The “majority” accent, as shown on TV, is the Midwestern one - a flat, relatively accentless form of speech. It has the obvious advantage of not sounding too “weird” to any particular group.
BTW, I spent a good long time in S. Florida recently, and trust me, it they don’t speak “regular” down there. S. Floridian English has been hugely influenced by both Spanish and New Yorkese - the joke I heard repeatedly down there is S. Florida is the sixth borough of New York City.
Sua
Years ago I remember some Brit (Anthony Burgess writing about his time in NYC?) saying that he thought the way the cab drivers didn’t drop their H’s sounded very genteel (unlike the lower Brit classes who did drop their aitches). That was back when the cabbies were born & bred Americans; I’m not sure if the speech of the various “working class” born & bred Americans still in NYC would still strike a Brit the same way.
As for the difference between a language & a dialect, I thought it depended on the context. In this thread, people are mostly talking about dialects of English; as most of us are using it here, “dialect” can refer to varieties of a single language. On the other hand, some linguists may consider French & Italian to be Romance “dialects”, but how many people would call them the same language? The Chinese government insists on calling the different types of Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin) dialects of a single language, partly because if they call them “languages” it suggests different cultures and might encourage separatist tendencies. In China, at least, such differences arose because of geographical barriers. Some would argue they persist because of ethnic pride.
Well, the Chinese can understand each other’s written language (most write exactly the same way, despite pronounciations), so there’s obviously more than a passing similarity.
— G. Raven
Morrison -
My boss speaks fluent Mandarin and is conducting his marriage to a real Taiwan-Chinese in it. IIRC, he says that Cantonese is about as related to Mandarin as German is to French (and he speaks Austrian German too).
Remember that the tone of a word can have almost everything to do with the meaning of a word in Chinese. I went to a restaurant with him and his wife, and he said the waiters weren’t speaking Mandarin. His wife corrected him that they were, but it took him a moment’s thought to agree. Their mangling of the tones because of their Cantonese accents had confused him so much that I guess he thought he was just picking up some of the meaning from the Cantonese they were speaking.
True enough. I seem to have escaped relatively unscathed, people have informed me I have a fairly neutral NI accent but my sis’ has lumbered herself (quite deliberately I feel) with a Strabane accent which is the worst accent in NI right after a Belfast accent. Its kind of hard to explain how such a small country has such a large variation in accents, from lightly Scottish accents around the North coast to the thick Belfast accent thats unmistakeable anywhere, but it is so noticable when you here the way people talk here.
I feel a need to chime in . . .
I’m “accent-deaf” and I was born and raised in Louisiana. I grew but with the original red-necks, coming from a long line of share croppers and menial larbores. (Contrary to popular belief, Louisiana is not entirely Cajun, I don’t know a word of the language or have a drop of Cajun blood). In my teens, I moved to Colorado where my accent became a source of hiliarity to peers, I couldn’t tell how they sounded different from me. As time worn on, my accent faded (or so I’m told), but my Louisiana heritage is often given away by phases I use, more than what I say. I call crawlfish, crawlfish, instead of “crayfish”. I pronounce pecan “pee-caun” instead of “pee-CAN”. I use the Cajun-French term “lan-yap”, this means extra anything that you can use for whatever you want.
A man of infinite sagacity, this German. What on earth can he have meant?
Though having lived almost my entire life in Southern California, I agree that our dialect sounds “regular” to me,
or perhaps we should say “correct”. 
But I think Broadcast Standard, if you will is a little different. For instance, we usually don’t say “AH-dult” for a grown person, it’s usually “a-DULT”. And a Broadcast Standardism that makes my flesh crawl is “PROH-grum” (Program). I don’t know why it bothers me like it does, but we’d just say “program”, both syllables more or less equally accented and enunciated.
Your right about Chicago, there’s definitely a dialect there, and it could probably be broken down further based on ethnicity and economic level. MY cousins have what I think is a definite twang in their voice, but they wouldn’t say “Da Bears”, like the working class guys in the old Saturday Night Live sketch.
To say that dialects are within a language and that we are talking about “dialects” because we are talking about one language, namely English, is, in defining a dialect, circular logic. Basically this is saying “its a dialect because its not a language”.
Mutual intellegibility is not the definition. Again I go back to my example of muntually unintelligible Swiss and German dialects and mutually intelligible Scandinavian languages.
Regularizied writing would seem promising (it would explain the above example) until we get to Chinese. Morrison’s Lament says (or implies) that the similarity of writing among Chinese “dialects” means more than a passing similarity of speaking. I have met Japanese people who could read Chinese writing but could not speak Chinese. I dont think anyone would say that the Chinese and Japanese languages are the least bit closely related. Chinese, by having a non-phonetic writing, disproves the regularizied writing theory.
Perhaps the difference between language and dialect is both arbitrary and politically motivated. I have had Bosnians tell me that they absolutely do not speak “Serbo-Croatian” and refusued to purchase “English/Serbo-Croatian” dictionaries. These folks absolutely do speak Serbo-Croatian!
To * me* there isn’t a lot of difference. However, I’m comparing people from the south shore to people in the Providence area(less than 20 miles away), not other parts of RI, since I don’t know anyone from other parts of RI.
In spoken language, yes. But when you write it down, it’s nearly always exactly the same, word for word.
— G. Raven
Speaking as a weird diphthong (now there’s a rock band name for you)native to Oregon, I remember well when I started in local radio at the age of 17 and my boss had a pet peeve about the word “nuclear”, which he insisted (thank goodness) be pronounced “new-clear” instead of “nuke-you-lar”. Even today, if I hear the latter, I immediately thing “low class”.
Where is that? Y’all is a contraction for “You all” which seems to imply purality. I have never heard any one use it in reference to a single person at least here in Texas.
Tito, you are correct of course–I simply reversed the words by mistake. I get on this message board late at night and the occasional brain fart does occur. I meant that it was a PLURAL not SINGULAR word. Please excuse!!
Now you’re hitting it. I wish I knew the source, but the aphorism I hear from linguists is “a language is a dialect with an army.” It’s politics. Lately, the pendulum has swung in favor of preserving languages, and part of that process has been to reevaluate and elevate to “language” status what previously may have been described as “dialects.” When I was in junior high - ca. 1980 - I remember Catalan being described as a dialect, nevermind its mutual unintelligibility with Castillian Spanish. Now it’s treated as a language, reflecting Catalunya’s autonomy in post-Franco Spain. The EU has assisted this process, providing funding to preserve languages that are threatened.
I’d be willing to guess the former. My experience in Quebec is that although Montreallers are pretty intelligible, folks from small towns are a completely different ballgame. I remember talking up a cute guy in a Montreal bar (or rather, trying to), who turned out to be from some town of 500. To me it sounded like the French equivalent of Southie - equally impenetrable and, imho, equally…inaesthetic. Happily, we kept our interaction to the inarticulate.
My father’s a Sicilian immigrant. Northern Italians might as well be speaking another language. Same goes for various towns in Sicily. I believe this to be the case everywhere. I live in Philly. I can definately tell if a person is from the Philadelphia area. To me it is a very distinct accent. While traveling through parts of Appalachia, I honestly couldn’t understand a single word that was spoken to me. My father(who sounds like the stereo-typical Italian immigrant) finds southerners dificult to communicate with. I think that’s because he learned to speak english in Brooklyn.
That’s cause you’re a good noticer
When I shot No Way Home in 1995 with Tim Roth, he had with him the same dialogue coach that had been with him for the preceeding several films he’d made.
He needed a perfect Staten Island accent, and I can tell you that there is indeed a distinct accent from Staten Island. Now and then, he’d slip but for the most part, the accent is killer. Right on da money. Always cracked me up to see him drop back to whatever brand of Brit speak he uses when we’d cut.
The man cut off my pony tail and made me eat Marmite. And still, I’m fond of his work.
Cartooniverse
Having grown up in several different regions of the United States, I suppose I have something to contribute here. I picked up accents along the way. About a million years ago I won first place in a Valley Girl contest.
I use “accent” to refer to regional speech inflections and “dialect” to refer to local word choice.
Californians in general use a wider pitch range than most Americans. Their speech tends to be slow, but in moments of anger they may double their rate of talking. The effect is startling. The stereotypical Valley Girl accent is limited to the San Fernando Valley in northern Los Angeles where development after World War II brought a large Jewish population from the Northeast. The Valley accent combines extreme pitch ranges with nasal tones typical of older Jewish accents and added a strong attention to meter. Vals pepper their speech with fillers, “like” being the most common, for rhythmic effect. The accent spread well beyond its ethnic origins so that now an Asian-American or Chicano resident is as likely to speak it as anyone else. Its dialect borrows heavily from surfer culture. Mexican Spanish, which sounds leisurely and singsong, also makes its proximity felt.
In the Hampton Roads area of Virginia at least three local dialects coexist. Not surprisingly, they’re closely related to the region’s social history. White collar Virginians talk in lilting tones, lengthening their vowels only slightly. The sound is light and throaty. Working class Virginians speak from the chest. Their drawl is broader, more recognizably “Southern” to unfamiliar ears, and their speech is slower. Most of the African-Americans in the area use a third accent. The intonantions are distinct and the pacing is rhythmic. Vowel sounds dominate and a new listener may have trouble distinguishing the consonants. Most educated African-Americans in the region either adopt the more prestigious of the local white dialects or eliminate Southern regional tones from their speech. Sometimes in the lowlands one meets a Virginian from the hill country, Appalacian twang intact. North Carolinians who move to the area also sound different. Their drawl is much slower and more relaxed than any Virginian would use.
To the rest of the world, New York City and Brooklyn in particular often get stereotyped in the accent of one neighborhood: Bensonhurst. Bensonhurst is a stable Italian-American community where the local accent is broad, loud, affable, and rough. White Brooklynites from Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights often amaze outsiders by sounding “like they’re not from New York at all.” African-Americans from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood use more of the inflections of their Bensonhurst neighbors, but the Bed-Stuy accent blends enough Southern tones that the Italian influence escapes most ears. New York City’s other four boroughs have equally rich local sounds.
South Florida may seem devoid of regionalisms to newcomers. As a land filled with recently transplanted Northeasterners, New Englanders, and Midwesterners, the dominant sound often appears to be a Network Newscast Standard American blend. Pockets of deep Southern drawl persist in less developed areas. Unlike California, Floridian speech tends closer to a monotone. The dominant Spanish influence is Cuban, which sounds rapid and clipped. In some communities relaxed Anglo- or Franco-Caribbean tones predominate.
That’s enough for one post. For what it’s worth, in both France and Germany most of the locals thought I sounded English.
Being from the Deep South (Smith County, Mississippi) I can identify many different Southern accents, since they vary from county to county here. Jackson folks don’t talk like Natchez folks. My Smith County folks SURE don’t sound like someone from Memphis. My cousins from Alabama sound very different from my cousins in Georgia. I’ve had waiters in restaurants in Florida cry, “You’re from Mississippi, ain’t ya!” as soon as I open my mouth. As for my own accent, I talk something like this:
“Will y’all hand me thu yeller piller from under the winder befo’ mah dawg chews a hawl in it?”
And my aunt (pronounced ‘aint’) says my accent isn’t very heavy!
British accents from movies defuddle me – I tried to watch “Chicken Run”, and couldn’t understand a word those chickens were saying, other than the one that sounded like Mel Gibson. I ran screaming from the accents in “Snatch”, but then I don’t know many people who didn’t.
I, also, have never seen a movie that got my accent half-way right. But then, they never make movies about the South other than a) John Grisham movies and b) movies about the Civil Rights movement, so I don’t have a wide range of films to choose from. When “X-Men: the movie” came out, I was watching it in a theater in Jackson, when the character Rogue appeared. She’s from MS in the movie, and when the words “Meridian, Mississippi” apeared on the screen, the entire theater started screaming in excitement. Though, mysteriously, despite being from the South, Rogue had an Australian accent during the whole film… 
.:Nichol:.
My daughter, who went to a little fresh water college that caters to the children of Lutheran ministers from the Upper Mississippi Valley, maintains that you can tell Upper Midwest accents apart by the way people pronounce the name of their home State.
Minne-soota (with a hard “o”) already noted above.
I-wah
Wis-can-son
James Thurber noted that people from Columbus, Ohio, don’t move their lips, mouthing all words like the word “king.”
As far a Europeans go, even the uneducated ear can tell the difference between the Rheinland-Pfalz accent and, for instance, a Frankfurt accent. Pfalzish is about as distinct as a strong Arkansas accent.