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Baltimore and Philly are pretty similar in speech, almost as close as NYC and Boston.
Um, no.
Baltimore is pretty unique. There is a noticeable Tidewater influence to the Baltimore accent but not as noticeable as it is in the DC accent. I think the Black Philadelphia accent is rather "neutral" as far as these things go and doesn't lean too strongly in one direction.
Interesting critique of William Labov's work on dialects.
Quote:
The ethnolect/dialect opposition does more than divide speakers into non-white and white for sociolinguistic analysis. It further assumes that speakers do not cross these lines – or if they do, this is something of note and to be named, like the phenomenon of crossing (Rampton 1995). Nowhere has this assumption held more sway than in research on AAE. An early focus on identifying the unique structural features common to communities of AAE speakers across mainly northern U.S. Cities (Labov 1966, Labov et al. 1968, Wolfram 1969, Fasold 1972, Labov 1972a) led to a wide-scale assumption that African American speakers do not produce features of regional dialects. In some cases there was evidence that African Americans in U.S. cities were not, in fact, producing regional dialect features (see for example Labov 1966). More common has been to assume this and to exclude African Americans and other non-whites from dialectological samples (unless we are looking specifically at an ethnolect in a locale, or investigating the extent to which non-white speakers assimilate to local white norms in a locale). A concomitant effect of this assumption for AAE is the supra-regional myth (Wolfram 2007) that African American speech does not differ regionally. Both assumptions lead to the same perspective on African American speakers – that they are speakers of an ethnolect. Despite a recent move in the literature towards investigations of regionality in African American speech (Yeager-Dror and Thomas 2010, see also the citations inWolfram 2007), I would argue that African Americans’ ethnic identity still trumps other considerations, so that we continue to struggle with crossing the ethnolect/dialect divide, or at best end up talking about convergence between or divergence from these two fixed -lects.
Recent work in New York City has found that African Americans do in fact produce features of NYCE, contrary to the findings in Labov (1966) and to the broader supraregional myth (Wolfram 2007). Both Cogghsall and Becker (2010) and Becker (2010) found that African Americans produce a raised and ingliding BOUGHT vowel, a feature long studied in NYCE (Babbitt 1896; Hubbell 1950; Labov 1966; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). Raised BOUGHT is part of a larger set of long and ingliding vowels in NYCE, shown in Figure 1. Continued non-rhoticity in NYCE accounts for the maintenance of this large system, so that mid and high vowels in non-rhotic contexts are also long and ingliding. A wide-scale merger of the ingliding vowels in NYCE was reported in Labov (1966), in which tense /æ:/ and BOUGHT raise in parallel along the periphery of the vowel track to merge with non-rhotic BARE and BEER (for /æ:/) and BORE and BOOR (for BOUGHT). Labov reported that these mergers were complete for his young working- and lower middle-class speakers in casual speech; he further categorized raised BOUGHT as a change in progress, predicting raising to continue in NYCE.
I've always thought the perception of "non-southernness" or "northernness" in Black speech was based on the extent to which it shares characteristics of White ethnic speech in Northern cities. I can't say I've ever heard an example of a Black Chicagoan that sounded anything like the stereotypical White Chicagoan.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 06-25-2020 at 09:03 AM..
A few examples of the black Philadelphia accent for reference. It sounds very northern and different honestly. These are a good indicator what a black Philadelphia urban street accent sounds like.
The only real difference I hear between Between and Philly is the “oo” thing in Baltimore. Because both sound mostly northern to me outside of that. I can hear a Hint of southerness, it’s definitely more pronounce in Bmore. Baltimore is a little more southern-but overall it’s generally east coast, like Philly. Just my opinion. Probably not a great pairing.
I can hear hints of southern in black NYC accents but its overwhelmingly northern sounding. Baltimore is a mixture of everything. Can't really say it's mostly anything. Its just weird. DC sounds mostly southern.
No I don't think this is true. Baltimore and DC blacks both have a level of southern twang to their accents. There is no accent line that separates Baltimore and DC. You can claim the accents are different, but in terms of their southern influence/twang, there is no difference (Baltimore black accent is not less southern sounding than the DC black accent; they are equal).
The accent line would be between Baltimore/DC and Philly. Philly is where you start to hear a more New York-like black accent with not much of a discernible southern twang.
Blacks from NY, Philly, and Boston have verified this.
It is: Baltimore and DC (some southern twang) - Philly (neutral with slight New York-like accent) - NY/ Boston
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
Interesting critique of William Labov's work on dialects.
I've always thought the perception of "non-southernness" or "northernness" in Black speech was based on the extent to which it shares characteristics of White ethnic speech in Northern cities. I can't say I've ever heard an example of a Black Chicagoan that sounded anything like the stereotypical White Chicagoan.
Naw I think northerness is just more standard speech, certain slang/mannerisms. You can sound like a northern black NYCer (DMX, Russel Simmons, Teyana Taylor) but nothing sound like a ‘White New Yorker’...
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