Quote:
Originally Posted by NDL
I have an interest in linguistics - specifically, local accents.
Don't ask me why; I couldn't tell you. But here's my shot at a light hearted thread, that has nothing to do with Pizza  .
My Wife & I have thick New York accents. If we had a child in Charlotte, assuming that my Wife had a hands-on role in the development of the child till the age of 6, do you think that the child would grow up reflecting the accent of a native born Charlottean?
I have come across a handful of native born Charlotteans, aged 17-30, that have very slight, if almost nonexistant, accents, and they seem pleased to not have one - which I find sad.
Does anyone have anything to add, about the local Charlotte accent, regarding native born Charlotteans?
Has it all but disappeared among the native born? |
NDL, glad to hear you have an interest in regional accents. It's fun, isn't it? As to your children, my family would be a good test case. My wife and I moved from (escaped from?) New York about 40 years ago so I could continue graduate studies in linguistics at UCONN. I too am interested in dialect geography and am almost clinically conscious of how I speak and how others around me speak. I have fun meeting new people and guessing what part of the country they are from. I'm right four times out of five. Our children were born here and I was curious how their accents would develop. Here in the Hartford area the western New England accent is heard. (The Connecticut river, which runs through Hartford and cuts the state in half, used to be the boundary between the eastern and western New England dialect areas, but that has blurred in recent times and today even in the Hartford suburbs east of the river, where we live, the western New England accent is heard.)
Notable local features are full retroflex final R's, that is, final R's in a word are fully pronounced, unlike the adjacent New York metro and eastern New England r-less dialects. So here, for example, people say "beer" with the R fully pronounced, not R-less, as we did in New York, where we inserted a compensating glide to a central vowel, something like "be-uh". Also there is less lip rounding for the "awe" sound in words like "coffee" and "daughter". This is difficult to show without the special symbols that linguists use, but if you want to try it, say the word "daughter" and stop yourself in mid-word and note the position of your lips. Say the word again and try not sticking out your lips so much. You will find that you will then sound more like the newscasters you see on TV, who are taught to use an accent which doesn't have this feature.
In any event I was curious how our kids would turn out. I am happy to report that they (fully grown now) sound like Hartford area natives. Of course over forty years even my accent and my wife's accent have changed to conform more to the local standard, but when our kids were growing up I think we must have sounded very Brooklyn. I still have vestiges of it today, although I can pass for a local when I try, but there's still no mistaking where my wife is from.
As to your point about non-existent Charlotte accents, as Coped pointed out, even in New York accents are less pronounced among the younger generation. I see this in my own family, who all still live there. I think it is also a question of education and social stratum, and is something I've been meaning to investigate when I have some time.
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