in New York City where the show is based. This also reflects in the skit in the mention of finding parking. But in the context of this thread, the skits do support SoCal use of “the”.
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.
Not just SoCal. I have a Canadian friend who does the same. I assume it’s a regional thing. In MA it’s The Pike but otherwise the route number with no “the.”
Can confirm. In Canada, at least for big highways, there's always a definite article ("take the 401 until Yonge") meanwhile for side roads you never use the definite article. In the states, I've noticed that named roads get the article, but not interstates ("take I-81 north until Syracuse").
I've lived in San Diego most of my life, with a few years in Berkeley. Literally everyone says "the 5" in SD, and I was consistently ribbed for saying it in the Bay Area.
Edit: oh and "The City" === san Francisco drove me nuts, too.
I was a military brat and moved around a bunch as a kid and was surrounded by other kids who moved around a lot. It wasn't unusual for a significant portion of your class to be different by the end of the year.
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)
It did and didn't. If you attended schools run by DoDDS (Department of Defense Dependents Schools) before and after transferring, there wasn't the jarring effect of "this school system teaches algebra in $GRADE but the other teaches it in $GRADE-1" because I think the general curriculum was standardized.
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.
I’d love to have been there to see what the guess was for me. During my growing up years I lived in Houston, the Bay Area of California, Salt Lake City, Denver, Northern Indiana, Pensacola, SW Montana, West Palm Beach, Seattle, and Ponce, Puerto Rico. I have no idea what dialect of English I speak and would be super curious to have heard the professors guess.
I haven't been to Boston in 15 years, but I remember it having two very distinct accents when I was there.
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.
One sound that I've noticed a lot recently is an "r" pronunciation which sounds like the tongue is all the way back in your mouth (if you pronounce an 'r' then pull your tongue upward and back, that's the one). It usual appears in "ar" sounds either before or after "g" or "k" sounds.
You can hear it in words like "marker", "park", "craft" and the like.
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!
Linguists seem to disagree, but I swear that I can tell the difference between a Manhattan/Bronx accent and a Brooklyn/Queens one (to the extent that they exist anymore, which is barely).
I grew up 20 miles west of DC and now live 20 miles east of DC. The difference in accents and dialect was quite surprising, so it’s interesting to see the clear delineation on the map. My 10 year old daughter’s friends point out she doesn’t have a “Maryland accent” which I find hilarious. Funnily enough it’s sensitized me to other mid Atlantic accents and now I can immediately pick people out from New Jersey (even DC transplants with quite subtle suburban Jersey accents).
Is there a quiz somewhere where I can learn what accent I have? (Of course it would be epic to do this with EnCodec embeddings, but a “does X rhyme with Y” quiz would suffice.)
There's a good (but old one) available from the NYTimes[1] - a lot of it actually centers on which words you use for certain things (i.e. roundabout vs. rotary[2]) and rhyming like if you pronounce aunt and aunt as onht or ahnt or pronounce each one differently.
> In order to process your responses, we need to know where you acquired your dialect features. This usually means that you should answer the questions below based on where you were raised
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?
As a mass-hole I'm always tickled by these examinations especially because there's so much local variation within Boston due to how varied the individual neighborhoods can be. The non-rhotic accent isn't pervasive as a lot of people have trained themselves out of it outside really historic urban centers - but there is a wide variety of bizarre terms we use.
There's definitely a "suburban Boston accent" where you have most of the terminology and vowel inventory of a traditional Boston accent, but since it's rhotic the speaker thinks they don't have an accent.
Does anyone know if this data is available in a structured format for the regions? E.g. geojson? It would be really cool to transform this into an interactive map on top of an OSM base map to make it easier to use.
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.
The map is atrocious.. Too much detail at that scale!! And I think I might've heard of the existence of an Appalachian category in Places like WV and parts of Tennessee. I'm a foreigner and even when I could barely tell the difference between dialects, I could very clearly see the huge difference between how people in WV and Eastern PA accents vs NJ and NY on the coast. Also, it seems odd that the "Canadian" dialect-s are so neatly aligned with the border!! I feel like people in much of Alberta speak some generic North American English and not a lot of "aboat".
North of Ottawa in Quebec, Hull specifically, almost nobody speaks English!!! I lived there and everything was in French. Some people couldn't and did care to speak English even as a second language. The English that people speak in Quebec and particularly Montreal seems to also differ from the generic Canadian accent you know!
I am curious, since there seem to be many linguists in this thread, could anyone place Ken Schwaber's (one of the co-creators of scrum) accent? The most noticeable characteristic about it is that his /æ/ in words like "have", "past", "perhaps", "backlog" sounds very narrow/high. The /ei/ in "take" is also more narrow/high than usual. Is this something characteristic of any of the American dialects?
Google says he was born in 1945 in Wheaton, Illinois. Is this typical of that area?
Sounds like southern Wisconsin influenced. Wheaton is not far so perhaps he moved there or had family there (or the Wisconsin accent extends into wealthier Chicago suburbs)
An additional note on AAVE's deletion from the author's conception of "American Dialects": this page has been posted to HN before, and each with more than 100 comments has a root comment questioning AAVE's absence.
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.
I was in the San Francisco area for the first time recently, and I noticed that people sounded like they were from the Midwest. I'm glad to see this agreeing with me. Does anyone know why this is?
San Fransisco is the main port of the west coast. The Oregon Trail gets all the fame, but ship was usually how newcomers came to California and the other western states.
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.
It's not. Not sure what the official boundary is (if there even is one), but Midwest is far east of Western. It would better be called 'Norcentral' these days, but the name is probably left over from times when St Louis was considered western
My father's family has been in the Pacific Northwest since the 1800s, particularly Seattle and Corvallis. There is one word in particular, "peaked" which was pronounced "pekkid" (not to be confused with "peckish"!). Dunno why. Have gotten lectures from both dialect deniers and fascists over the years.
Grew up in rural Minnesota (now in rural WA south of Seattle) and am familiar with "peaked" pronounced "peak-id" as in "tuckered out" (but just now checking M-W dictionary I see "being pale and wan or emaciated : SICKLY", so I've been wrong about it for awhile). I'll listen for pekkid, thanks!
I’m not sure the pin/pen merger is a thing in the California San Joaquin Valley. I’ve only lived here for a few years and not heard the merger, and my wife–born and raised here–says them differently
I couldn't figure out, what is the difference between "on as in dawn" vs "on as in don"? I watched several examples but felt like the all sounded the same?
I live maybe 400 km from Toronto and when people from that city come by with their "Torontoww" accent they're pretty easy to distibguish from the local lads from up the line as soon as they open their mouths. My wife's relative from up in the valley speak with an almost unintelligible dialect with different phrasing and pronunciation than I'm used to.
I'm from SW Ontario and live in BC. Apparently I sound like an American because I routinely get asked if I'm from Seattle. There's definitely an Easy-West divergence even north of the border.
The differences are accentuated when you get into rural areas. A lot of the stereotypes people have of Canadian English are based on the speech of people who in e.g rural or northern Ontario. The raising, the 'eh, etc. Though in fact all Canadians tend towards these things, they're strongest there.
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.
Seen is definitely a SW Ontario thing too, although more rural still. It's considered kinda unrefined I think. Same with "youse" like "you people" except "youse people." If you go further north I notice people talk in a exaggerated ascending and descending pitch inflection, at least along the north Huron coast. I catch myself doing it when I visit family there.
Yeah, for sure it's all over Ontario, but most especially rural-anywhere, but urban in the north, too.
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
Rural MB has "I seen" quite a lot. There are some really thick accents in places here.
People from Saskatchewan seem to be more nasally and higher up on the palate.
Albertans usually sound like mid western Americans.
FWIW (and I may have a bad ear) but I've lived about 20 years equally in the PNW and Central Canada and people in both places sound identical. (The only blatant difference is that I rhyme words like "bag" with "vague").
Otherwise the differences I've experienced most are in word choices. Words like toque and chesterfield draw blank looks in the PNW.
I always find it amusing when maps like this, or for weather, etc. have a nice even line at the 49th parallel and it's like... "here be dragons" after it :-)
Trying to understand the weather from maps that just grey out Canada is like trying to figure out what's going on in a chess game if you can only see half the board.
Definitely. I can generally tell the difference between Texas, Louisiana/Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee/Alabama/Georgia, NC, and SC accents, but I can see how some damned Yankees might not.
yes, it seems clear to me that there is much less dialect variation in the US, outside very rural areas, than there was 30 years ago. Even then, the adults had much more variation than the kids.
I'm currently reading Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley in Search of America". He wrote it in 1960 and even then he remarks on how the US is quickly losing local dialects thanks to radio, television, and mass media.
I'm from N. GA which has a flowery dialect and all those expressions my grandparents used are dying. I think 1 or 2 more generations is all that's left.
There tends to be the most variation in the country where a language originated—-the “center of diversity”. Taiwan is the CoD for the Polynesian languages including Indonesian and native languages of Madagascar. (As per Guns Germs and Steel)
British people also sound more American than ever. Nearby, in Ireland, there are rich (suburban, I think?) Dubliners who have never left Europe that, with their normal accents, can briefly pass for Americans to Americans.
I spent 2 weeks in Iceland doing the ring road. We stopped for dinner in a tiny village in North Iceland. Our server genuinely sounded like an American. We asked if he had lived in America. He said he had never left his village, even to go to the capital. He just learned English from American media. His English was flawless. He could have said he spent most of his life in America and we would have believed him based on his accent alone.
Between schools teaching some form of standard pronunciation (in most countries, at least), and routine exposure to the same through mass media and intermingling in large cities, most languages seem to be on the trend towards less dialectal variety.
I can't possibly remember where but I remember hearing that there are actually more new dialects today. It seems like something that is in constant flux everywhere.
It does not escape attention that AAVE is relegated to a small blurb in the "Special Interest" section, with a number of inaccuracies.
>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:
> 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.
The webpage is presented as a fairly comprehensive overview of "American Dialects", of which AAVE is one of the most widely-spoken. To gloss over it the way he has is criminal, especially because he's an academic. This is part-and-parcel of the way blackness is marginalized in and erased from the American record. Essentially, every chart on the page is missing a column. It does a major disservice to anyone who might happen upon the page and view it as a credible source regarding the way Americans speak. You might as well present an atlas with the lakes and ponds removed from each map.
This is a bit simple, too. AAVE is not a single thing. All black people do not have the same accent, and some don't have similar accents to each other. There is also no an ur-accent floating around that is perturbing all black people in a uniform way from the local accents that surround them.
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.
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
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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)