Welcome to City-Data.com Forum!
U.S. CitiesCity-Data Forum Index
Go Back   City-Data Forum > U.S. Forums > General U.S.
 [Register]
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.
View detailed profile (Advanced) or search
site with Google Custom Search

Search Forums  (Advanced)
Reply Start New Thread
 
Old 11-05-2009, 04:13 AM
 
Location: alive in the superunknown
542 posts, read 984,674 times
Reputation: 237

Advertisements

Maybe on a extremely general level this map is fairly accurate, but in my area only some of the older people have thick discernable southern accents. With younger people, it depends on who they were raised by and their schooling, but many in my age group either have very light accents or none. I know people who have grown up in the town I live in here in VA that either have thick accents or none at all, or some have a mix. It's similar to stereotyping a Brooklyn accent to all of NYC when not even all Brooklynites have the accent. Same for everywhere else. Also, if I read the map correctly it even barely puts DC and extreme southern MD into the southern accent section. I found it amusing because no one really has an accent, unless they are from another country. The locals who grew up there have more of a general US accent(no accent).
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message

 
Old 11-06-2009, 01:45 AM
 
102 posts, read 308,485 times
Reputation: 94
I used to work in the tourism industry and I met people from all over the country and by far the most prominent accents are:

Jersey: Stereotypical Jersey accent
Brooklyn: Same
Minnesota: Think of the woman from the movie Fargo "Don't You Know?"
Boston: "Pahk the Cah"
New Orleans: Kind of French influence
Canadian accent is only distinguishable by the word "sorry

Interesting story, some woman was talking to my little brother in the Walmart one time and I thought she was mentality handicapped. Turns out she was just Cajun. LOL. Yes she spoke exactly like the Waterboy's Mother! LOL
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-06-2009, 09:59 AM
 
Location: East Cleveland
217 posts, read 690,406 times
Reputation: 70
its way more than one accent on ohio....

because the northeastern part of the state sounds nothing like southwestern part...
down near cinncinatti, we tend to look at them as sounding country,they say we have an eastcoast sound..but when i hear people from youngstown, they have that pittsburgh real proper on how they say things like (pop, lock,pocket) it almost sounds like and english accent to me..im not sure about the western half of the state, they probably sound similar to the people in indiana..
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-06-2009, 10:57 PM
 
Location: New Hampshire
2,257 posts, read 8,131,569 times
Reputation: 4108
As a graduate student in linguistics who specializes in American dialects, I'm surprised I haven't seen this before. It's a very impressive piece of work. To be fair, most of his data comes from the Atlas of North American English by William Labov et al., so there isn't much on this map that isn't in that book, but he does make some modifications and adds more precise dialect regions.

Mapping dialect regions is a very challenging task. The "ANAE" data comes from a few telephone interviews with speakers in various cities. To the best of my knowledge, their study did not control for things like education level, socioeconomic status, time spent away, etc. -- all of which can have a significant impact on the way one speaks.

Moreover, the interviewees represent a broad range of the age spectrum. As others have pointed out, there is a tremendous difference between elderly speech and young speech in a given area. While it does seem like many young Americans are "converging" linguistically towards a homogenous form of General American English, there are certain regional dialect features that are in fact stable or even expanding. For example: the cot-caught merger, pin-pen merger, the Northern Cities Shift, etc.

The bottom line is that the current data we're using to map dialect regions is not substantial enough to indicate the most precise geographic boundaries. So no map is perfect, and no map is going to capture the extent of speaker variability within a single region. But we can nevertheless see some pretty convincingly clear patterns.

I commend this guy for a very thorough job with this map, but I can see already that it's not without flaws. My area of expertise is New England, and I don't agree with his modified placement of northern NH and northern ME with Vermont. And I can dig up a lot of data to support that.

I also noticed that some of his speaker samples aren't necessarily representative of the areas they're from.

I know that these dialect threads pop up a lot on c-d and I usually try to avoid them because I know I'd spend all my time clearing up common misconceptions about American dialects, but maybe I can start putting my knowledge to good use.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-07-2009, 01:59 AM
 
14 posts, read 34,010 times
Reputation: 18
thanks for nice post

let me check full map
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-07-2009, 02:27 AM
 
2,106 posts, read 6,604,323 times
Reputation: 963
There's so much activity going on around Cleveland.. I can't even read it
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-07-2009, 03:42 AM
 
246 posts, read 756,063 times
Reputation: 157
Interesting how the Bay Area is the only part of the West Coast that has its own distinct dialect.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-09-2009, 03:45 PM
 
218 posts, read 1,238,093 times
Reputation: 114
So how exactly do people from southern Ontario talk in a different accent than people in bordering US states? I've never noticed a difference.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-09-2009, 03:57 PM
 
8,276 posts, read 11,832,267 times
Reputation: 10075
Quote:
Originally Posted by Scalpy McScalperson View Post
I used to work in the tourism industry and I met people from all over the country and by far the most prominent accents are:

Jersey: Stereotypical Jersey accent
Brooklyn: Same
Minnesota: Think of the woman from the movie Fargo "Don't You Know?"
Boston: "Pahk the Cah"
New Orleans: Kind of French influence
Canadian accent is only distinguishable by the word "sorry

Interesting story, some woman was talking to my little brother in the Walmart one time and I thought she was mentality handicapped. Turns out she was just Cajun. LOL. Yes she spoke exactly like the Waterboy's Mother! LOL

I would say that the word "about" is a better word to use in comparing English Canada with the US.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 11-09-2009, 05:48 PM
 
Location: New Hampshire
2,257 posts, read 8,131,569 times
Reputation: 4108
Quote:
Originally Posted by Redrum237 View Post
So how exactly do people from southern Ontario talk in a different accent than people in bordering US states? I've never noticed a difference.
Really?

There are quite a few differences (although not as dramatic as, say, the differences between the Upper Midwest and the South). The first big three that come to mind-

The cot/caught merger. Canadians use the same vowel in both words, same as in "don" and "dawn," etc. They use a somewhat rounded low-back vowel in both words. This vowel is closer to the vowel in "caught" and "dawn" for Upper Midwest and western NYS (Inland North) speakers.

Canadian raising. This is the famous "aboot" stereotype, although the actual pronunciation is much closer to "a boat" (with an unrounded vowel in the diphthong). Canadians raise this vowel in diphthongs before voiceless consonants, so you hear it in words like "out," "house," "lout," and "write," but not in words like "loud" or "ride."

Canadian lowering / lack of Northern Cities shift. Canadians use a lower and more retracted vowel in words like "bad" and "cat." People in parts of the US adjacent to Ontario generally have the Northern Cities shift, meaning their pronunciation of these words almost sounds something like "bee-ad" and "kee-at" to other English speakers.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
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.


Reply
Please update this thread with any new information or opinions. This open thread is still read by thousands of people, so we encourage all additional points of view.

Quick Reply
Message:


Over $104,000 in prizes was already given out to active posters on our forum and additional giveaways are planned!

Go Back   City-Data Forum > U.S. Forums > General U.S.

All times are GMT -6.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top