English speaking Americans are familiar with the regional accents such as the Boston accent, the Southern accent, the New York accent, the Western accent, etc. There are also the ethnic accents such as the Black accent, the Asian accent, the Hispanic accent, etc.
Can a minority person with an ethnic accent identify a regional accent within the ethnic accent? For instance, would a black from Chicago hear the voice of another person and be able to say, “that guy is definitely black but he must be from Boston”? Or, do Hispanics that live in the south speak American English distinctly different from Hispanics that live in the north?
The question is only based on generalities, not specific exceptions.
Yes — basically, a native English speaker who is (1) black and (2) from Chicago will likely have dialectal features of both (1) black English and (2) Chicago English. This varies tremendously by individual and circumstances, but there’s no reason not to partake in both at once; regional languages / dialects aren’t closed sets.
I can hear a definite difference between Detroit black English and Chicago black English - both accent and word choice. It’s not HUGE, the dialects (if they’re even that far apart) are completely mutally unintelligable.
Yes, in my experience, it’s easy to identify what part of the US someone comes from their accent whether or not they have a “primary” accent (Chinese, Filipino, etc).
Sure. Both speakers and audience from either group can communicate freely with the other.
This is in contrast to a (hardly rare) circumstance where a speaker of one dialect may understand a speaker of a larger of more widespread dialect, but a speaker of the “larger” dialect may not understand the person from the smaller population dialect. For example, most speakers of Gulla will be able to understand the English spoken on TV and radio, but few people outside the Gulla islands and coastal region will understand Gulla. (Or, in the example of the OP, nearly all speakers of AAVE from Chicago or Detroit will understand suburbanites from metro Chicago or Detroit, but many suburbanites from those areas will have difficulty understanding AAVE from the same area.)
I was stationed in Germany with two guys from Alabama, one from the north one from the south. They had a little difficulty understanding each other at first. Both were white.
They got along well except during football season when very heated arguments arose over which team was best. If I remember correctly, it was UA v UA, Birmingham.
None of us at the airfield could understand anything either said, but this was eventually remedied when the two men learned to use semaphore.
Yeah, I made up that last part, but I needed a punchline. So, shoot me.
Chicagolanders have a very noticeable dialect. (Detroiters probably do, but I have a harder time hearing what I grew up speaking, other than a few Canadianisms.) It is true, however, that Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago are in the same dialect family and are very close. You might need to be from one of them to distinguish the others.
And I have lived in the Midwest all my life, and in the two cities named, 12 years in the Detroit area and 15 in Chicago giving me some long-term familiarity with the spoken language in both.
I don’t think one needs to be within a minority to have “the ear” esp. regarding the New York (City) accent. Mike Tyson (NSFW bleeped) sounds distinctly New York and African American to me.
This is not just an American english phenomenon. When I was in Glasgow in 2005 for Worldcon, I had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant near the convention center. The waiter/cook spoke english with a combination Scottish/Indian accent. I could understand about 1 in every 5 words. But the food was great.
Not exactly on point, but interesting later that night, I was talking to a guy from Edinburgh who had came for the day. Someone else joined in the conversation, and jokingly told the first person, “What do you know, you are from Edinburgh.” The first guy replied it was more than someone from Glasgow would know. I asked if they knew each other and they said no, they could tell where each other was from because the other one talked funny. They both sounded Scottish to me, I couldn’t tell the difference.
Lok is quite right, British regional accents and Asian ones end up in all sorts of amalgams which can sound bizarre to an outsider, or in other cases might not be noticed at all.
