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It's kind of true, actually I'm back in Massachusetts now; when I was a teen, I had a slight Boston accent but a lot of the people around me and many of my friends have pretty pronounced, obvious Boston accents. You still hear them when you're out and around, and still hear kids and teens who sound have it... however, when I'm out, I hear people - teenagers especially - talking to eachother and they sound absolutely no different from a gaggle of young people at a store in LA.
My fiercely-anti-California ex from Seattle sounds like she grew up in Irvine, and people have assumed that's where she's from in the past. When I drove across the country this summer, I heard people in Wyoming, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc who all could have passed for a Southern Californian.
I notice a similar phenomenon in Australia. Most teens, especially girls, have that ditzy, tonal way of speaking that annoys me.
I think that's a bit of myth, I've never heard any borough difference, nor any Long Island vs city difference. Just weaker and stronger versions of the accent.
Finally, despite common references to "a Bronx accent", or "a Brooklyn accent", no published study has found any feature that varies internally beyond local names.
Odd since the latter three tend to have a more positive image out here than LA.
I'm talking about people who have moved to those cities from the east. Just read the threads in those forums for a quick reference. Seattle and San Francisco in particular are frequently called, reserved and introverted as well as passive-aggressive. San Diego gets the reserved thing quite often too. Having spent time in all four metro areas and knowing people from all four, in my experience LA stands out the most.
When I visited Greece this past year, I traveled solo.... As an American I was surprised at how many Australians, Canadians, and ppl from the UK I met. Tons of people....however it was glaringly apparent that I was ALWAYS the only american wherever I went. I was actually quite surprised. I couldn't help but wonder why I didn't encounter more Americans while in Greece. I mean the US has over 300 million people. Statistically, it made sense, however most ppl I met in the Greek Islands were Australian....followed by UKers and the Canadians. Had a great time, met so many cool ppl. I actually started to resent the fact I met no Americans like "why don't Americans value travel like other anglo-sphere countries? like, wtf?"
Some would you're just lucky KIDDING ! KIDDING !! That is strange, because when I travel in Europe I meet a lot of Americans. In fact when I was younger and travelling in Europe the people that usually I ended up befriending and hanging out with were people from the U.K. and the States...
That's true, I would say the same for foreign accents, they tend to stick out more. Though we hear American on TV an American accent still sticks out like a sore thumb IRL. I guess many Americans almost always only hear American accents that they think they 'don't have an accent' but to foreigners, you have a very prominent one. It was weird going to the US being totally surrounded by American accents, on the radio, TV, real life. Here I'm used to hearing all sorts of accents on a daily basis.
That's pretty funny - I watch so many British shows, read so many British books, and study so much British history that I didn't even NOTICE the British accents in the UK! It was weird. I would probably be one of those people who starts talking in a British accent after about a month - then I'd be accused of being pretentious. LOL!
But speaking of American accents -here's mine, from another thread- THIS IS TEXAS, BABY!:
Americans travel to the same specific locations over and over. It's it's not London, Paris or Rome, many probably don't even know where it is. When people ask me where I want to go in Europe and I say Dublin, Brussels, Amsterdam and Stockholm, you can hear the proverbial pin drop.
My favorite vacations have been spent in Ghent, Brno, Jihlava, and Pateley Bridge.
That's pretty funny - I watch so many British shows, read so many British books, and study so much British history that I didn't even NOTICE the British accents in the UK! It was weird. I would probably be one of those people who starts talking in a British accent after about a month - then I'd be accused of being pretentious. LOL!
Haha well you sound like an Anglophile, but most Americans probably aren't familiar with a lot of British TV shows.
Here we get a lot of UK TV shows on TV. Plus, especially in Perth, British accents are super common. There are suburbs here that are literally half British born, where you hear all kinds of English, Scottish and also Irish accents as much as Australian. It's probably almost as common to have a British born grandparent as an Australian one here in Perth (we're the most British city in Australia though so it's less so in say Brisbane). So British accents never sounded foreign to me...indeed as late as the 70s upper class people hear had a wannabe upper class English accent.
I always met lots of Bostonians in LA, but very few when I lived in SF and only one in Seattle.
Seattle's culture is very, very passive and introverted, to the degree that as an "introvert" by Mass standards, I was the most loudmouthed and obtrusive boor imaginable by Seattle standards. I was actually born in Seattle and spent about half my childhood there, but I definitely took more from Boston in that sense. It was really hard for me to feel comfortable living there again when I moved back in '08-09, so I left.
It's funny, I do hear people dump on LA out here, and I usually just say something like, "it's actually a wicked awesome place." Most people just parrot dislike for it, which is dumb... it's just that after 9/11 it became unacceptable to dump on NYC so the invective had to go somewhere
Bostonians seem to keep to themselves but I wouldn't say they're as shy as PNW's probably are. They seem pretty 'real' too, much like New Yorkers. I actually spent 2 weeks in a psych ward in Boston (long story) so I actually got to know some of them pretty well.
Haha well you sound like an Anglophile, but most Americans probably aren't familiar with a lot of British TV shows.
Here we get a lot of UK TV shows on TV. Plus, especially in Perth, British accents are super common. There are suburbs here that are literally half British born, where you hear all kinds of English, Scottish and also Irish accents as much as Australian. It's probably almost as common to have a British born grandparent as an Australian one here in Perth (we're the most British city in Australia though so it's less so in say Brisbane). So British accents never sounded foreign to me...indeed as late as the 70s upper class people hear had a wannabe upper class English accent.
You'd be surprised at how many Americans watch BBC stuff! And PBS carries tons of BBC programming. It's very popular over here.
But yes, I am an Anglophile.
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I'm back in Massachusetts now; when I was a teen, I had a slight Boston accent but a lot of the people around me and many of my friends have pretty pronounced, obvious Boston accents. You still hear them when you're out and around, and still hear kids and teens who sound have it... however, when I'm out, I hear people - teenagers especially - talking to eachother and they sound absolutely no different from a gaggle of young people at a store in LA.
