Of course with TV and a lot more migration you have a lot more “designer dialects” than ever.
I currently live in an area of Georgia with a very specific regional accent at one time but the explosion of Atlanta’s exurbs, cable, and a massive increase in the Spanish speaking population about twenty years ago has made a fascinating new series of dialects for the teenagers and 20-somethings I’ve heard. It reminds me almost of the Chinese-English mashups in Firefly.
This is very interesting and seems like it will be helpful to some fun research I’ve been doing. I’ve been on a quest recently to figure out how I ended up with such a strange accent compared to my parents when all of us were raised in NYC. Most notably my pronunciation of “crayon” as “cran.”
This is wonderful. I remember studying dialectology amid lamentations that the snaffletree/whiffletree isogloss was losing significance and soon we’d all be speaking network English.
This is wonderful. I remember studying dialectology amid lamentations that the snaffletree/whiffletree isogloss was losing significance and soon we’d all be speaking network English.
I listened to a bunch from AL and the closest I could get to anything that sounded familiar was from Jackson county which is at the other end of the state. The one from Elba which was the closest geographically may as well have been from Mars. But that guy was obviously a lot older (1908-1987). It’s hard to imagine that making a huge difference but I guess it does.
It was so long ago now I can’t be sure although I’ve spoken with people on the phone as recently as several years ago and I recall there being a range of accents. But then not all of them were necessarily born and raised where I was.
My brother lives about 30 miles from Elba, and while he sounds (and looks) like Bill Clinton his kids, who unlike him were born/grew up in the area, have a similar accent to that.
My own accent is usually described as more Midwestern, which is odd since I grew up in central Alabama hill country. I attribute it to watching a LOT of television when I was a kid.
I find it interesting that my DC home is part of the Midlands, especially the way that Midlands snakes its way across the US squeezed between its neighbors. As an undergrad in North Carolina, people told me that I had “No accent.” Apparently, I sounded like newscasters and other “regular” people on tv.
I also notice that the Chesapeake Islands were given proper distinction. I remember camping with a kid from Tangiers Island. At one point, he exclaimed, “Oh no! My marshmallow fell in the foyer!” To which we responded, “Oh no Sam! now Mr Frodo won’t get his smore!”
This is quite nifty, especially for a mimic like me. I like the specific word distinctions on the map. That conveys key information a lot more directly than a simple chart.
The New Orleans inset supports something I’ve tried to explain many times to people over the years–that a N.O. accent has next to nothing to do with a Cajun one. The characteristic N.O. “city” accent is more like Bronx, I’d say, and the inset tags it as “Greater NYC”. (I understand that there really isn’t much, if any, actual dialect difference between the GNYC boroughs, but I still think of it that way.)
My girlfriend (from South NJ) was mocking a Bostonian’s two-syllable pronunciation of “crayon” – which is the only pronunciation I (Brooklynite) had ever used, or even heard.
I’m puzzled by many of the chart’s entries for the SF Bay Area; over and over it says “On = Don, not Dawn.” I live in this area, and I don’t see how both can be true.
Thanks for posting that, it was really interesting!
I listened to the one guy they had for where I am from (Buffalo). At first, I thought he had no accent at all (which, of course, is telling in and of itself). What I then realized is that he’s a lot more educated than most people I know (er, mostly because I’m related to them) who speak with a strong Buffalo region accent, so some of the things I associate with that accent are also reflective of more colloquial speech. I was a little surprised that there weren’t many recordings from that area, because my understanding is that the Great Lakes region is an area of high interest in linguistics now, because the accent is in a strong shift pattern at the moment.
In early studies of language patterns, researchers tended to focus on vocabulary, but eventually realized that vocabulary was too fluid. The pronunciations of different sounds was more stable and therefore a more reliable way to study regional accents.
However, in those early years, researchers thought that there was a significant difference in vocabulary between (I think) New England and more southern parts of the eastern seaboard, which was easily tracked by the usage of “snaffletree” and “whiffletree,” which are different words for the same part of a horse-drawn cart (I think the long pole that sticks out from the cart and the horses are hooked up to). The dividing line between the two areas was called an isogloss (“iso-” meaning dividing and “gloss” meaning vocabulary).
The is-/iso- prefix actually means ‘same’, ‘equal’, ‘uniform’ - as in isosceles triangle, which has 2 sides that are the same length. Which honestly makes the etymology pretty puzzling and easy to see why it’s so tempting to break it down that way.
What really baffles me is that “On”, “Dawn” and “Don” all rhyme. I don’t get the distinction at all. The YouTube links are really long videos. How is one supposed to find someone pronouncing just the selected words?
Looking around the chart, it’s pretty clear that it’s a random mishmash of dialects and not really all that refined or thorough.
There are apparently three places of note in Oregon: Portland, Molalla, and Eugene. Molalla? A Portland suburb of 8k people? That strongly suggests that someone is having fun.
