It’s strange - moving from SF to Toronto - I still talk the same, (at least no-one comments on it), but people here really do talk differently… I can’t figure out why their accent can be so obvious to me, and yet I don’t seem to have one to them…
Then again, I was never much into using hella… and no-one seems to even notice when I call them dude…
This thread is totally screwing with my head. 
Native Southern Californian here. I have noticed that we tend to avoid the soft “I” sound in many words.
Milk is pronounced “melk”, and Wilshire is pronounced “Woolshure” or “W’lsh’r”.
And I have never heard a local use the word “hella”. Never.
Because it makes sense. If someone tells me to “take 5 north…”, “I’ll be asking take 5 what? People? Minutes?” “The 5” is just a shortening of “the 5 freeway”.
You know the turtle from Finding Nemo? He was from California, no doubt about it.
I hardly hear anyone say “hella” here in Vegas except high school kids. Are you talking to people who have just graduated?
Dammit, NorCal is a NoCal term. NoCal is a SoCal term.
Dude, I’m second gen Californian too! (Although my Mom is from NoCal.) I’ve met a 6th generation Santa Barbarian. I think they sounded like me. My brother-in-law is pretty close to 5th generation Californian, and is probably 100% Chinese, but speaks much more formally in a dialect not easily recognizable as Californian (doesn’t cuss at all, never uses “dude”. “sweet” or “gnarley”). I almost never use the term Cali, though. This may be a generational thing.
What? The i in milk is pronounced like the i in MILF! Wilshire is pronounced like WILL-SURE, or the 'Miracle Mile". OK, I speak the special dialect of Valley speak.
LoCal is a subset of SoCal and is defined by the area south of Camp Pendleton. I rarely hear the term actually used, and generally only in jest.
I’ve only hear one person in California who prnounced ‘milk’ that way. He lived in Mississippi until he was eight or nine.
I think a lot of Southern Californians sound an awful lot like Okies.
Actually, 5 is short for Interstate 5, so that’s why in the rest of the country, we call it I-5. 
Well in British Received Pronunciation, law takes the open mid back rounded vowel (open o) – [lɔ] – and stop takes the open back rounded vowel (turned script a) – [stɒp].
In General American, there are variations, but one common distinction is that “law” takes the “aw” vowel [lɔ] and “stop” takes the “ah” vowel [stɑp] (script a).
We take the freeway. So we take the [Interstate] 5 [freeway]. 
Well, that makes sense. A lot of Okies wound up in Southern CA. Half my grandparents came with their parents during the Depression, and I have a great-aunt who really was an Okie from Nowhere, Oklahoma. She says that her one-room schoolhouse had 14 students and 12 of them were her cousins.
Certain parts of Bakersfield (where I grew up) has this sort of pseudo- southern accent thing going on in certain parts of town if you pay close enough attention.
I miss California!
Not long ago, I was approched by a tall, elegant lady from the embassy, who wanted to let me know that somebody from the embassy was from the village where I am working. She mentioned we might want to meet at some point.
“Great. That would be awesome!” I replied.
She looked down at me and, with no small degree of disgust, said
“Yes. Awesome. Ah-hem.”
I still call everyone I know here dude. Can’t be helped. "Hella’ is a Sacramento based thing that spread to all of Northern California (who the heck says stuff like “nor-cal” and god forbid “Cali”?) and every year it would cause a tiny war between the freshman at my central Californian university. But beyond the vocab, I think there is an accent. I think part of it is a near inability to say "t"s in words. Like, I’m from Sacra-menno, then I moved to Sanna Cruz, and then I moved to Oaklan’.
Actually … You take Interstate [highway/route/freeway] [number] 5.
That’s a good point. I’m from Sanna Maria myself, but now I live north of Sacramenno.
But all of my Okie family people are from Bakersfield. That’s where I lived until junior high.
Did you see the Daily Show last night? They showed a clip of The Pope finishing a speech. President Bush got up, shook his hand, and you see that he is saying (and spelled out by TDS) “Thanks, Pope. Awesome speech.”
I think some slang is best left out of cross-cultural dialogue.
I was born in So Cal (Lakewood/Long Beach) but raised in the Bay Area since I was about 3. I gotta look into this Law and Stop thing - hmmm.
Oh - and for the most part, I agree with posters who frame a standard California accent as neutral - it sure feels that way to me, given travel around the country. But a Surfer Dude or Valley Girl - or just the local jargon - sure those are different…
I love Dude - living in New York, I Dude-speak all the time - watching Juno, where all the kids call each other dude was hilariously familiar. I started a thread about a week ago about the jargon folks use in their areas of interest (search on this forum for the word “geekery”) - I illustrated my examples with sentences that all started with Dude…silliness ensued.
I think a lot of Southern Californians aren’t actually from Southern California. I’m not sure of the numbers, but it seems that most who emigrate to California from other states end up in Southern California.
In my area at least it’s because a lot of them ARE Okies. Ever read Grapes of Wrath, dude?
My grandmother told me that people in Bakersfield burned it in the streets, they were so mad. Not the Okies, the ones who were already there and felt unjustly accused.
That would not surprise me.
I was Wiki’ing around and discovered that CA actually had an “Anti-Okie” law in the '30s - basically said that knowingly assisting an indigent person to move to California was a misdemeanor. It was overturned in '41 for being unconstitutional.
ETA: I’m sure others know of this, but I lived in another state for 4th grade, so I missed the big California history section.