Dayton, Ohio! Woo-hoo! Of course, her accent doesn’t sound Daytonian at all. Though, so far as I can tell, there isn’t one single Dayton accent, that nasal whine is much more associated with Cleveland and Toledo.
Which also exists in American English, in places such as the aforementioned. Day’nah-high-ah.
The only accenta that strike me as being characteristically Californian are the “surf’s up duuuude” and the “omigaaaad!” ones.
A matter of some controversy in Scottish tourism circles! .
I’m not sure I agree with this. I would agree that to one’s own ears, any speech patterns or pronounciations that differ from their own would be perceived as an accent. But, are you saying their is no actual “proper” way to prounounce words as dictated by the laws of phonetics? I don’t mean proper in terms of acceptable, but in terms of correct as per the constructs of the language.
Sorry, I know I’m not explaining very well. I’m just not grasping the idea that there isn’t a pure (for lack of a better term) form of American English and therefore a region that comes closer than others to speaking it.
Exactly.
The laws of phonetics? Youwha?
Linguistically speaking, you could theoretically define a “Standard” American English accent or a “General” American English accent, but “pure” is a judgment and has no empirical basis, unless all you are using to mean is a relative “distance” from a standard.
Whom are you going to look to for an example of a “pure” version? The science of language does not look to authority or prestige to determine “correctness.” A “standard” is the one that is supported by institutions, but in the United States it’s a lot easier to find a standard with respect to grammar and vocabulary than it is to find one with respect to accent.
To a large extent, the accents you perceive as being “pure” are not as alike as you think.
Okay, let’s use the term " standard " then. While I want to explain myself, I don’t want to get bogged down in semantics, but I’ll try again.
When looking up a word in the dictionary, that word is spelled out phonetically to illustrate how the word is pronounced. Doesn’t that mean that their is indeed a “correct” way to say a word? Certain letters and combinations thereof are meant to sound a certain way, no? So, if you look up the definition of “forever” you will be shown that it ends with a hard “rr” sound (sorry, don’t know the technical term for this. I assume you know what I’m trying to say), but since you’re a native of Brooklyn, you pronounce it “foreva”. You are not pronouncing it the “standard” way, as you are omitting the “rr” sound.
Does that make any more sense?
I think this is highly debatable. I grew up in California, and my father did most of his growing up here, too, so I guess you could say my roots here run deep, at least by California standards.
A TV broadcast or concerted organizational effort is not a “PROH-grum”, and a fully grown human being is not an “AH-dult”, but both those pronunciations are standard “medi-ese”.
For me, accenting the second syllable of ‘adult’, and fully pronouncing both syllables of ‘program’ has always sounded more natural.
No, it means that this is the pronunciation that the dictionary compilers have observed. There very well might be significant minorities that pronounce it differently. If one of those minorities is large enough, it might warrant an “alternative” or “second” listing.
“Meant to”? By whom? The alphabet was not handed down by a linguistic creator god who intended the individual letters to be pronounced a certain way. Most Western European languages use variations of the Roman alphabet. Have you looked at the variety of the ways letters are pronounced? They are often not pronounced in ways that ancient Romans “intended.” And how did the standards for modern languages develop? Essentially, from people who started to violate the “standards” of their own time?
Many accents are not “standard.” That merely means that the person in question is not using a “standard accent,” but rather a “nonstandard” accent. What more do you want to derive from this description? Maybe the Brooklinite’s accent will someday become so popular that it will become the de facto standard. Or maybe Brooklyn will become an independent nation-state whose government then defines the Brooklyn accent as the “standard” one to be taught in schools. Who will be “pure” or “incorrect” then?
These strike me as sounding Canadian rather than anchorese.
Isn’t that a bit strong? There are combined entries for the words in the OED. The OED also says of the verb “The now more common form shit is influenced by the pa. pple. or the related n.”
Arkansans. 
You might think that “t”, say, has a standard pronunciation. After all, the dictionary uses the letter to indicate something, right? Well, it doesn’t but is pronounced differently in different places and there is no one to say one of them is standard and the other isn’t. They differ chiefly in the point of articulation, which can be anywhere from the roof of the mount (along the ridge) to the back of the teeth. They all sound alike, you say? Then explain why there is a consistency among them in any one region.
The “l” is even worse as there are two very different pronunciations. I once read in a phonetics book something like, “The `l’ is a lateral in all varieties of English.” Not in my dialect. More precisely, the first “l” in “lateral” is lateral and the last one isn’t. I believe that is standard in American English, most dialects, anyway. A woman I know who emigrated from Italy at age 11 and speaks nearly unaccented English (that is to say, not Italian accented) says “lateral” with two lateral "l"s.
Then there are vowels. I am given to understand that in most dialects of English, “bad” rhymes with “sad”. Not in mine, where the first has a tense “a” and the second is lax. Similarly with “can” (what you put peas in) and “can” (modal) and the unstressed version of the latter “cn” is still a third possibility.
All the listing in a dictionary can tell you is that “bet” has the same version of “e” as "get, but cannot tell you what that is. So it basically extends your accent from familiar to less familiar words.
I think of the English of nework radio broadcasters as standard, but I don’t think it is anybody’s actual dialect.
That’s not unique to NH. Most Americans, I believe, would say something closer to “twenny” than “twenty” when speaking quickly and informally (I think you heard the vowel wrong, btw). We’d also tend to say “thirdy” and “fourdy”. And in NH that last one would be “fawdy”, as in then times “fo-uh”. 
Funny, that didn’t sound at all Cleveland to me, and I’m from there. It did definitely sound American, and I’d say there was at least some Appalachian influence in there, but a lot of other things, too.
On the Standard American Accent, if it exists, I can definitely tell the difference between my native Cleveland and Appalacian, or New York, or Texas or other Southern accents, but I can hear almost no difference between Cleveland, Philadelphia, Montana, or California. I’m sure that there’s a difference there, and that a trained linguist could identify it easily, but it’s subtle compared to the differences between some other American accents.
As for the glottal stop replacing consonants in the middle of words, I’ve yet to meet an American who routinely pronounces the “t” sound in the middle of “cotton”. Everyone knows it’s there, until you actually listen for it.
The accents in North-East Ulster, Counties Down and Antrim sounds Scots, even to people from other parts of Ulster.
No, it didn’t sound Cleveland to me, either. I was just commenting on that one characteristic.
I’m no trained linguist, but I would say that Philadelphia has a fairly identifiable accent. And Cleveland is a lot closer to other NCVS locations, like Buffalo and Chicago, than it is to California. And, even knowing little about accents, I’d have to say that it’d be much more natural to group Montana, California, and Cincinnati, than it would be to group them with Cleveland.
I’ve been in Cleveland a few times and to my ears Tom said by a Clevelander sounds like “Tahhm” and God sounds like “Gahhhd”.
Yes, one of the characteristics of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is that the low, back, unrounded vowel of Standard American gets pushed forward, sometimes even as far as the vowel in Standard American “cat.”
I lived in California for over 20 years, and then moved away in 2001. Two observations:
I never met anyone in that entire time in California who called it “Cali.” In fact, aside from twitspeakers (er, I mean “leetspeakers”), your post is the only place I’ve ever seen it.
These days, if you move to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, or a wide variety of other places, you do not mention you’re from California. It’s poison. All day long I listen to people gripe about “those damned Californians driving our real estate prices up” and “those damned Californians thinking they’re better than us” and “the idiots from the land of fruits and nuts” and on and on and on.
So ahem I’m not from Cali.
I don’t know what “lateral” means in this context, but I’m having trouble thinking of a way to pronounce “lateral” where the two "l"s aren’t alike.