Do West Coast Americans have an Accent?

[mhendo]

@Sage Rat

Bump. Hoping for any answer to the specific items mentioned in the OP. Current status is:

1. 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.

Not universally true, by any means.

Plenty of artists from other countries sing with recognizable (non-American) national or regional accents, and their singing sounds just fine.

@Sage Rat

2. No comments as yet.

What sort of comment do you want? Confirmation that your Australian friend finds it easier to talk in an American accent? Sorry, can’t help you with that.

If you want confirmation that someone who grew up speaking with a different accent will find it easier to speak West Coast American than their regular accent, then i most definitely disagree. In fact, it staggers me that you would even entertain the question. The notion that a person has spent their whole life speaking with a perfectly natural (for them) accent, and then says that they find it easier to just switch to West Coast American is, to my mind, patently absurd.

I can understand your Australian friend changing his accent so he could be more easily understood by Americans. I’ve been in the US almost 6 years and there are still occasions where i’ll emphasize my r’s in an American way in order to make it easier for Americans to understand me. But i do this for their convenience, not for mine, and there’s no way in hell that talking in an American accent is easier for me than talking in an Australian accent.

And as for the title of the thread, i think it’s been well and truly established that, yes, West Coast Americans do, in fact, have an accent.

[jimmmy]

Are you whoosing us?

@Sage Rat

notice that even just watching movies from the fifties, like Casablanca that there is some sort of accent (which I assume to be the Californian accent of the time (?))

Who are you referring to Bogie? He came to California 13 years before this film. Lived in NYC his whole life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humprey_Bogart

@Sage Rat

, like “Frankly my dear, I just don’t give a damn.”

Gable was born and raised in Ohio. He first set foot in California 14 years before he uttered that line on film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Gable

@Sage Rat

4. There is no “regional accents.” I couldn’t tell you if a person came from LA or Oregon, let alone which area of town he was born and raised in. The closest I have ever experienced was when I called the big interstate freeway “The Five” rather than “The I Five”, which is a dialect issue rather than one of accent.
5. 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 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 think several people have mentioned they can tell PNW, and various parts of California. You can say OH THATS NOT WHAT I MEANT! But you can’t say there have been no comments (I don’t claim I can tell - it all sounds like Jcorre’s General American Dialect - a midwestern accent - not the English spoken by native white Californians you seem to be referring to). I think you need to clarify how this point hasn’t been answered and I don’t mean that as chesty as it sounds – I like your bulldogedness - as long as we aren’t veering into obtuseness.

[Interrobang]

At least one native Seattle linguist has argued that the Pacific Northwest is a distinct dialect region. Distinct elements of the northwest accent, per the Seattle PI article:
[ul]
[li]Creaky Voice: Many locals, especially women, use it[/li][li]Strong ‘S’: We really like to emphasize the S. Listen[/li][li]Low-back merger: Say “caught” and “cot” out loud. If you’re a true Northwest speaker, the words will sound identical. [/li][li]Fronting the vowel: They do this in California, with words such as move.[/li][/ul] I’m not a native, myself, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy.

[even_sven]

I think whoever said “sing-song” had it right. And there is also a hint of Southern in there as well and extreme shwa-ing…I rarely pronounce vowels fully. A lot of consonants also get lost- “T” is rarely “T” unless it’s in the beginning of a word. Sometimes who syllables get lost I’ve lived in “Sacremenno”, “San-eh Crooz” and “Oaklen”. I speak quite fast, but with a twang.

Honestly I get asked “where are you from?” a lot- my accent is pretty extreme. But I’ve known a lot of Sacramentans who speak like me.

[Marley23]

@Brain Wreck

I’ve wondered the same thing. I mean… the Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Rick Springfield, U2… when they sing, there’s no trace of their native accents.

Gotta disagree about the Stones, at least. I don’t know what kind of accent Mick is supposed to have, but he doesn’t sound American. And that’s not just when he does his awful ‘fake Southern’ voice, either.

As far as British bands sounding American goes, imitation is a factor, but it’s also true that singing forces you to change the way you pronounce certain sounds. If Britons lose their accents when singing, I think a lot of Americans do, too.

[Sleel]

Yes, we do. I say “we” because I was born and raised in northern California.

1) When people sing (well) they sound like West Coast Americans. This is regardless of how heavy their accent is in speaking. For an example would be the songs in the movie The Commitments.

I haven’t seen that movie, but with regard to singing, there are some vast differences between singing and speaking. Many of the vowel differences are lessened due to deliberately affected pronunciations (and sometimes really strained rhymes), elongated vowels, and the mechanics of singing. One of my friends was a vocal major and the drills he did for singing were incredible. If you’re trained operatically, you learn to manipulate every, and I mean every, part of your vocal apparatus. Those who are less trained will naturally fall into certain ways of producing the sounds because it produces less strain and is more understandable by most people.

2) An Australian friend talking with my mom said that he was softening his accent while in the US so he could be more easily understood. Further, he said that it was actual easier talking that way.

I can believe he was softening his accent to make himself understood more easily. If you went to Australia, depending on their amount of contact with American accents, you might have to affect a slight Australian accent to make yourself understood. I don’t know if it is easier talking with a west coast accent or not since that’s my native dialect. I do know that saying, “Dunno,” with an Australian drawl is a lot easier than saying, “I don’t know.” Doesn’t prove anything one way or the other though.

3) As a West Coaster, I couldn’t “soften” or “lay on” the accent. I can’t even begin to think how I could try to do so. While as I can perfectly well think of how to do so with any other accent I can do myself.

Of course you can’t “soften” it, you obviously don’t know what it is about the way you speak that makes your speech distinct. For the same reason, you can’t exaggerate it.

4) There is no “regional accents.” I couldn’t tell you if a person came from LA or Oregon, let alone which area of town he was born and raised in. The closest I have ever experienced was when I called the big interstate freeway “The Five” rather than “The I Five”, which is a dialect issue rather than one of accent.

And I would say that this probably means that you’re from southern California because unless northerners have been picking up more regionalisms since I’ve been out of the country than I’ve been aware of so far, someone from the Sacramento/Stockton area would say, “take 5” or “take I5.” Adding a “the” before a freeway/highway is a southern California thing. They also use words and phrases normally reserved for people when describing the roads: “The 5 was being a total bitch today. I couldn’t even get to my exit for, like, 20 minutes.”

A roommate when I was living in San Diego referred to Coke, 7-Up, Mountain Dew, etc. as “pop.” He lived about an hour south of Seattle. I can tell if someone is from Oregon or Washington within a minute or two, usually. There are some differences in speech patterns between the Bay Area and the Central Valley that are pretty subtle unless you’re from the area, but that do exist. I can almost certainly tell if someone’s from farther south than Fresno, and there are differences in the LA area between many of the different cities. Ask someone from West Covina if they can tell the difference between the way someone from from Burbank and Fontana sounds. I’ll bet there’s probably a difference, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t catch it as I’m not a native Angelino.

You probably just don’t listen to the differences very well, or don’t have the right aptitudes for picking up on them. Nothing wrong with that. Most musicians don’t have perfect pitch, but they can still play. You’re not a linguist, so you’re untrained in listening for the difference. Without a natural gift similar to perfect pitch, training to hear the difference, or a strong interest in dialects, you’ll probably miss most of the subtleties. That doesn’t mean they’re not there.

For the record, I pronounce “king” with a more lax vowel than I do “keen,” which is definitely a tense vowel. There is a distinct difference to me. The other minimal pairs hold up pretty well though.

[roger_thornhill]

@brian_ax

I certainly agree that their singing accents often are not as strong as their speaking, accents, especially with their earlier, bluesier songs.

But The Beatles sang with an accent. Grab a lyrics sheet and sing along with some of your favorite Beatles songs…you’ll find you pronounce words differently than you usually do.

Unless yer from Liverpool

Her, her!

I haven’t done a systematic linguistic study of this, but just the other day I was listening with my 10 year-old Beatles fan (thank god we’ve weaned her off Westlife) to the Yellow Submarine album. It’s notable how many songs/parts of songs are deliberately sung in Scouse. I’m at work, so can’t check, but “Altogether Now” comes to mind as one, and there are many more in the canon. A game I play with Natalie is to get her to guess who’s singing each song. With tips (e.g. if the song has a very narrow range it might be Ringo, if it’s a weird song it might be John, if there’s a strong Scouse accent it might be Ringo or John) it can make it more fun and even educational!

[Sage_Rat]

@mhendo

Plenty of artists from other countries sing with recognizable (non-American) national or regional accents, and their singing sounds just fine.

But if I listen to music prior to the 1960s, will all singing be in the regional accent?

If you want confirmation that someone who grew up speaking with a different accent will find it easier to speak West Coast American than their regular accent, then i most definitely disagree. In fact, it staggers me that you would even entertain the question.

Given that I’ve only ever heard one person comment on it until just now, I don’t know why I shouldn’t entertain it. So at current we’re 1 to 1.

The notion that a person has spent their whole life speaking with a perfectly natural (for them) accent, and then says that they find it easier to just switch to West Coast American is, to my mind, patently absurd.

Absurd or not, if there’s only ever been one study, and the one person in that study went against what is “absurd” then–well you’ve got a pretty data-lacking study, but it’s still all there is to go on until you can do a study where you can get more answers than “1.” At current, we’re to 2.

And as for the title of the thread, I think it’s been well and truly established that, yes, West Coast Americans do, in fact, have an accent.

You can certainly distinguish zero from other numbers, that still doesn’t mean it has a value.

I am certainly fine with there being an “affected pitch” in the Standard American Accent rather than “no added affected pitch”, I would just rather scientifically prove it one way or the other.

[Sage_Rat]

@Sleel

You probably just don’t listen to the differences very well, or don’t have the right aptitudes for picking up on them. Nothing wrong with that. Most musicians don’t have perfect pitch, but they can still play. You’re not a linguist, so you’re untrained in listening for the difference. Without a natural gift similar to perfect pitch, training to hear the difference, or a strong interest in dialects, you’ll probably miss most of the subtleties. That doesn’t mean they’re not there.

That is always possible. I just don’t find it very likely given that 1) I am a good singer, and 2) my British-national drama teacher found my proper and cockney British, North Irish, and Scottish accents all to be spot on (though most probably conglomerates.) Similarly I can do Australian, various Southerner (though I’m not actually sure where they equate to geographically), and Black Preacher accents (i.e. Martin Luther King Jr. style)–though all of these last haven’t been verified. So given that I can intone them all fine (and I have no fear that if I spent enough time with a particular individual that I could get it locked to a specific locale), I’m doubting that my hearing is the issue.

[Sage_Rat]

@Marley23

As far as British bands sounding American goes, imitation is a factor, but it’s also true that singing forces you to change the way you pronounce certain sounds. If Britons lose their accents when singing, I think a lot of Americans do, too.

Indeed. I’m listening to John Lee Hooker play right now. And while I know he’s from Texas, just to go from his singing I would have no idea that he was (except perhaps through regionalisms.) Though I’ve never heard him talking so he may be a bad example.

[Sage_Rat]

@Interrobang!?

At least one native Seattle linguist has argued that the Pacific Northwest is a distinct dialect region. Distinct elements of the northwest accent, per the Seattle PI article:
[ul]
[li]Creaky Voice: Many locals, especially women, use it[/li][li]Strong ‘S’: We really like to emphasize the S. Listen[/li][li]Low-back merger: Say “caught” and “cot” out loud. If you’re a true Northwest speaker, the words will sound identical. [/li][li]Fronting the vowel: They do this in California, with words such as move.[/li][/ul] I’m not a native, myself, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy.

Well, a) I grew up in California and pronounce caught and cot the same, and b) these are all examples of pronunciation rather than “pitch” as I intended “accent” to mean. Assuming now that “pitch” is the right word.

[Johanna]

@Sage Rat

Well, I answered the question on accent vs. dialect in the above post. As said, given it may be the wrong word, but in common usage where I grew up at least I can say that accent is generally used to refer to a sound not pronunciation. If that isn’t the technical word, then I am quite willing to swap it out with the correct one once it is figured out what the hell bit of linguistics I intended instead.

My view of this as a descriptive, not a prescriptive, linguist: Sage Rat described h/h* take on accents and dialects as well as s/h** might given the origin of h/h idiolect and absence of formal linguistic study. Since linguists already admit that we don’t use “dialect” in any rigorously meaningful sense, that leaves it open for laypeople to use according to commonly understood meanings. Linguists can’t have it both ways: if we say we do not use the word dialect, then we don’t have any sort of claim to it and oughtn’t squawk when laypeople go on using it as they always have.

*her/his
**she/he

[Leaffan]

@RickJay

(For fun, oif you ever meet an Ontarian who claims they don’t have an accent, ask them to read a sentence with the word “During” and then ask them where the J came from.)

I know exactly where it came from: Scotland. Scottish stone masons of the 19th century built a lot of the mills and bridges in Rural Ontario.

[Excalibre]

@Johanna

My view of this as a descriptive, not a prescriptive, linguist: Sage Rat described h/h* take on accents and dialects as well as s/h** might given the origin of h/h idiolect and absence of formal linguistic study. Since linguists already admit that we don’t use “dialect” in any rigorously meaningful sense, that leaves it open for laypeople to use according to commonly understood meanings. Linguists can’t have it both ways: if we say we do not use the word dialect, then we don’t have any sort of claim to it and oughtn’t squawk when laypeople go on using it as they always have.

*her/his
**she/he

I have yet to hear a linguist admit such a thing.

[Johanna]

Excalibre, why are you making me go and look this up? You read and contribute to the linguistics threads as much as I, if not more so. And although I thanked you above, I’m not sure I fully deserve the compliment you paid me. Your overall competemce in tackling linguistic topics is a match for mine; if I know more about some areas, you know more about others.

sci.lang FAQ: “Because of such problems, some linguists reject the mutual intelligibility criterion; but they do not propose to return to arguments on political and cultural grounds. Instead, they prefer not to speak of dialects and languages at all, but only of different varieties, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.”

John Mace: “The term ‘dialect’ is not a scientific term, and the dividing line between an accent, a dialect, and a language can be political more than anything else.”

Wendell Wagner: This is one of the problems in trying to answer the question “How many languages are currently in existence?”, that it’s quite a bit harder than you might think to distinguish between a language and a dialect."

Wiki say: “There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, although a number of paradigms exist, which render sometimes contradictory results. The exact distinction is therefore a subjective one, dependent on the user’s frame of reference.” And:“There is no defined line between a language and a dialect.”

Terralingua:“There are no linguistic criteria for differentiating between a language and a dialect (or vernacular or patois).”

Zompist boards: “Most of the linguists I know don’t really care about the distinction. They recognise that this is a question without a scientific answer and they don’t sweat the distinction.” And: “language and dialect are both concepts that are too fuzzy for actually trying to use with a scientific defination.” [sic] And: “Bottom line is that there is no non-arbitrary way of separating the fuzzy levels of idiolect/register/variety/dialect/language. Which is why using these terms scientifically is not fruitful. When (good) linguists refer to a particular language as object of their study they don’t usually use these terms without defining them: the variety of language x spoken by old women in village x, or standard written x, or classical x, etc.”

I didn’t say “dialect” has no meaning at all for linguists, I said the word has no scientifically rigorously defined meaning, as the above quotes illustrate. As illustrated by the so-called language status of mutually intelligible Norwegian/Danish/Swedish vs. the so-called dialect status of mutually unintelligible Mandarin/Hokkien/Cantonese.

@Wikipedia

there are many apparent “dialects” of Slavey, for example, geographically widespread North American indigenous languages, by which the linguist simply means that there are many subtle variations among speakers who largely understand each other and recognize that they are each speaking “the same way” in a general sense.

I have no problem using the word in this fuzzy sense and recognize its legitimate use by linguists. Search my posts on linguistics, I’ve used the word many times–in such a fuzzy sense. Plush, even.

For Sage Rat–does this help?–“Accent refers only to distinctive pronunciation, whereas dialect refers to grammar and vocabulary as well.”
–David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p. 24.

[Excalibre]

@Johanna

Excalibre, why are you making me go and look this up? You read and contribute to the linguistics threads as much as I, if not more so. And although I thanked you above, I’m not sure I fully deserve the compliment you paid me. Your overall competemce in tackling linguistic topics is a match for mine; if I know more about some areas, you know more about others.

sci.lang FAQ: “Because of such problems, some linguists reject the mutual intelligibility criterion; but they do not propose to return to arguments on political and cultural grounds. Instead, they prefer not to speak of dialects and languages at all, but only of different varieties, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.”

I would agree if you said that dialect can’t be rigorously defined, but it’s simply not my experience that linguistics doesn’t use the term. “Some” is, I think, the operative word in the above quote. It’s a particularly relevant question when you’re comparing, say, “Galician” and “Portuguese”, where the choice between the terms “dialect” and “language” is a matter of political import and is not clearly answerable from the linguistic data. But that doesn’t mean that a situation like this one - in which the variety is quite clearly not a language - wouldn’t be described by a linguist as a “dialect”. I simply don’t think that’s accurate, and my linguistics professors and books I’ve read (those that touch on the subject at least) have certainly used the word “dialect”.

Note that all the examples you found were in reference to the question of “dialect” versus “language”, which is not at issue here. And using “dialect” in this discussion probably is useful, to whatever extent this discussion is useful at all (since Sage Rat still seems to be clinging to his nonsense about some people “not having an accent”.)

I’m not trying to screw around with you here; I simply am quite used to using the term “dialect” in linguistics and your statement struck me as odd.

[FlyingRamenMonster]

My friends think the default accent is British for much the same reasons you stated. I should show them this thread.

[Johanna]

@Excalibre

I would agree if you said that dialect can’t be rigorously defined, but it’s simply not my experience that linguistics doesn’t use the term.

Ah, I see the source of the apparent misunderstanding. Linguists certainly use the word a lot, especially in the subfield of dialectology. I agree with you on that. My point was that linguists can’t claim it as a term of art owned exclusively by linguists the way say “dark matter” is a term owned by cosmologists.

If somebody posts in MPSIMS, “Hey, I think I have ‘dark matter’ in the basement behind the water heater” - there will be replies like “LOL! Girl, I think the dark matter is fillin up your head.”

But if someone posts that in a GD or GQ thread on cosmology, our physicists will chew their ass. Quite rightly.

@Johanma

Your overall competemce in tackling linguistic topics is a match for mine

If you lift this as a sig line, please do me a favor and correct my spelling.

[Excalibre]

@Johanna

If you lift this as a sig line, please do me a favor and correct my spelling.

Actually, if I do, I’ll just add this quote to the end of it.

[Raguleader]

Just jumping in here, sorry if I repeat anything someone said earleir.

When I need to conjure up my interpretatio of “Normal” English, I just assume it’s similar to how Lieutenant Kennedy speaks in the Horatio Hornblower movies. What I consider “Accentless” English, however, is how the same actor portrays Captain Adama on BattleStar Galactica (amazing how having an English accent and squashing the accent is the difference between him seeing jolly/carefree and him seeming like an arrogant ass )