Inspired by the GQ about the origin of the English Accent, I got to wondering about English Dialects, and then American dialects.
Looking in from the outside, The ones that come to mind at time of writing this are - New York (brooklyn), Southern (Texas etc), and the ‘everyone else’ accent.
I know there’ve got to be wider range of distinct dialects than these. For instance is there a marked difference between a Chicagian and a Californian?
Oh my. There are regional differences just in NYC. But if you’re looking only for broad differences, I’d say there are:
New England
New York
Mid-Atlantic
Southern
Texan
Cajun
Midwestern
Upstate New York
SoCal
…and that’s just for starters.
There are probably hundreds all together. Boston has a very strong and well-known one. However, the Kennedys are from Massachusetts and they have their own accent that you have probably heard. New Orleans has about 7 distinct accents according to a paper I once read. There are several Southern accents and some of these can largely be broken down by race. Chicago does have a distinctive accent that is very different than the Midwestern standard. It would not be confused by a Valley Girl California accent or most other California accents. Minnesota has a pretty funny sounding accent. I am sure we could go on and on.
Texas and true Southern are definitely different. And there’s also Lousiana which is it’s own little world. The accents in Fargo are pretty different from the rest of the country as well.
You could probably do a whole treatise on Southern accents alone. North Carolina is far different from Florida, for instance. One very noticeable difference (not from that example, BTW), is whether Rs are pronounced at the ends of words. Think of an old plantation gentleman saying “Oh Belvedere!” I’m not quite sure where that’s from, but I imagine it’s from Georgia.
Oh, lord yes. Chicago has a very distinct accent. California is mostly part of the general American mainstream. There are distinctive accents in New England (think John Kennedy), New York City (think the Costanzas on Seinfeld), Baltimore, Philadelphia (Rocky Balboa), Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Wisconsin/Minnesota. The south has its own range of accents, which I’m not so good at telling apart, but I know that there’s a distinct southeast Virginia accent, New Orleans accent, Tennessee accent, and that someone who knows can tell whether you’re from the South Carolina coast, south Georgia, or east Texas.
First, though, we’ve got to work out whether you are asking about accents or dialects. They’re not the same thing. My WAG is that there are more distinct accents in the United States than there are distinct dialects. There are some notable dialects that can be identified as being noticeably different from the general American dialect (African-American vernacular, Gullah, etc.), but I think it’s not quite as diverse.
Do you mean dialect or accent?
As far as accents go, there are dozens: Maine is different than Boston, which is different than Brooklyn, WIDT Long Island, WIDT upstate New York. And that is just the places I’ve visited in the last two months.
Then you can start getting into the bigger regional differences, i.e. North East vs South vs Upper Midwest. I could probably tell the difference between a coastal North Carolina accent and a piedmont or mountain NC, but not VA or SC from either. Picking accents out, IMHO, has a lot to do with familiarity. I’ve lived in the places I claim to be able to differentiate.
I probably couldn’t tell the difference between Minneapolis and Chicago. I’m not saying they are the same, I just haven’t heard enough of the real accent to be able to tell. I’ve only heard the stuff in movies and on TV, which I’m assuming is just as inaccurate as the TV difference between Boston and Maine.
Now, some parts of the country are such a mix of people from other areas that the accents sort of mix together. I think LA and Washington DC are examples of this. That’s not to say that there is no accent for folks whose families have been there along time, it’s just harder to tell if a person you meet there is first generation or fifth, or visiting.
Now dialect is a much more delicate matter. Do we include Muffy the stereotypical Connecticut preppy as a dialect? Gangsta rap? Franglish? Spanglish? I don’t know.
There are several quite distinctive Midwestern accents, at least three broad categories:
Or don’t. I’m not sure where the Kennedys got their accent, but it is most certainly not Bostonian.
Don’t look for a good example in movies, either. Rob Morrow in Quiz Show got it wrong. Kevin Costner in 13 Days got it REALLY wrong. I think the only people to come even close were Ben and Casey Affleck in Good Will Hunting.
Well, this dude seems to break it down into 11, more or less. Wikipedia breaks a similar list down further to 25. And both of these lists don’t recognize the differences between, say, West Texas, New Orleans, and Virginia, which I would say are pretty huge differences, even to my Yankee ears. To say nothing of Northern and Southern California. And I’d say that New Yorkers are not going to be happy about sharing an accent with New Jersey.
Well, the Affleck’s are from there, so’s Matt Damon for that matter.
It’s just gonna be a case of how thin you want to slice this.
Southerners don’t all talk alike. North Carolinians don’t sound like South Carolinians and South Carolinians don’t sound like Charlestonians and Georgians don’t sound like Savann… people from Savannah.
And to me, Kansas has a very distinct accent. I can hear it. Can eeeeewwwwwweeeee?
When I moved from Iowa to Rahchester, NY, all the kids told me I talked funny.
Nevertheless, it is a New England accent and shares enough characteristics with Boston accents and other accents in that region to be reasonably labeled as a genuine New England accent.
Sure, but it’s an accent shared by a population of one family.
Affectation and accent are two entirely different things. As tdn says, no one in New England but that family sounds like that. We wouldn’t ascribe a new “accent” to Michael Jackson’s odd way of speaking, would we?
Lobsang, this site has audio files of people reading the same story in various dialects. There are several from the US.
I’d just like to repeat that regardless of the Kennedy family’s specific accent is unique (which I don’t know enough about to judge), it does share enough characteristics with other New England accents such that it is recognizable as a New England accent of some kind..
Michael Jackson’s odd way of speaking seems to be related to characteristics other than phonemes and morphemes and allophones. It’s more about his vocal characteristics than his pronunciation.
Heck, even just in Michigan you can tell someone from the Upper Peninsula from some one in the Lower Peninsula at a single listen. The Upper Peninsula tends towards a more Canadian/Minnesota type accent, while the Lower Peninsula tends toward the Midwest norm. However, even Lower Peninsula accents are different than Ohio or Indiana accents.
My thought is this: think about all the different accents in Britain. Now multiply that by at least 30, and spread them out across a much larger land mass.
There are probably hundreds of different Southern accents, depending on any number of factors (class, race, etc), and I’ll include Texas under that grouping, though Texas doesn’t like to be included in any group beyond Texas itself. I cringe at actors doing a bad “Generic Southern” accent.
I suspect the answer is thousands if you get really picky about it.
Not only is there a Chicago accent, but it’s only a Chicago accent. I was born there but grew up in the burbs. My extended family lived in the city. We have totally different accents. And to further confuse the issue, I grew up in the southern burbs and my SO grew up in the northern burbs. His family sounds way more Fargoish.