Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Location: Appalachian New York, Formerly Louisiana
4,409 posts, read 6,540,027 times
Reputation: 6253
Quote:
Originally Posted by LexusNexus
I didn't find this to be the case. It takes more than hills to feel northeastern.
The last bit is unnecessary as it seems to serve no purpose other than to antagonize.
More to the point it, as most things do, depends on how much experience you have and where that experience comes from. It can also be colored by where you come from.
I like to keep an open mind when approaching this subject because cultures are not strictly concurrent with state borders or census-given regions as we all know. I will not say Ohio is northeastern but it does have similarities to the interior portions of western NY and PA as well as northern WV.
If you, like many others, define the title of 'northeastern' exclusively as highly urbanized, fast paced and wealthy you'd be incorrect. However that definition would certainly separate your northeast from most of Ohio entirely.
Again though, that is not an accurate idea of the northeast. That assumption would be akin to assuming all middle eastern countries hate America and Canada never has crime.
It is entirely logical that all states bear similarities to their neighbors, particularly at the borders shared. Upstate NY east of the Hudson river is very much like New England; Texas along the Louisiana border is extremely similar to Louisiana. Etcetera.
If you drove on I-71 in the rural area between Columbus and Cincinnati it looks midwestern.
People in Philadelphia do not talk like people in Cincinnati, it's absurd to say they do, I base that on 2 months spent in Phoenixville PA.
No one in Dayton pronounces it "Day-on" unless they are incoherent hood rats.
Everyone that I'm around in Ohio (I was born and raised here) pronounces Dayton as "Day-on" (as in not putting the emphasis on the 't'), including many news people, so I don't know what you're talking about.
Also never said that Cincy accent and the Philly accent are the same. But they share many similarities like:
Both are Midland dialects
Both front the long O
Both front the ow sound
Both have a tense-lax short-a split system (though Cincy's is more like NY than Philly or Baltimore)
Both use the positive anymore (as in "this discussion is pretty tiresome anymore")
Both have variable glide deletion in words like "fire" or "wild"
Not the same accent like Pittsburgh and Philly aren't the same accent, but Pennsylvania is believed to be the original home of Midland accents, starting in the Mid-Atlantic, which was an outlier on the East Coast when it came to dialect.
My $0.02. As a person who was born in Cleveland (too young to remember it though) and also as a person who visits at least once a year to visit family-- I can say that Cleveland is like the northern cities of Buffalo, other upstate NY cities, and Pittsburgh. The rest of the state I have very little knowledge about but I am guessing that it is not very similar to northeastern states at all, geographically. Of course Ohio is nothing like new England or the Atlantic seaboard states, and even Cleveland falls short of that similarity. There is a certain accent in the Cleveland area, but I can't compare it to accents to similar cities previously mentioned, as I have never spent any time there. Should Ohio be reclassified? No it should not due to the fact that Ohio is overall more of a Midwestern state than a northeastern state. The best way to describe it would be to call half of it (or at least the northeastern area) a great-lakes rust belt area, and call the southern parts an Appalachian/mid-west state. The fact is that the northeast part and the southern part are as different as night and day. My family that lives there seems to sort of look down on other parts of the state and idolize where they live (Cleveland pride). this may be because they don't like the cornfield midwest stereotype that is actually true for much of the state, but not the part they live in which is very urban.
Linguistics wise, Ohio shares dialects with Western NY and all of Pennsylvania and *gasp* Maryland (except without Southern history or influences).
Topography means nothing.
Philly and NYC are flat and Boston is kind of not flat.
Cincinnati is the only Midwestern city with New York accent carryover.
Ohio was never a part of the South and coincidentally was an extension of the Northeast.
It definitely is a contender.
Ohio was never an extension of the Northeast. It has and always will be Midwestern. Ohio has far more in common with Midwestern states than Northeastern ones. And Cincinnati does not have an accent anything like NYC. It's not a contender. Western Pennsylvania and Western New York linguistically are more like the Midwest than Northeast anyway. You've got it backwards.
Ohio was never an extension of the Northeast. It has and always will be Midwestern. Ohio has far more in common with Midwestern states than Northeastern ones. And Cincinnati does not have an accent anything like NYC. It's not a contender. Western Pennsylvania and Western New York linguistically are more like the Midwest than Northeast anyway. You've got it backwards.
You love dialect maps, right? Well, what if I told you that most of Ohio and Pennsylvania are in the same dialect region. Of course you know this but ignore it.
Funny, being in the same dialect region counts only if it supports your argument. Philly and Baltimore are in the Midland region, so to you, Maryland is Northeast. Philly and Cincy are in the same Midland region so Cincy is...Midwest. Unbelievable double standards you got there.
Now you'll come back and say that Philly and Baltimore are both Mid-Atlantic dialects as if that was a separate, isolated region that wasn't part of the Midland. Too bad it is.
You know what dialect isn't part of the Midland? NYC. Kinda like Cleveland.
Hate to break it to you but Pennsylvania is more like Midwest linguistically than it is like the Northeast. That's ALL of Pennsylvania save for the Scranton area. Yet nobody questions its Northeast status. Maryland is similar except that part of the state has Southern dialects in it.
The dialect of Western New York is not strictly a Midwest dialect. It includes parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. So much for your Midwest theory. Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware are the East Coast states where Midland dialects are spoken, whereas they're spoken in MOST of the Midwest. So if you want to argue that Western NY and PA are linguistically Midwestern, you're deliberately ignoring Mid-Atlantic region that speaks Midland dialects.
There is no Midwest accent. There are Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects East of the Rocky Mountains. Dialects in the US follow a North-South continuum in the region East of the Rockies. Cities along the Northern extremities speak Northern dialects, Middle areas like Pennsylvania and Ohio speak Midland dialects, and South of the Ohio people speak in Southern. If you want to claim West NYS and West PA are Midwestern in dialect because some Midwest cities speak in those dialects, then Philly and Baltimore are also Midwestern. That's how stupid your logic is. Not that it matters because West PA and West NYS don't even speak in similar dialects other than saying "pop". By that logic, Louisville is Northeastern because they say "soda"
Last edited by EddieOlSkool; 10-19-2015 at 11:37 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
