Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part One) | WIRED

new york city trenton north carolina mississippi and northern florida that's where you get this kind of blanche dubois scarlet o'hara kind of classic southern

accent

hi my name is eric singer i'm a dialect teacher today we're going to take a little

tour

of some of the different English speaking North American

accent

s now a couple of disclaimers these are by no means all North American

accents

or even all English speaking ones and not all of the ones from the same place sound the same Accents vary according to socioeconomic origin, generation, ethnicity and race and all kinds of individual factors because in a very real way the accent is identity, different people from the same place have more or less localizable

accents

and that generally also has to do with identity now in some of them. our stops We're going to look at some of the more distinctive and interesting local features, but that doesn't mean that everyone there has that accent or has it to the same degree.

I will also feature some linguists and language

expert

s from around the world. continent join me today to lend your

expert

ise in some of these areas Hi I'm Megan Figueroa Hi I'm Nicole Paz I'm Sun Michaud Hi I'm Kalina Hi I'm Amani Doran One of the things you'll notice the way is that accents often don't follow political boundaries , especially those such as state borders, will surely follow important geographical boundaries, such as mountains, but what regional accent differences primarily reflect are settlement patterns and contact with historically isolated communities such as Ocracoke Island overseas. The banks of North Carolina or the sea islands in the lowlands of Georgia can have really distinctive ways of speaking;

They have had the time and isolation necessary to diverge and develop them. That's the other thing that makes the variety of accents much more diverse. In the British Isles, for example, where there are local populations who have been speaking English in their own

part

icular way for hundreds and hundreds of years and there is more diversity of accents on the east coast of the US than west of Mississippi, it has been colonized by the English. The first places where English was spoken in North America were Roanoke Jamestown and of course Plymouth Massachusetts where the Pilgrims landed in 1620.

So let's start there, the Pilgrims spoke with what we call Rhodic accents, meaning they said all the R's, in fact, almost did. all English speakers in 1620, including those in England, that's right, a southern English accent might have sounded something like that. It was only at the end of the 18th century that fashionable young people in and around London began to let themselves down and from there the trend spread. to america now north of plymouth rock we have avedyat in one of the places where you can hear the boston accent today the stereotypical boston accents of course are not rhodic which means there are no sounds in the car parking lot and at harvard yard, let's all get in the car and head south down the coast now toward Rhode Island.

The traditional Rhode Island accents here aren't rhodic yet, but there's a key vocal difference in the placement of that gut sound in park your car. in Harvard Yard, we call this the starting valve in Boston, it usually has a nice facade, park your car in harvard yard in rhode island it's back park your car in harvard yard ah Rhode Island accents were shaped by a lot of Irish immigration and Italian just like New York City so many accents that don't vary depending on the borrowing by the way that's a myth I know they're going to tell me to forget it, but I'm sorry that sociolinguists have studied this very carefully and there really isn't a specifically Brooklyn accent, specifically Bronx accent, there are certainly a lot of different New York ones. city ​​accents, but they vary by socioeconomic background and ethnicity and other aspects of group membership and identity rather than by neighborhood or district, historically they are not rhodic, although that is changing in some of the younger generations, I'm sure here's something fun that most of them have. in common, the tip of the tongue hits or near the teeth on the td and n sounds instead of, you know, a little bit further back so you can hear that in this kind of New York City accent, the tip of the tongue in the teeth in times square, new york city and this type of new york accent 22nd street times square uh silly taxi traffic and so on, okay, so you may have noticed that all these accents that I have talked about until Now they sound pretty white.

I'm going to pause here and linguist nicole. Holiday will delve a little deeper into varieties of African American English. My colleague Amani Dorn will demonstrate some of those accents. Hi, I'm Nicole Holiday and I'm a linguist, as we know that New York has all kinds of people. African American English has many shared characteristics across regions due to its history, so black people in Africa were kidnapped and brought to what is now the United States at that time, they did not all speak the same languages, they spoke several African languages different and those languages ​​came into contact not only with each other but they also came into contact with the English spoken by the colonizers, this created a situation where there was a really unusual learning exposure to English, so all of these languages ​​are in contact with each other. others and for economic and survival reasons, enslaved people had to learn English in some way, but the English they were acquiring was not like what was learned in the classroom, it was in this really unusual acquisition situation, so some Some of the features we see in modern African American English are the result of this contact between African languages ​​and the English spoken by the colonizers, and those features have persisted for generations after slavery was legally ended.

Most African Americans remained in the South but experienced truly extreme segregation. This led to different varieties of English being spoken in black and white communities in the South and even when they moved north during the Great Migration Nicole, how did the Great Migration influence accents? The English that we see spoken today by African Americans has some features that have persisted through generations and stopped, so it might be using something like a d sound for where you see a written th, which is why you can hear that in this clip they said I could

part

icipate online they said I could they said I could they said I could participate online l vocalization so that's an l becoming a vowel in a word like pool or pull it can sound something like pull or pull you said ask cool who cool cool that's cool we also see simplification of the consonant cluster if you have a series of consonants at the end of a word you might see them turned into a single consonant so in a word like West you might hear it pronounced Does Wes, it's been a minute, but she just left, she just left, she just left and anything specific to New York is a common feature in New York City is what we call a raised vowel in words like thought and cloth sounds something like oh coffee without foam on top it's not coffee at all so let's put it together right back to eric thanks nicole and even that is just the tip of the iceberg of linguistic diversity in this incredibly diverse city about 50 New Yorkers speak other languages in addition to English at home and for half of them that language is Spanish Megan Figueroa is here to tell us a little about one of those varieties The variety linguists call New York Latin English.

New York Latin English is heavily influenced by Puerto Rican Spanish and Dominican Spanish. A notable feature of this variety is a light l, the sound you would find in a word like love leaf, so new york latin english. The speakers have a particularly light light. You can hear that in this native speaker clip. I guess growing up, I know what it's like to not have a lie. I know what it's like to not have a lie. Lying lie in contrast to light. dark l on the back of your tongue, so think of the words milk and pull the lighter.

It was a feature of New York Latin English, but Latinx people are a very diverse group of people and speak a variety of varieties, we'll get to more. of those later thanks megan and by the way this unique feature contrasts well with other new york accents because most other new york accents are pretty dark also lots of lemon pops la la i like to lick them , so now that we're leaving New York. and heading south into New Jersey and toward Philadelphia, we crossed an important dialect boundary. Now in line north of this line, most people say ahn rhymes with don south, they say it rhymes with dawn, of course this doesn't apply at all if you rhyme. dawn and dawn only if it has two different pronunciations, that's called cradle-caught fusion, but we'll talk more about that later.

There are some major dialect areas in the US and one of the biggest dividing lines is between the northern dialects and the central dialects. online basically runs along this boundary, so when we cross it somewhere around Trenton, we have crossed from the north to the Midlands dialect. Now another thing that starts to happen as we go down towards Philadelphia is that the goat diphthong starts to move forward. in the mouth, so let's go grab some hoagies, you wanna go get some hoagies, maybe even a little further down the road as we go down to baltimore, especially you know, danny, you wanna get some ocean on Wednesday, let's make a quick stop at DC where Nicole has some really interesting things about the prosody of local African American speakers in my research I study prosody which has to do with the tone and intonation of the phrase itself.

In one study I found that African American speakers may be more likely to ask yes, no, question with a level or falling tone for white speakers, we expect a rising tone in questions like these, so something like did you wash the dishes? but African American speakers are more likely to say something like, Did you wash the dishes? The feature we see in DC similar to New York is the raised thought cloth vowel that ah. This is a new feature in DC and we think it's part of a pattern of DC varieties looking more like northern cities than southern ones.

You can hear that. in this clip a change is needed, but um, edward costó, edward costó, okay, let's go back to eric, now we take a quick de

tour

towards pittsburgh. The Yids are the only people in all of North America who soften the mathematical diphthong, except perhaps in Chicago, sometimes the smoothing. is when you take a diphthong like ow and smooth it so it's just an ah sound, just like we have price smoothing and a lot of the sound, so i smooths ah price the same thing here except with the math vowel smoothed a a Sound long ass, you just want to meet Dan Tan, go shopping for catches, head back to the Delmarva Peninsula as we head towards Virginia, something different happens with the same mouth diphthong.

Here it will sound like Oh Mouth House, so it doesn't soften. here it's raisins the tongue starts a little higher uh instead of i so it's like oh oh a boat hose this feature is called tidal raisins something similar happens with this biography in Canada and there we call it Canadian raisins but it's essentially the same It's time to get out of the house, keep heading south, into North Carolina, we're actually starting to hear a pretty significant goat front again, so the vowel sound on the boat, very hopefully, starts with the tongue later in the mouth, oh, curiously, the goat front, which is now widely extended. in much of the southern United States appears to have originated in North Carolina sometime in the latter part of the 19th century.

Remember that the boundaries of regional dialects do not necessarily follow political boundaries, but rather patterns of settlement and contact between populations, so the online part of North Carolina, which is located in the Appalachian highlands, the original European settlers they were Scots Irish and Germans who moved to the southwest from Pennsylvania because they were relatively inaccessible and isolated for a long time, which is useful, it's different from the lowlands and coastal areas, the isolated speech communities are fascinating because we can get some really interesting sound patterns here, you get a really dramatic face for example, so the diphthong on the face starts very low around i i face light die, you'll also get some particular dialectal features, so the words and the word order and grammatical things that go back to those original settlers of Scotland and Northern Ireland things like hunt and efficient and additional sounds too like the r sound and warsh and the h sound and press, follow with tap, here's nicole again for talk a little aboutAfrican American Speech in Southern Appalachia Hello again, so African Americans in Appalachia are understudied primarily because Appalachian stereotypes are very, very white.

African Americans in Appalachia are more likely to be rhodical, so in words like floor, why up there on the fourth floor, fourth floor? On the floor you will get the r, while in other places you might get flow. African Americans in Appalachia also tend to follow the more general Southern pattern regarding eye monopolization. Ah, in a broad sense, it turns to i, so you widen and now the map tour continues with eric, thanks nicole, we are picking up again in North Carolina, in the Outer Banks there is an even more historically isolated community because to a change in shipping patterns in the mid-19th century and probably also by sympathizing with the northern cause in the civil war.

The war farming island was relatively isolated from the mainland for a long time, developing perhaps one of the most distinctive and different dialects in North America, forcing islanders to sometimes tell tourists, well, the tide is in. high on the healthy side last night, the waterfall, the night when the moon shines. Without fish, islanders with extra coke are sometimes called high tide because of that particularly distinctive oi sound and their accent is sometimes considered British or Australian, even for the British, truth be told, there are some similarities with some accents regional English accents, including that high toy vowel sound that is similar to both South West English accents such as Devon or Gloucestershire and East English accents such as Norfolk and Suffolk in the east and most counties of England.

England. Interestingly, another distinctive thing about the old Ocracoke accent is that it also has a kind of balance to it, something that both the southwestern and eastern English accents also have in common. North Carolina is actually one of the most linguistically diverse states in the country. I want to bring colleen newmark on now to talk about native american english. Hello, my name is kalina newmark and I am talita denney, first nations northwest territories canada. I come from a strong line of Dene and Metis leaders who are passionate about our language and cultural teachings. The Lumbee Tribe is the largest Native American tribe recognized by the state of North Carolina.

Lumbee speakers combine and pronounce English words that distinguish them from African American and Southern speakers. Since encountering white settlers in the mid-19th century, the Lumbee have forged a dialect of English that is uniquely their own. An interesting feature is that Lumbee English speakers share vowel sounds present in the Outer Banks accent where tide is pronounced. You can hear that in this native speaker clip when he got halfway through that bit on this side on this side. On this note, thanks Kalina, so the Ocracoke Island High Tide accent is an accent that is rapidly disappearing. Younger Okracokers tend to speak much more conventional American English.

There is a popular idea that we are losing regional accents and that people sound more and more similar. That's true. of some people in some places, especially in some of these isolated communities, but it's not true across the board, there are actually a lot of accent differences that become more and more distinct over time, but of course it's a panorama complex, there are parts of the south that don't have much of a southern accent. Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas, are two good examples. Many people from those two cities can be quite difficult to identify by their accents, which brings us to what is sometimes called General American.

American in general, the first thing is that it's not a single accent, it's basically a terrible term for a wide variety of accents that essentially don't have many obvious regional distinguishing characteristics. Let's talk to Son Michoa, now Sun is a native. gala speaker a fascinating and really important creole language spoken in the netherlands of carolinas, georgia and florida. Gullah is a language spoken in a region of the United States called the Galakichi Cultural Heritage Corridor that officially extends from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. Gullah is an Atlantic Creole very similar to Bohemian Creole English and Beijing Creole.

In fact, when I visited the Bahamas, there was a lot of local imathol and I have also been local, there are a variety of factors that influence the language, for example, the isolated plantations on the sea island a mixture of African languages ​​as well as the accents of lower-class English and Irish servants and slavers. European slavers were so poorly adapted to the sea island environment that they often allowed long periods of solitary time to our ancestors with little or no supervision, the slavers would not match the languages ​​to confuse them and hinder their ability to organize rebellions.

Now the scheme of this tactic was designed so that our Gala Gichi ancestors would be forced to speak English so that their overseers could be aware of their communications, but what the slavers did not predict is that this top-notch African pigeon English-based generation would become a creole, a fully mature, rule-governed language of its own, much of which remains with us today due to generations of forced segregation and eventual separation by choice. Before the construction of bridges that increased easy access from one side to the other, I will explain some distinctive features of the Guligici accent, for example, the foot vials of the kit are inverted so that the words fish and foot sound like fish and are fit the lot. trap vowels are inverted for god and pat to sound like gad and pot the softening of teas where butter and bent would sound like butter and beans Gluttony speakers also drop consonants for vowels where the two words meet, for example in the sentences that Galile and that boy, the word for its of addition or subtraction the d depending on whether there is a consonant or a vowel preceding the importance of accent in the Guligici language simply cannot be underestimated, it is the clearest link between us and other displaced Africans throughout colonized spaces and the black diaspora how we sound is as important as what we say because our accent is a statement in itself this has been your master of arms, my son, stay safe and as always we give peace, thank you very much son, so if you're counting, that's six southern accents already, although we're not being remotely exhaustive here and we've only been through a few states, many more to come as we head deeper into Piney Woods Bell, southern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and northern Florida, we go into one of the parts of the South that has always been Rodic, much of the South historically was not Rodic, that's where you get this type of accent classic southern by blanche dubois scholar o'hara.

You can hear that in this clip here that I've always relied on. the kindness of strangers you hear how there is no r in strangers strange strange strange that's a non-rodic accent but it has changed and changed rapidly in the last few decades so most of the younger white southerners are now rhodic and most of the pine forests, although they always have been Now Nicole talked about the fact that some African American speakers in Southern Appalachia soften the i diphthong of the price vowel in some words and we get a long i sound, but in other words is still an i diphthong and this is a pattern we found. in much of the south and in most of the pine forest belt, although there has always been what we can describe as total price softening, where some southerners soften the diphthong in words like fly, climb and ride, but use diphthong in rice and right here in the pine forests. belt let's soften them all fly up rod and get up straight life night and so on here there is also an interesting posture which is that you start to have tips of your tongue that are very focused on the edges and what I mean by that is that instead from that of using this part of the tongue, the blade for things like t and d sounds uh, so that there is a lot of surface contact, obviously, we only use the narrow edge of the tongue so that it is a more focused area of ​​contact.

Ten tired turtles talk about dentists. We'll finish part one right here, but we'll continue this across the continent. We're going to Chicago and Southern California and yes, absolutely, we're going out on a boat in Canada. See you next time. two