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Since the U.S. has many different dialects, which one seems to be the most genuinely American? It's not necessarily the same thing as a "neutral" or "dominant" accent (i.e. the ones you hear the most), but to put things in perspective, if you were a tourist from another country (or even staying in another country and watching American television programming for example), which one stands out the most?
And yes, it's perfectly fine to say more than one. (If the answer is "all of them", there should be some sort an explanation).
The categories are fairly general. For the Northeast, I think we can agree that New Yorkers have a different accent that Bostonians. Folks in Philadelphia have an accent to their own as well. Same thing in the South. Someone from North Carolina does not have the same accent as someone from Louisiana or Texas.
I would say they are all equally unique.
Also the further West you go, the accents seem to disappear. There really isn't a California, Arizona or Washington accent that I've ever been able to distinguish. Californians do have a hard "R", but other than that, it's not really distinguishable as Californian. Sure you have the "surfers" and "valley girls", but that is such a small segment. Most folks on the west coast do not have an accent like that.
Black folks make a language sound "blacker" no matter what the language is though (Cape Verdean Creole, Jamaican Patois, Haitian Creole, Even Black BritishAccents) so i voted Lower Midwestern.
The poll leaves out dozens. The seaport accents as on New Orleans and Baltimore are interesting to me but localized. New Mexico has a Hispanglo thing going. I'm originally from St. Louis and say Warsh and Farty but I don't hear that all through the lower midwest. I think there are many southern accents. The accents that I hear most often as typical in pop culture are the general perception of what a New York city person sounds like and the rural southern bumpkin/Texan version.
Southern. The Midwestern and Western ones are too close to Canadian; the Northeastern ones are too close to British and Commonwealth dialects.
I'd have to disagree with exception of New England. Southern US accents do stand out, iconically, and they are easy to imitate for our neighbors across the pond. But the most defining features of American accents in general are the rhotic "r" and nasalized vowels (try enunciating a sentence while closing your nose, and then try doing so with a sentence in a different language and you see just how nasal American English is). Those features are more pronounced in the Northern US dialects. Southern US dialects are largely non-rhotic and represent the evolution of Elizabethan/American colonial English. Imo, the Long Island accent is one of the most peculiarly American accents you can find. The California or Valley Girl accent, not so much. The accent has so influenced speech in a number of hard to understand ways that you can now find "uptalk" intonation pouring into other languages like German.
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