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"