My visa application is finally en route. I have been back in the US for seven months and I hope to be gone soon.
Still, while back in the US, I have noticed a lot of changes in the pronunciation of American English. Or am I nuts?
“Black” for “Block” is the classic example, part of the Great Vowel Shift.
The “California Accent” where all sentences end in an final inflection like a question?
Even TV announcers seem to be doing it. Have you noticed changes in the American accent in the last couple of years?
No I haven’t, but it’s interesting that you have. I am probably too close to it to notice (I am guessing).
Slight Nitpick: the California accent has nothing to do with the inflection going up at the end, that’s just annoying. It might be typical “valley girl” but I don’t know anyone who talks that way anymore and few Californian’s, as a general rule, actually do that. The California accent is more typified by lazy a’s (uhh instead of ahh) and is otherwise very similar to “Standard American” or a Midwestern Accent.
I think what you mean is that Californian dialect doesn’t have /ɔ/, and instead uses /ɑ/, so that “cot” and “caught” are pronounced the same. But that’s not only in California. (Terms like “lazy a” are pretty murky in print communication.)
There are sooooooooo many regional variations of pronunciation in American English. It makes it hard to opine on this. I’ll just say that I haven’t heard any differences in my area.
Well sure, if you want to get all “knowledgable” about it, dude.
I mearly parrot what I learned in voice and speach class low these many years ago. I just wanted to point out that the California accent has nothing to do with up talking, which is annoying and which I have never heard anyone actually from California do since I was about 10 years old, and I grew up in the Valley.
You do get a weird variation on it with people who grew up in Beverly Hills, but it isn’t quite the same thing and those people are universally dispised by the rest of the folks from Southern California. All you people from Northern Califonia who may be reading this, you should know that it is *this *group that you actually hate, the rest of us are pretty cool.
I’m a CA native & no Californian I ever met pronounced cot & caught the same way.
In Californian, “cot” has the standard short o sound, and also is brief in duration. If someone stretched out the duration of the vowel sound without changing the sound produced, it’d be close to the Boston haahvaaaahd yaaahd if you concentrate on the aaa sound & don’t include the trailing h sound.
“caught” is much more like “cawt”. The vowel duration is still short, but the sound is the same as “aw” in “Aww, shucks.”
And I’m seconding the above poster’s question about black & block. Who and where allegedly pronounces which word like which? I’ve spent years traveling all over the US, and never heard anyone anywhere say something which sounds to me like “the drug store is 3 blacks up on your right”. Neither have I heard “That’s a nice clean block car you have there”.
I’m always interested to learn of some new regionalism though. Paul?
This is the low back merger which is heard throughout the Northeast and the West.
When the pitch rises on the end of a statement that is not a question, then this is called “uptalk”. Usually women are the ones doing “uptalking” and its not particular to California.
Third generation native Californian and couldn’t figure out how cot and caught would even be pronounced differently until your explanation. I’m tired, and the only difference I could come up with was pronouncing the “gh” as an “f” sound as in draught, heh. On reflection, pronouncing an “aw” sound in “caught” is something I’d associate with Brits, East Coasters, and maybe Canadians.
It’s hard to convey pronunciation explanations in print with terms like “long” or “short o sound,” because that makes it seem as though there were only ten vowels in English: a long one and a short one for each of the written vowel letters.
vintageloveletter’s description, while terse, gives a better sense of the sounds, in that there are two low back vowels (some would say three, but for me that’s more about the prosody of the utterance) which are distinct for most Americans in the East that are generally pronounced the same for most of those in the West.
I guess a better way to explain it is that for most Westerners “not” and “naught” are generally pronounced the same ([nɒt] or [nɒt]), but for Easterners, with the vowel in “naught” ([nɔt]), the mouth is somewhat tenser and the sound produced lower in the mouth than “not.”
LSLGuy, though, says he has always heard a difference with Californians.
Smart People in the language business say that such a vowel shift (which began in the Great Lakes area) will spread and consume us all. (I see the new president if from the region.)
What I find remarkable is how often I catch newscasters, who speak for a living, doing it.
The uptalking makes me want to get violent. It’s not regional, just stupid. I hear it from customers across the board, and while women are more likely to do it they’re not alone in it. I will say that 20-some-odd years ago, my speech and drama teacher encouraged us to do it, as “it makes you sound more upbeat.” I told her it makes me sound more retarded and refused to do it.
As for *black *for *block *-- isn’t that just a Bostonian thing?
Basically a white multiethnic way of talking that turns you into a