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Charlemagne120
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Booyah!!!
Jan 2003
time: 23:26
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NY accents accentuate the long E and short A sounds in words prominantly.
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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:26
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Apparently though the Professor at Harvard has some opponents when talking about whether California (especially Northern California) has a dialect.
This page is linked from the 'American Dialect' Link's page:
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/1906/dialects.html
Pacific Southwest (15) -
The first English speakers arrived here from New York, Ohio, Missouri, New England, and other parts of the Northeast and Midwest in the 1840s, bringing the Northern and North Midland dialects with them. Words originally used by the gold miners of this period are still used today: pay dirt (valuable discovery), pan out (to succeed), and goner (doomed person). The early twentieth century saw an influx of people from the South and other parts of the West. The people here are particularly fond of creating new slang and expressions, and, since Hollywood is located here, these quickly get spread to the rest of the country and the world (the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was examined in Verbatim : part one, part two). During the late 1970s and early 1980s, an extreme exaggeration of this dialect that came to be known as "Valley Girl" or "Surfer Dude" was popular among teenagers and much parodied in the media with phrases like "gag me with a spoon" and "barf me back to the stone age." Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Whoopie Goldberg in her one women show are two famous examples.
Though San Francisco is different:
San Francisco Urban (8)
Unlike the rest of California, which in the early twentieth century saw an influx of people from the South and other parts of the West, San Francisco continued to be settled by people from the Northeast and Northern Midwest, and elements of their dialects (North Midland, Upper Midwestern, Inland Northern) can be found. Mission dialect, spoken by Irish Catholics in a specific part of the city is very much like the New York City dialect.
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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:26
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Charlemagne: from the site I just linked:
New York City (5)
Unlike Boston and other urban dialects, New York City stands by itself and bears little resemblence to the other dialects in this region. It is also the most disliked and parodied of any American dialect (even among New Yorkers), possibly because many Americans tend dislike large cities. When an R comes after a vowel, it is often dropped. IR becomes OI, but OI becomes IR, and TH becomes D as in "Dey sell tirlets on doity-doid street" and fugedaboudit (forget about it). This pronounciation is particularly associated with Brooklyn but exists to some extent throughout the city. The thickness of a speaker's dialect is directly related to their social class, but these features have been fading within all classes over recent decades. Famous speakers are Rosie Perez, Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie, Archie Bunker, Bugs Bunny, and (if you're old enough to remember) the Bowery Boys.
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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:26
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Duncan, perhaps you will listen to a linguistic professor?
http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-li...t/msg02786.html
quote:
There are a couple of answers to your question. First off, as you pointed out, the regional differences in the West are generally smaller than in the East and the South. This has partly to do with the more recent settlement of the West (differences take time to develop), and partly to the mixing that has ocurred (settlers of the West came from many different places and blended together when they settled). Lumping the West and the Midwest together, we find fewer differences in that large area than we do along the East Coast. That's part of why "Broadcast English" (as it's called) is more like the speech of the West and the Midwest than the East or the South: it represents
a larger portion of the US than any Eastern variety does.
But probably just as important, the features that mark you as a Westerner or a Midwesterner are usually not stigmatized. We tend to notice the features of someone else's speech only if they carry some social value, either positive or negative. Very few features from the West or Midwest carry such social value. I am from Utah and still talk like a Utahn; I teach linguistics in New Jersey. My students never notice the peculiar features of my speech until I point them out ('cot' and 'caught' are the same for me, as are 'merry', 'marry', and 'Mary'). None of my students talk like I do, but none of my features are stigmatized, so nobody pays any attention. If I said 'father' without a final 'r', or if I 'pahked my cah' the way Bostoners do, everyone would notice. Broadcast English includes no stigmatized features.
But speakers of Broadcast English don't talk like the rest of us. There are peculiar features of Broadcast English, like pronouncing 'news' as 'nyews' and 'tune' as 'tyune', that, as far as I know, are not found in any other variety of American English. (They *are* found in British English.) The reason that speakers of Broadcast English sound like they're from the West or Midwest is that all of those varieties contain no stigmatized features and so we don't notice the differences.
The reaason that there are differences at all is because
language is constantly changing, in pronunciation and in
other ways, and if two groups of speakers of a language are separated for a long enough period of time, they will drift apart and the differences will eventually become noticeable (as British and American English have). |
Last edited by Imran Siddiqui on 18-02-2003 at 03:35
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18-02-2003 02:45
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