Really? I’ve lived here all my life, and I definitely use the same vowel sound for both.
Do you remember seeing commercials for Paul’s TV (the King of Big Screen) in La Habra? “I am the keeng!”
I grew up in the Midwest, spent 25 years there, then moved to California and lived in both SF and LA. I didn’t notice any dialectical differences attributable to geographics, but I did notice cultural and jargon differences, like the black accent in rock music or Valley Girl sounds in some juvenile groups.
And now that I’m back in the Midwest, I don’t notice accents in people from Chicago, altho there are slight accents in rural parts of Wisconsin that remind me of scandinavian influences (the “o” in “No” is different, and drawn out). Not to mention phrases like “There ya go!” to mean “OK”.
I remember Ronnie Eckstine in LA educating us (lily-white musicians) on how to pronounce “alright” properly, as in “Feelin’ AW-RAT!”
The above Wikipedia link on California English is pretty much right on the money.
There is definitely a difference between the SoCal and Midwestern accents – I learned this in one of my first linguistics classes when I found out I was the only one besides the prof who pronounced cot and caught differently (likewise body and bawdy, hottie and haughty). Other distinctions (like merry/marry/Mary) I go back and forth on. And this despite living in LA since my fourth birthday. I blame my parents and their Midwestern accents.
– Dragonblink, linguistics grad student
Is there no recordings of British people singing previous to 1960? What names should I look for on iTunes?
Go to Bakersfield, and you can find plenty of people who don’t speak “standard”. I think it’s more of a rural/urban thing. My college buddies from suburban Dallas/Plano, TX don’t “sound Texan”, either.
I can recognize a distinctive “California” pattern of speech, but I don’t know if I can describe it. Let me give it a shot.
Soft vowel sounds are exceptionally soft. While an Easterner may say “Sawft” and a Midwesterner might say “soft” a Westerner will pronounce it more like “Sahhhhhft.”
Also there’s a particular sing-songiness to Western U.S. speech. Whereas many people choose to emphasize the noun and/or verb in a sentence, or raise their voices at the end the sentence to indicate a question, it seems westernERS seem to RAISE and lowER their voiCES every FEW syllaBLES. Some Southerners do this to, but with their own distinct pronunciations.
If you have a sing-songy speech pattern combined with soft vowels, you sound “Californian” to me.
Anybody up for a Doper Teleconference? 
“I can name that accent in three words, Bob.”
So, kunilou, is that Northern Californian, Central Coast Californian, Southern Californian?
Another Linguistics thing on the California Accent (& yes: no ifs, ands, or buts there is one)
On singing I can add that on piece of the homogenous “Anglo-phone” accent is that we all use the same notes and words when we sing, so our distinctive regional speech rhythms, patterns and words are lost or largely mitigated.
Further, in some cases - especially Rock N Roll it is traditional that certain words are purposely mispronounced “Bay-bee” for baby being one example to sound like rural African Americans of the mid-20th century (where Rock n’ Roll started). I have always though that Rock singers, if I suspected they were affecting a singing accent, sound more like Elvis or Ray Charles than they do like Jan and Dean – but that last bit is opinion - not GQ obviously
All the talk of accents being “more muted” or of one regional accent being generally “stronger” than another betrays the incorrect assumption that there is some sort of base English pronunciation that, the further strayed from, the more accented a pronunciation is. I might pronounce ‘bacteria’ as ‘bacterier’ and you the more standard pronunciation, but that doesn’t make your accent more muted; it just makes it different.
Interesting article and it seems well thought out. As a native Northern-Californian I don’t think I’ve ever heard the ‘keen’ ‘king’ issue. I pronounce them with different vowel sounds as well with “keen” having the longer ‘e’ sound.
Back to the OP though, of course the West Coast has an accent. It’s simply that it’s the dominant accent in media. Thus, I think someone would be correct to say that the West Coast accent has the most claim to be being “standard American” but that’s just because they’re leaving out that it’s the standard American accent
Either way, just because it’s dominant doesn’t mean it’s not an accent…
Sage Rat, how about this. Do you expect to be able to go up to an Australian, say “where am I from?”, and have them say, “I have no idea, you have no discernable accent”?
Of course you have an accent. At the very least people will consider you to have an American accent. You have a way of talking that distinguishes the region where you are from.
And Split Enz sing with a mild NZ accent, I can hear it now because I’ve been living in Australia for the last five years. Pink Floyd sing like the middle class English chaps they are (though I think Roger Waters seems to sing in American when it suits him.)
Of all the palces I’ve lived, I found that Buffalonians seemed to be the least aware of their own accents; so much so that they think they have the standard middle-American newscaster accent, even though in reality they speak in a very strong, very nasal Great Lakes accent. They think “We don’t sound like they’re from New York City, so we don’t have an accents.”
Buffalo is the only city I’ve ever lived in where it’s acceptable for television news reporters and radio disk jockeys to keep their local accents on the air. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a news reporter on a Southern television station speak in a thick drawl, use dude-speak in LA, or talk like a Mafia don in New York, but watch the news on a TV station in Buffalo, and the local flat A is more the norm than the exception.
It always interested me to notice that the Beatles had different accents among the four of them. George and Ringo came from slightly poorer backgrounds and sounded much more strongly Scouse, at least as I understand it. Disgraced and dismissed early drummer Pete Best also has an accent you can cut with a feather, though through a fluke by which his mother acquired their large house, he grew up in somewhat more opulent surroundings.
Bloc Party is another, since you can clearly hear that they’re from the UK even if you aren’t paying attention to the lyrics which provide further clues like the use of the word “trainers” in Staying Fat or “give you a million pounds” in Plans. Sadly, I can’t make out any words at all from a remix of their song Helicopter…
That doesn’t prove a west coast accent: if you look at the dialect survey map, you’ll find that most people in New England pronounce those word pairs the same way as well. “tot” and “taught” too, but “marry”, “merry” and “Mary” all differently. Since it is the norm here, you can’t really suppose several million people almost uniformly decided to chance to the West Coast pronouncation.
this might help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accents_of_English_speakers#United_States
General American is the name given to the accent used by most TV network announcers; it is most similar to the local accents of Iowa and adjacent parts of Nebraska, and Illinois. General American makes a good reference accent, and a good goal for foreigners learning American English, because it is generally regarded as a “neutral” accent (when most Americans say someone “doesn’t have an accent” they mean he or she has a General American accent).
You are correct. Early broadcasting schools were located in the Midwest and that accent became the broadcast tradition. That accent is different from the West Coast accents including California accents. There is sometimes a tendency to think of a broadcast (neutral, general) dialect as a “standard” dialect because we hear it so often from “authoritative” sources and people who are famous. The implication is that other dialects would be non-standard or sub-standard. That isn’t the case. There is no standard American dialect or standard American accent.
Which Tennessee accent? 
We stretch from Missouri to Virginia. (And how do you pronounce Missouri?)
Very good. My earliest recollection of the widespread recording use is Mickey and Silvia’s (Sylvia’s?) Love is Strange circa 1956 or 1957. “Bay-bee…Oh, Bay-bee…My Sweet Baybee, you’re the one…” If I am not mistaken, they were/are African Americans and the trend may have caught on from that recording. Just a hunch.
Thank you, Excalibre. Pronunciation is a set of features including phonetics, sandhi (phonetic changes at word boundaries), pitch intonation (at different levels: in sentences and phrases as well as individual words), stress (ditto), timbre, etc.
Any one or more of these features used in describing pronunciation may be used to distinguish dialects or accents. But the study of pronunciation itself does not depend on dialects or accents. And as Doper linguists have often pointed out, there is no strong definition for what constitutes a “dialect,” so the word isn’t much used by linguists in a rigorous technical sense, but it comes in handy for loose descriptions.
As for the difference Sage Rat noted between British pronunciation of a word said with an American accent and the way it sounds in British speech: In this example the phonetics coincide while the pitch accent diverges. British speech has a wider pitch range than the relatively flat American speech, especially for men.
Bump. Hoping for any answer to the specific items mentioned in the OP. Current status is:
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Almost universally, all musicians throughout the world affect an American pitch accent to a sufficient extent that most Americans don’t realise they aren’t American bands until they speak. And are able to sing so regardless that those band members couldn’t speak with an American accent any better than Dick Van Dyke could do British.
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No comments as yet.
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No comments as yet.
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You can tell through word usage, or mini-cliques like Valley Girls or whatever the current fad accent is. But no comments on the lack of “pitch accent” differences (though the simplest answer would simply be that we’re all locked in to each other due to TV using it.)
And the new addition of:
- Floridians (as I recall) and other areas of the country also use, or are near it, even though they are physically separated from the West Coast. (?)
And again to all the posters saying “Try talking and I can guess that you’re from the West Coast”, yes, I realised this. And that isn’t what I meant.
I was wondering if there was some sort of something where, like Shagnasty postulated, lots of people with different pitch accents who have converged on an area and are now trying to communicate will default to some pitch accent that is easier for everyone to pick up the words. So far we have determined that the accent sounds “slow” (“drawl,” per even sven) which sounds likely from that theory.
I was born and raised in California and I can almost always tell you whether someone is from the north, the south, or the central valley. We all have slight variations in how we talk (which I am unable to explain without havnig an example of the other two here in front of me- a lot of it is speed and inflection on certain words).
And I say them the same. I say “Keeng” and “keen”. Perhaps that’s more of a valley thing?
Oh come on now, don’t tell people to come here. It’s just not nice. We definitely have odd accents here- very odd ones. When I travel, people almost always say, “Ohhh you’re from California! Yeah?” then they stop themselves and say, “But. . . you do have a bit of a southern accent. . . so which is it?”. When I went to San Antonio, I found that I sound more Texan than most Texans, while still maintaining my “likes” and “fer sures”.
And to answer some of the unanswered questions (well, attempt):
- I can totally lay the California accent on thick. All I have to do is stop relaxing my tongue (that’s where the Southern accent comes from) and change my pacing up a bit. I’m so good at it, that sometimes people think that’s actually how I speak.
Oh, and I already addressed 4. I wish I had some way to record my voice, that way y’all (that’s the Bakersfield in me) could hear how I speak. I guarantee you’d say, “Whoa, she’s from California.” Everyone always does (in fact, I noticed New Yorkers were particularly interested in how I talk, as were Chicago…ans, and Floridians).