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Lots of states may have one standard accent throughout the entire state...but some states have a variety of dialects. I live in Missouri and there are four distinct accents. The St. Louis accent, the general Midwestern accent, the southern accent, and the Ozarks accent. How many different accents are in your state?
How much time do you have? Michigan is a veritable mixture of dialects. But in all seriousness, as a sociolinguist, I'm not very interested in these particular dialectal divisions. I consider dialects and accents to exist along a continuum, and within in every region, every county, every city, there are countless dialects and countless accents along this continuum. Everyone belongs to a speech community, but that speech community might be as small as a family, a neighborhood, a city, a county, multiple counties. So the answer is hundreds, thousands even.
I don't know that Colorado has a distinct native accent, let alone more than one. Most of the variety of accents seems to come from people who moved here from out of state, myself included. In fact, it seems like most of the people who live here are out of staters. Where I'm originally from - Pennsylvania - there are several native accents. This is a pretty good map:
1. Hudson County "Noo Yawk" sounding accent. To me it doesn't sound much different than a Brooklyn firefighter accent, non-rhotic.
2. Newark-area accent, rhotic. This is common in places like Kearny, Essex County, parts of Union and Morris, Paterson area, etc. Chris Christie has this.
3. Milder "inland northeastern" accent. Similar to much of the Hudson Valley, parts of CT, northeastern PA. Pretty widespread north of 195 and west of the Parkway.
4. South Jersey, with similarities to Philadelphia and southeastern PA. Identifiers include the long O sound in phone and home, etc. and they drink wooder. Also, north is "newerth" and south is "sailth." When I said there are "possibly more" NJ accents, I had this one in mind. There are probably distinctions natives to this region can make within the region, but are imperceptible to me.
1. Hudson County "Noo Yawk" sounding accent. To me it doesn't sound much different than a Brooklyn firefighter accent, non-rhotic.
2. Newark-area accent, rhotic. This is common in places like Kearny, Essex County, parts of Union and Morris, Paterson area, etc. Chris Christie has this.
3. Milder "inland northeastern" accent. Similar to much of the Hudson Valley, parts of CT, northeastern PA.
4. South Jersey, with similarities to Philadelphia and southeastern PA. Identifiers include the long O sound in phone and home, etc. and they drink wooder. Also, north is "newerth" and south is "sailth." When I said there are "possibly more" NJ accents, I had this one in mind. There are probably distinctions natives to this region can make within the region, but are imperceptible to me.
You talking to me, say that in a Joiiiseyyy Italian accent lol
Well, the two regions in New York that I'm familiar with are considerably different from each other, but I'm not familiar with the western and northern parts.
Nobody says "joisey" except Bugs Bunny, and southerners trying to annoy Jerseyans.
It's apparently working.
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