And for that matter, a St. Louis accent is different from a Kansas City accent, which is different from an Ozark (southwest) accent, which is different from an Ozark (southeast) accent…
USAans, have you ever had the problem of not being able to understand a fellow USAan? I don’t mean an immigrant with a really thick, say, Spanish accent. I mean a native speaker. Ever happen to you?
There have been times when I simply could not understand West Texans. I also sometimes have trouble with Ebonics.
I’ve got relatives from northern Maine that I can barely understand, and that’s only about 200 miles from where I grew up.
I have had trouble understanding quite a few African American women when I stopped in Wilmington to ask for directions. I could understand most people although I had to pay closer attention than I would back in Virginia.
I noticed a distinct difference between Cleveland and Columbus accents when I visited friends in both places. Columbus had to my ears a more Southern twang. Main thing I noticed in Cleveland was they say “gad” instead of “god”, “tam” instead of “tom” etc.
Here in California it’s pretty mainstream, but there are still differences. The most obvious is Southern CA, but people say things differently, sometimes just little things. For some reason here in my city locals pronouce “almond” as aa-mond–it’s a major crop here so people say it a lot. You can tell who was born here and who wasn’t from that, though my gardening-mad mother has picked it up after 15 years here.
This is what I’d call a “Cleveland accent” but you don’t really find it too much except in older folks and people “from the neighborhood.” It’s sort of a toned-down Chicago.
Don’t forget Pittsburgh with their weird accents, y’ouns. Actually I’d assume it’s all of Western PA because it definitely creeps into Youngstown.
I haven’t heard Yankovic’s accent among younger people, but as An Gadai notes, there still is a Cleveland accent that’s distinctive from the rest of Ohio.
[del]But Weird Al isn’t from[/del]
Never mind.
When I first moved to Georgia from North Florida, I had trouble with the most extreme Southern accents. Even though North Florida is pretty Southern and my mama’s from Alabama. I actually had a guy call up and ask for “wrasslin’” tickets in such an indescipherable accent, another employee had to get on the phone and tell me what he meant.
When I ran a record store in Atlanta, sometimes the young African-American men woudl be hard to understand but they were mostly doing it on purpose to be annoying.
Oh sure. One time I was at JFK airport, riding around in a shuttle bus, and a woman was talking to the driver in a Noo Yawk accent so thick that even he couldn’t understand her at first.
(A few years later I was in NYC again and attended Mass with our host. It was celebrated by a priest who sounded like he was from the Godfather or something. “Pees be wit’yoo.” It was very unexpected for us California folks, and pretty funny.)
I’ve lived in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Tennessee. They all sound different. When I first moved to TN and would be talking to the old (white) guy that cleaned stalls at the boarding stable where I kept my horse, I’d occassionally have to ask him to spell a word, because I just couldn’t understand it. And too, sometimes he used horse terms that were different down here than anywhere else I’d lived.
StG
That’s pretty funny! Did he preceed it with “ayyyy!”?
That reminds me of that Brett Butler joke in which she immitates a guy from Brooklyn saying (and you have to say this in a Brooklyn accent) “I’d hate to be from the south, ‘cause people from the south sound so freakin’ stupid!”
Once, on hour 20 of a straight-thru drive to Florida from Michigan we stopped deep in Georgia for dinner. Unfortunately for our tired brains, the workers spoke a combination of Ebonics and deep southern accent. I usually have no trouble understanding accents, but I had no freaking clue what they were saying. Neither did anyone else in my family, actually. I’ve got no clue how we ended up with edible food. They might have very well asked us if we wanted super-death-hot-chile peppers on our food, and we would have said yes.
I’ve always suspected those of us in the northwest do not have any sort of distinct accent, and given the number of posts in this thread thus far giving nary a mention of Washington, Oregon or Idaho or other states in the region, this corroborates my suspicions. Could you people from other parts of the U.S. identify us as being from the northwest just from listening to how we talk, or are we too bland or neutral-sounding? You never hear anyone say, “he has a northwestern accent”, and nobody has ever said, “You sound like you’re from Idaho” to me. As I work in a call center that takes calls from all around the country, which of course exposes me to various regional accents, not one person in over two years has ever commented on my accent (or lack thereof) as an indication of my location.
Not to me, but I’ve seen it happen. Been the cause of misunderstanding, too. I fade between eastern Kentucky and northern Ohio, depending on my surroundings. I pronounce “pen” and “pin” the same way, for example–which caused confusion in a guy from NYC. I took my husband to meet family in Kentucky, and a friend of the family with a really nasally Kentucky accent came over and was talking to my grandpa, and my husband (from Colorado) couldn’t understand a word. When I talk to my mom on the phone, I start getting animated in a Kentucky accent and he laughs and can barely understand me. That’s just accents. There are plenty of phrases and words unique to dialects that I’ve seen misunderstood or mean different things. For example, to me “on the up and up” means honest, above board, and generally not skeevy. I’ve had at least 4 people tell me that phrase means “things are improving.” So there are those two avenues of misuderstanding. When someone you don’t understand is speaking a phrase you wouldn’t use the same way even if you could understand the words, you’re in trouble.
As far as the number of dialects, I agree that there are more accents than dialects. I’ve personally noticed these differences in American speech, but I don’t know what to call them:
New England (includes the northern of the 13 colonies, north of Virginia, minus New York. sub: Boston, others I’m not sure about) Very soft, seem to leave out harsh consonants
Upstate NY: kind of a split between midwestern and new england, with the occasional affectation of NYC phrases.
NYC: lots of diffeent accents, obviously. Brooklyn is distinctive, as well as a nasally accent I cannnot place.
New Jersey: kind of like NYC
Pennsylvania: influenced by “pennsylvania dutch” and slight Southeastern. “Round” vowels, slight drawl in some places
Southeastern: Includes Kentucky, West Virginia, west part of Virginia, and northern Tennesee. Sharper, more nasal than deep south, lots of what English teachers like to call “local color” but really means bizarre phrases outsiders take a minute to understand. Vowels are long and are either drawled or whined, depending on the accent.
Deep South: southern Virginia and Tennesee to Northern Florida. As far west as the Mississippi River. Not nasal at all. Very soft and almost boisterous. I think of FogHorn LegHorn when I hear it.
Midwestern: Includes northern Pennsylvania, Northern Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and probably as far west as Kansas and Nebraska. This one seems the largest and the most “generic American” accent, but has sub-sections, too, like Wisconson, which always sounds to me like someone’s trying to talk while holding their mouth as still as possilble. Reminds me of cheese. Honestly. There’s also Northern Ohio and Southern Ohio, and Chicago, as has been mentioned.
Louisiana: Cajun is unique, and I’m not sure if there are other accents in the state
Texas: must have its own category, of course.
California: includes Valley Girl, Surfer Dude, and I assume other accents I don’t know about.
The other areas, I don’t have any idea, but I’m sure there are differences. That’s just differences I’ve noticed. Here’s the wikipedia page on American English: American English - Wikipedia which I’m off to read, myself.
What’s funny is I know a married couple from Brooklyn. He speaks with a perfectly neutral/non accent. She has a really bad accent. When she says “four”, it has two distinct syllables, neither of which contains the letter R.
And many New Orleansians sound far more like many New Yorkers than they do people from northern Louisiana due to the similar ethnic mix (Irish/Italian/WASP/Black/Latino; most Southern regions only had large WASP and Black populations until the past few decades).
The accents of Gulf Coast residents from Florida panhandle to Texas often resemble those of other Gulf Coast residents from hundreds of miles away more than they do the people who live 40 miles away in their own state. A major reason is that these regions were settled en masse much later (true, some families go back 3 centuries on the coast, but probably 99% are people who came or whose family came there in the later 20th century) and often by non southerners.
The huge migration of northerners into Florida and other southern states (retirees and military and company relocation) has softened the southern accent in many places. In some (socioeconomically) upper crust private schools in Alabama and Atlanta students with thick southern are rare and even mocked.
I have very little “regional” accent of any kind and the same is true of most of my friends even though we’re all born/bred/umpteenth generation southerners/Alabamians. None of us consciously worked to get rid of southern accents- we just never had them. I attribute a lot of this to television, because most of us grew up in rural areas and TV [and before then radio] were like family altars in rural areas. A study I read once in a history journal stated that in the mid 1950s more farmers per-capita owned TV sets than urbanites of the same income range, and the same was true of radios 30 years before when they were selling for more than most families earned in a month.
You still hear many different types of southern accents, but the “American Generic” is becoming increasingly common among the post TV era middle class.
If you’re talking about uptalk (valspeak), it’s spread across the country now, and I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a “dialect.” (And I’m pretty sure the valley girls got the uptalk from the surfers, when they crossed over the hills to Malibu during their summer vacations.)
It’s very difficult to determine what exactly is a dialect is in the U.S. because it’s a highly mobile country, and California in particular is a hub where people from other places come, and then go off to somewhere else.
I used to live near the city of Cordele, Georgia, “Watermelon Capital of the World”. I started researching the area because I heard accents there I’d never heard in the south and too many to attribute to just “hmmm, ya ain’t from 'round hyeah are ya?” loners.
What’s now Cordele was a tiny crossroads town with a couple of huge plantations at the end of the Civil War. When Sherman took Atlanta and then Milledgeville (which was then the capital), many of the legislators fled to what’s now Cordele as there was a train depot there and it was far away from Sherman’s expected route (though fairly close to Andersonville- about 30 miles or so) and they took their house slaves with them.
House slaves tended to speak with better English and be a bit more informed than field slaves for obvious reasons, and when the war ended many of the legislators, left bankrupt by the War and the slaves being free, just left their house slaves in Cordele to farm or otherwise exist. (Contrary to popular notions, house slaves were often more anti-white than the field slaves because they lived around the white family and often of course were members, so many chose not to work for their former masters after freedom.) After the war the area became an almost all black community of former field slaves and these house slaves, and the house slaves often provided the merchants/preachers/etc., to the community and there became two sets of black families- the small “elite” and the workers- and they had different speech patterns.
Okay, then came a huge northern migration to the area- a little late for Carpetbaggers, but more northerners fleeing cold weather/seeking economic opportunity in the turpentine/timber/kaelin/peach orchards/coastal railroads running through that part of Georgia, and so soon there were hundreds of northerners in the area (from different regions of the north). The city became a more major railroad nexis (it was in fact named Cordele after the daughter of a railroad executive in part to court the railroad’s interest in the area- common trick throughout the nation). As the town grew and the cotton and peach crops failed, lots of south Georgians gradually moved to town for jobs.
Most of the black population literally lived on the opposite side of the railroad tracks from the white community, and the white community was divided by one of the streets in the town from the native Georgians and the northern emigrants, and the black section was divided by socioeconomic lines from the professionals/storekeepers (who tended to overenunciate) and the field/factory/kaelin mine workers (who had “lower class” accents). It was a majorly segregated town several different ways- northerners (even their second and third generation descendants) didn’t mingle too much with southerners, none mingled more than they had to with blacks, and blacks had their own castes.
Today the trains rarely run but it’s become a major Interstate town (which is what river towns used to be) with lots more restaurants and hotels than most small cities would have as a vital part of the economy (they’re basically an oasis for travellers on I-75). This one little town that today has about 12,000 residents has a to this day a ton of different accents. Go into a restaurant and you may hear accents that sound like a midwesterner or even New Yorker by one employee, a deep Georgia drawl by another, and a ministerial cadence by one black employee answered by a more ebonics/ghetto dialect from another- it’s just a fascinating microcosm.
Though thereagain, you also get a lot of American Generic. Almost disappointing in a way.