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"Unique," meaning "none other like it" and "identifiable" meaning "able to be recognized" are two different things.
Kate Middleton is not the most unique person on Earth. There have been people who were nearly 9 feet tall, people born with multiple arms, people with super-genius IQs capable of learning 100+ languages in a year. These people would be "unique" since they are like 1 out of 7 billion.
Kate Middleton is, however, one of the most "identifiable" human beings to ever live, meaning you can go to Taiwan and show people a picture and they'd say "Oh yes! Kate Middleton!"
So OP is using two different terms interchangeably when they are not quite the same. It's clear from the OP he means "running into a person from that place anywhere on the planet you would most easily be able to identify where they are from," which would not be Charleston or New Orleans since many people "anywhere on the planet" could not even find those cities on a map.
Slang, vernacular and accent are different. I only realize if someone is from NOLA if they say things like "neutral ground." Otherwise, it's not distinctive enough for me to say "Ha! I knew you were from New Orleans!"
There are only a few accents that really stand out in the Anglosphere.
"British" (no need to jump in and explain that there are several different accents on the Isles)
"Caribbean" (same thing. Most people will lump a Bajan, Jamaican, Bahamian accent all into one)
Australian
Scottish
Boston
New York
South African
These are the accents that 50%+ of English speakers across the globe will instantly recognize.
How is new orleans not identifiable? Is possibly the most distinct accent in America outside of Boston or NY and maybe a Minnesota/upper midwest accent.
"Unique" and "identifiable" aren't exactly the same thing. What OP is asking about essentially is whether someone can easily point out where someone is from based on speech, attitude and dress. This is why he has DC as a Tier 1a city because he believes a person who is "DC-maxxed," wearing foamposites, saying "Urrea" and so on will stand out in a way people from most other cities would not.
But if that's the metric, then I would say NY would be a clear No. 1 with a large gap between it and No. 2 simply because of the accent. Many people would recognize it in Plano, Montreal, Glasgow or Cape Town. That's even true among Black Americans since 99% of people would guess that Tracy Morgan is a New Yorker by just hearing his voice alone, slang or no slang.
Then I wonder whether this thread is partly mistitled.
"Identifiable" here really only skims the surface if by that one means one can tell where one is from simply by encountering them in some public place for a short time.
Culture goes far deeper than accents, and accents even vary within cities based on class: an Upper East Sider won't sound like someone from Bensonhurst, and I suspect we could say the same thing for Harlem and Bed-Stuy. But that's just one aspect of culture, and in a sense the most superficial one. How one dresses, one's tastes in food, the kind(s) of music local artists make, how people celebrate life's milestones — all those say a lot more about culture than an accent can.
And except for clothes and music, you can't distinguish them based on brief encounters.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
I think some of you are overestimating exposure to different cities' culture as well. A lot of young, educated Black people got exposed to Black culture from different cities by going to HBCUs or in some cases large PWIs. But there are way more working-class Black people who have never had much opportunity to leave their state much less attend college. So while someone who attended NCA&T or Hampton will probably be able to pick out someone from DC in a crowd, that dude who has lived is whole life in Chester, PA probably won't be able to.
Funny you should use the oldest and poorest municipality in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (founded in 1644 by the Swedes, who called it Upland) as your example.
I worked there for about a year, at Widener University, which is in the "nice" part of the generally beaten-down city. (I put "nice" in quotes because, though you can tell that the area where Widener is located was where the money lived in Chester's industrial heyday, the money's not there anymore, at least not to the degree it should be.). When I launched a new alumni newsletter there, one of the people I interviewed for it was Brent Staples (Widener '73) of the New York Times Editorial Board.
Staples' memoir, "Parallel Time," was the first of what became a flood of coming-of-age memoirs that Black men would write in the 2000s. In it, he wrote about growing up on Chester's west side and meeting one of the few Black professors at what was then called PMC Colleges* in high school. That professor encouraged him to apply. He got in, and that made all the difference in his life. As I wrote in my profile, "He walked across a freeway into a different world and never looked back."
Staples would be one of your counterexamples, the exception that proves the rule.
*What became Widener University started out as a military school, Pennsylvania Military College. The school abandoned its military program the year before Staples enrolled there; by then, the much bigger civilian program (Penn Morton College) dwarfed the military school.
Black "trendy" culture is also more homogeneous today, which makes it more difficult to take a glance at someone and instantly know where they are from.
In 2001, if you saw a Black man with a full Sunni beard and a lazer-sharp hairline (dyed on top of that), he was 100% from the Philadelphia area. That's now a common look everywhere and nobody associates it with any one city. The stylistic differences aren't so obvious anymore IMO.
Then I wonder whether this thread is partly mistitled.
Kinda. He starts off asking one thing but then asks another, but it becomes clear reading the OP that he's talking about people who can be instantly ID'ed as being from a certain place based off accent, dress, attitude, etc.
This is a reasonable question within a university context where you have young Black people coming together from different cities and blasting Go-Go or bounce or what have you. In that context, some cities are indeed more distinctive and identifiable than others. But those distinctions begin to fade as people age and start dressing appropriately for their age. There will still be some giveaways even in older age such as people saying "jawn" or "tew" when talking. This is the heart of what OP is getting at.
Kinda. He starts off asking one thing but then asks another, but it becomes clear reading the OP that he's talking about people who can be instantly ID'ed as being from a certain place based off accent, dress, attitude, etc.
This is a reasonable question within a university context where you have young Black people coming together from different cities and blasting Go-Go or bounce or what have you. In that context, some cities are indeed more distinctive and identifiable than others. But those distinctions begin to fade as people age and start dressing appropriately for their age. There will still be some giveaways even in older age such as people saying "jawn" or "tew" when talking. This is the heart of what OP is getting at.
"Go down to the jawn and get me some jawn so I can put some of that jawn on this jawn" is a grammatically correct sentence.
I would agree that that all-purpose pronoun immediately identifies one as coming from Philly.
I would agree that that all-purpose pronoun immediately identifies one as coming from Philly.
And even that's changing. I have heard people not from Philadelphia use it. The internet has made the world much smaller, which has resulted in people using a mashup of words from all over the place.
"Y'all" is a good example. I remember a few years ago someone pulling out a Labov map and telling me that the use of the word was confined to White southerners and Black people. Then I found an article that used Ricky Martin (born in PR) as an example of the word's spread well beyond those communities. I'm not sure if anyone would even challenge that anymore since we hear all types of people use that word, coast-to-coast, even in England and South Africa.
"Jawn," I'm sure, is not used with the same degree of regularity outside of the Delaware Valley, but culture creep is inevitable in this day and age. It always has been, but the internet accelerates it. I know I personally use "hella" a lot simply because I find it rolls off the tongue easier. And I couldn't tell you who I got it from or when I started saying it.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 04-09-2024 at 08:55 AM..
The interesting thing is that one of the terms in that quick Philly-speak lesson, "MAC machine," is slowly dying out ever since the Philadelphia bank that owned and operated the Money Access Center ATM network — the only regional ATM network that was owned by a single bank — got acquired by a bank from New Jersey that got acquired by a bank from Charlotte that got swallowed by another bank from Charlotte that got folded into a bank from San Francisco.
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