Baltimore Accent ~ Explaining (Dundalk, Essex, White Marsh: landlord, eat, yard)

[Evergrey]

Originally Posted by GunsMass

Don't know why you guys seem to think the Baltimore accent derives from anything Appalachian. It's a Mid-Atlantic dialect that shares traits with Philadelphia/South New Jersey and Delaware. (Ever wonder why Joe Flacco has it?) It exists now mostly in S, E, and NE baltimore county since the white working class long moved out of the city.

Perhaps it's Baltimore that influenced Appalachia. As someone living in Pittsburgh, I do find the Baltimore accent to be rather similar to the Pittsburgh accent... with some Philly similarities too (the dreaded "wooder").

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by GunsMass

Don't know why you guys seem to think the Baltimore accent derives from anything Appalachian. It's a Mid-Atlantic dialect that shares traits with Philadelphia/South New Jersey and Delaware. (Ever wonder why Joe Flacco has it?) It exists now mostly in S, E, and NE baltimore county since the white working class long moved out of the city.

The Baltimore dialect is distinctly a Midlands dialect, Mid-Atlantic by the newer, more specific, definitions. The version of the dialect most often labled "Balmerese" is the exaggerated form that still carries many traits derived from the Appalachian immigrants that came in great numbers in the 1940s (remember the Appalachian dialect is often considered part of the Midland dialect group as well.)

I don't have any citations for it, but I think the partial monophthongization of long "i" like Hollandtown, but not other words like "kite" are more Appalachian than Mid-Atlantic or coastal Southern. Elision (dropping consounants in words) is an Appalachian trait, taken the nth degree in Baltimore. And I think the nasal character of the dialect sets it apart from the rest of Maryland, even our own Appalachian region.

Maybe Philly has these traits as well, I am not sure. If it does, than maybe it is time to look in depth at the commonly held belief that these traits exist in Baltimore because of Appalachian immigrants.

And yes, Joe Flacco has the Mid-Atlantic dialect big time!

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by Evergrey

Perhaps it's Baltimore that influenced Appalachia. As someone living in Pittsburgh, I do find the Baltimore accent to be rather similar to the Pittsburgh accent... with some Philly similarities too (the dreaded "wooder").

The rail connections out of Baltimore and into Western Maryland, WV, and beyond certainly have a big effect. Most likely it is a bit of a two-way street, Accents from Baltimore coming along the railways out to the hinterlands, and immigrants bringing some traits back to the city.

I agree that Pittsburgh and Baltimore share many dialectal traits, but strangely Pittburghese is very easy for me to understand and imitate, but Balmerese is almost a foreign language. I know it when I hear it, but can't reproduce it to save my life. To my ear, all the vowels are "wrong" and produced in the extreme front of the mouth. SW PA dialects, while similar in other ways, have different vowels, most of which are pronounced much further back in the mouth. My mom's Baltimore friends always laugh at her short "o" It is glides so far back a word like "hot" sounds like "hwot" to their ears. I have heard some Pittsburgh city natives with a more nasal character to their speech than the surrounding rural areas of PA, which strengthes the Baltimore-Pittsburgh similarities.

Myron Cope, the old Steeler's announcer is a great example of a nasal Pittsburgh accent.

[P47P47]

Baltimore got a big dose of Southern/Appalachian-ness in WWII when so many people from those areas came to Baltimore to work in the shipyards, airplane factories, and other war industries. It's part of why South Baltimore is referred to by some as "Billytown".

[soug]

I grew up in South Jersey (near Flacco haha) and can confirm that the Baltimore accent (or at least one of them) has a lot of similarities to the Philly/SJ accent. For further information, look into the work of William Labov, he's a well-published linguist based at UPenn who has done a ton of research into U.S. English dialects.

[westsideboy]

Dr. Labov is the best. But Aschmann does some pretty cool stuff too. Not quiet as rigourous scientifically, but it is a wealth of information. I don't agree with all of his conclusions, for instance I strongly believe Western Maryland should be considered in the Midlands region (albeit very near the border) rather than the South based on lexical and tell-tale grammatical constuctions ("the car needs washed" being the most indicative) rather than just cherry picking out a few accent markers and placing us in the South. But overall neat stuff.

Aschmann places Baltimore in an Atlantic Midlands region with Philly, South Jersey, and part of Delaware.

American English Dialects

[slowlane3]

Originally Posted by dogpark

I agree. I know some folks from Pittsburgh (many down here for work) that have thick Pittsburgh accents (house pronounced haus).

I don't understand. Isn't "haus" the standard way to pronounce "house"? (In the German language it's actually spelled "haus"). I know in some rural parts of Virginia it's more like "hoos" or "haoos".

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by slowlane3

I don't understand. Isn't "haus" the standard way to pronounce "house"? (In the German language it's actually spelled "haus"). I know in some rural parts of Virginia it's more like "hoos" or "haoos".

In most dialects the vowel in "house" is a dipthong with a glide. Sort of like "haa-wouse." In the Pittsburgh dialect, the vowel has no dipthong, it is just one vowel sound, like "hass."

The most cliched expression of the trait is a bit easier to understand. "Down town" sounds like "dann tann" (the double 'n' is trying to express that it is a simple short 'a', not a drawled out one. For instance, I would pronounce 'dan' as day-un, making the short vowel a clipped dipthong.)

Here is how wikipedia explains it.

/aʊ/ monophthongization[2][3][10] (Kurath 1961; Layton 1999; McElhinny 1999; Wisnosky 2003; Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2005; Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006).

Examples: house is pronounced [haːs]; out is pronounced [aːt]; found is pronounced [faːnd]; downtown is pronounced [daːntʰaːn].
Further explanation: The diphthong /aʊ/ becomes the monophthong /a/ in some environments including before nasals (e.g., downtown), liquids (e.g., fowl, hour) and obstruents (e.g., house, out, cloudy). Monophthongization does not occur, however, word finally (e.g., how, now), where the diphthong remains [aʊ].[11] The /a/ sound is often depicted orthographically as “ah.” The colon after the /a/ indicates that the vowel is lengthened. Geographic distribution: One of the few features, if not the only one, restricted near-exclusively to southwestern Pennsylvania in North America, although it can be found in other accents of the world such as Cockney and South African English[2][3] (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2005; Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006).

Pittsburgh English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[K-Luv]

Originally Posted by P47P47

Actually, "Pink Flamingos" doesn't capture the Baltimore accent at its extreme because most of the actors in it were from the Towson/Lutherville suburbs, not the city itself (and in the case of Edie Massey, not from the Baltimore area at all). My own accent isn't all that pronounced, either, but to a Californian, I'm sure I did sound like the cast of the movie.

The pronounciation of a long "o" as "ao" is known as the "Mid-Atlantic vowel glide", and is common to the entire Mid-Atlantic area, although I'd say that it is most extreme in Baltimore, and definitely is a part of my accent.

I find the "Pink Flamingos accent" to be more representative of how people in Baltimore sound with perhaps only a handful of some Dundalkians, lifers most likely, who have the "Baltimore accent".

[The Notorious DGD]

Totally Go-Go's: The Interviews (compilation) - YouTube -- fast forward to 4:03.
If that isn't perfect Baltimorese, I don't know what is.