this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.
Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I'm not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there's still plenty of difference.
As an example, there's a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it's "yay-us". My town it's more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it's yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it's all part of it.
People from the dimwit town I grew up in pronounce garage as "gararge" it drove me insane. Also, the main attraction of the town is a gas station that sells ice cream.
I'm from NC. My mom is from IL. Neither one of us can pronounce the word "horror." She pronounces it precisely like "whore" and I can't get over it. I, myself, dislike "harrr" movies.
Added bonus: I am a grown-ass adult and the only way I don't stumble introducing myself is if I do it like everyone else did growing up: by pronouncing the L in my name like a Y. I cannot pronounce my own fucking name and it's not even a disability. Usually, I just hope no one notices.
One of the more entertaining parts of learning another language is the extra attention to sound has made me super aware, more and more, of what speaking quirks I still have that weren't smoothed out by the midwestern influence which is considered to be the "general" American accent.
The lingering Chicago dictates random K's must immediately be followed by a Y (Shikyaaga!), but the southern part of me demands that any L at the end of a word is a W now and we're dropping consonants like we drop relatives when they come out as humanitarian. I'm horrified, I feel so bad for any foreigner who has to talk to me.
You mean harrified?
Yes, I do :(
Lol, I knew someone was going to call me on that.
Lol don't sweat it man lol, I've lived in my state my whole life and people think I'm from California or something when they hear me speak
I grew up in Podunk Northeast Texas so I have the drawl. But I left and spent a lot of time all up and down the eastern seaboard married to a woman that grew up out west. So my brain added every affectation I ran across to the drawl.
Now I have the long vowel sounds in a fairly rapid speech pattern, do the weird O sound they use in South Carolina, will occasionally pronounce house like I'm from Ontario, and have a hard time saying my first name if I don't concentrate.
I still sound mostly like a shoeless Texas hillbilly bootlegger but with a bunch of exceptions. So it makes me sound drunk as hell, until I am drunk. Then the exceptions leave and I sound like I just got off work at the oil rig and I'm headed to the strip club to cheat on my wife before heading back to the trailer.
I say horror a little bit like "harror"
Is it good ice cream?
Eh. Its ok. They had decent sundaes the last time I went like 6 years ago.
I just doubt it when I heard this argument, here in Brazil even your neighbor have a different accent cause they are son of two German, Lebanese, Japanese or Italian descendants and you are from the same but your other parent are from another culture and then you are so lost you create your own accent that sometimes speaks one or the other holy shit I don't know who I am.
Dude, I LOVE Brazilians. I went for a little over 2 weeks in July. People were so nice, respectful, considerate, and laid back. I want to spend a month there next time I go.
Also, your bananas are on another level. I haven't eaten a banana in the US since I got back.
I usually send people this video when they say that all Americans have the same accent. Shoot even within the same cities you'll find different accents. It does a great job of showing just how different they can all be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMS70m-OzXo
i never really thought of it a code switching, but that's an apt description. there's definitely "professional" me and "hometown-accent-in-full-force" me.
Is this why I can hear my Finnish friend's "generic euro" accent when no one else can?
(She travels a lot and has a very, very weak Finnish accent, but a fairly strong "generic European" accent. None of our other European friends can hear it; the only people who can are American and even then it's inconsistent).
That's a thing with us Europeans - especially if you don't want to perfectly adopt a British or American accent. This is when you end up with the "euro accent" - you're perfectly fluent in English, without the accent of your native language, but since its neither British nor American English, it sounds just the slightest bit different.
Also from IL, southern. Near StL. The accents change like a proximity ring the further or closer you get to downtown, and even then going Ozarks MO is still different from Troy IL.
When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.
I worked on the river so I got used to every southern and local accent as the line boats came through.
Because comparatively it doesn't.
Your country simply hasn't existed long enough pre industrialisation for a broad range of accents to develop.
The US isn't a uniform age.
You get more hyper-local accents like the Boston, Philly and NYC accents in the older US cities, and fewer in places that haven't been densely settled as long.
Is there a difference between a Las Vegas accent and a Pheonix or Los Angeles accent? Honestly, I don't really know.
Still, there's fewer hyper local accents and accents tend to be spoken over a wider area. Probably also because the US has had relatively large amounts of internal migration. Also, I assume average people travel further on average than they used to when wagons were the state of the art.
Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.
Then you compare that to say England, that has been around for several millenia and has had influence from Celtic, Gaelic, Norse, Germanic, French and even Spanish to extent for hundreds or thousands of years before America existed. And then since America existed has had influence from Indians, Chinese, enslaved Africans and other immigrant cultures from around the world, just like America did. Then its just not really comparable at all. 200 years is legitimately nothing on the time scales needed for the depth of accents to form and Americans just don't understand that at all. It's like a European talking about 100 miles being a long distance, an American would scoff at that idea.
Ok, if you're going to talk accents, you have got to include Pennsylvania Dutch.
Everyone always talks about Southern accents, New England accents, Texas accents, Cajun, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch always gets left out, and I think it's a fantastic accent.
Doug Madenford is my go to example:
https://youtu.be/wjr2CexQ5V4