American accents

When I was young it was unusual for people to move far from where they were born. That is no longer the case as everyone is now from somewhere else and with that the distinctiveness of accents seems, at least to me, to have been greatly diluted. Various regional word choices such as bag vs. sack or pop vs. soda can still give people away but even that is less and less an obvious identifier than it once was.

I have always had a natural unconscious chameleon-like ability to blend in accent-wise to where ever I happen to be and that includes different languages. I was once aggressively challenged in Germany when I said I was from the USA. The drunk German refused to believe me because I did not sound American. OTOH I once spoke with someone on the telephone when I was living and working in Alaska. They later asked a co-worker about me and said I sounded like a California surfer dude so maybe I’m simply not self-aware.

Well, American accents don’t differ as much as the crazy accents in parts of your country. I mean really, the lion was dozing on the train from King’s cross to Dundee (where I had lion-y business) and I was awakened by some weirdos from Newcastle.
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I think they apologized for bumping me and said something respectful like “ooo…that’s a stylin’ suit” but it certainly didn’t sound like English. Seemed like nice enough folks even if they just kinda babbled at me. I nodded and shared my Tennessee whiskey because I’m a generous lion.
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And don’t get me started on the accents in the other crazy countries on your island home. I think that the accents north of the border are just a way to make it impossible to tell whether or not they’re all drunk on that Scotch whisky. I like it. ROAR!!!

And then there’s those crazy wackos with the Scouse accents. This lion was just in Liverpool where he had some fun, but I’ve just gotta say that it’s frickin’ hard to communicate well enough to get ‘em to put some delicious wildebeest in that stew. I ended up giving up and getting a curry. Hell…I couldn’t even get a wildebeest butty. What’s up with that?
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Also, the guy they had playing the Cavern Club did frickin’ Oasis covers. I mean yeah…I get that Oasis wanted to be the frickin’ Beatles but if this lion goes to the Cavern Club he wants to hear “I Want to Hold Your Hand” twenty times in a row. Leave the Champagne Supernova in Manchester. ROAR!!!

Even within regions there's variations. In NY for example, a Brooklyn accent is distinct from the rest of NYC. And in the south a Georgia accent is not a North Carolina accent.

American newscasters used to be taught to speak with a Midwestern accent because it was seen as the most "neutral" American accent. I don't really agree with that because they definitely have an accent. So does Baltimore. And Cali still has that whole valley girl/surfer bro twang.

youtu.be

Every states accent

^^ Brooklyn isn’t an accent, there’s more of us than any of the other boroughs, they got accents, we speak perfectly
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I spent the first 45 years of my life in California. I was a huge cultural change moving to Georgia back in 1987. I had a hard time understanding natives on the phone. I could read their lips in person

But like it was pointed out everyone is from some where else and I personally can't identify from where they came. One stripper thought that I was from New York because of my accent. I didn't even realize I had an accent.

Is there any place in the U.S. where y"all is not used?

I know NY has one and the South as well. Any others? Can you tell what State someone is from by the way they talk?

Oh man, there are lots more accents. The midwest has a totally different twang and even vocabulary. New England accents are much different than New York, and Maine is a special accent of it's own.

That said, I think it's nothing like in Britain where 50 kilometers away and boom people talk completely differently. (Like the difference between a Glaswegian and Edinburgh accent.... or the difference between Liverpool and Manchester. Or even east London versus west!)

I think sometimes you can guess someone's region. Like if you were to order a "pop" instead of a "soda", I might be like... did you grow up in the midwest? One interesting difference is how English speakers navigate the lack of a plural for of you.... like:

Britain: you all or you lot
NYC: yous guys
Philly/New Jersey: youse
Western PA: Yinz
South: y'all
Texas: all y'all

But then, as others have mentioned, many Americans move around, so our accents are often weird amalgamations of several.

When I spoke in front of a big group of people in my industry from all over the country, I was surprised how many commented on my strong distinct accent. I grew up in Philly. We don’t have a pretty accent or one that’s easy to imitate, but I realize it’s different easy for someone to place you. Baltimore the same in that respect. think that’s also the case for NY, New England, Va (the South in general) and Chicago/Midwest. They’re the big ones that come to mind for me.

I grew up in southern California and New Mexico. But people think I sound like Im from northern California or the Northwest. Then some think I sound like Im from Compton 😂

So yeah. The country is pretty mixed up and people are from all over. Accents blend

Personally. I like the Native American reservation accents in the South West.

I have a job where I talk to people at various army forts around the country on the phone so I get to hear all the different American accents. As a Indiana native, I never thought of myself as having an accent but I have been told by people in other states I do have one. The only accent variations in my state are class based ones. My middle class accent sounds a little like a Humphrey Bogart gangster character to upper class people here but sounds a little like an English aristocrat to lower class people here. Middle class people here have never said I have any kind of accent.

Londonguy, even though this is a strip club site, I’m glad you brought this up, as I am fascinated by the variety of people’s accents. The U.S. is a huge country and there are many, many different accents here.

Where you’re from (I’m speaking of the U.K. generally), which is small in comparison, I am constantly amazed at the differences in how differently people speak there. Irish, Welsh, and Scottish accents are very distinct from one another. Even in England, there are so many different accents, a lot of which (correct me if I’m wrong) have to do with class/social status. I remember Fiona Hill, former high-level U.S. government expert on Russia, saying she emigrated to the U.S. to become a citizen and work because even though she is smart and highly educated, her lower-class accent (she grew up in rural northeast England where her father was a coal miner) meant that she would never ever get a decent job in the U.K.

As PAWG_Patrol said, “Even within regions there's variations.” Boston accents are somewhat similar but in some ways very distinctly different from how natives of Providence, Rhode Island, speak, and they’re only an hour south. Same with Portsmouth, Maine, which is an hour north of Boston. And on and on throughout the U.S.

I have lived in seven different states as an adult. I grew up in the Midwest, with extended periods of time in two of those states, a summer in Tennessee during college, and have lived in four different East Coast states, mostly since 1998.

I grew up 40 miles from Chicago, and though I did have certain aspects of that “Chicago” accent, my accent differed from that in one very specific way: where I’m from, we pronounced Illinois as Ellinois, milk as melk, Wisconsin as Wesconsin. No one from Chicago speaks that way. And I only came to realize that as an adult and had moved away. And I have trained myself not to do that anymore!

There are a lot of people in the Midwest with southern accents that are more pronounced than some of the southern states I’ve lived in. In downstate Ellinois, sorry, Illinois, there’s a small town that the locals pronounce as “Tar Heel.” This is not to be confused with North Carolina, the Tar Heel State. The Illinois town they call “Tar Heel” is actually spelled Tower Hill, but you wouldn’t know that to hear the natives talk.

I love the variety. Vive la différence!

There are at least 8 major dialects, and apparently may be as high as 30.

Hawaii, Louisiana and Appalachia all arguably have their own accent.

Of course sometimes the difference between two dialects is disagreement on how to say one vowel sound.

@londonguy: Hundreds. 🤣🤣

@pawg. Midwesternets have a twang and say no through their nose. The west not cali is nuetral, vermont/new hampshire old timers have an accent so thick.... and the most unique is one you mentioned. baltimore and delaware

@londonguy: Allegedly, what Americans think of as a "British" accent is relatively recent, like a couple hundred years. According to various linguists I've followed, the dialect spoken by people in our Appalachian area is the closed modern equivalent to the dialect spoken by many of the British during Revolutionary times.

Some examples I can think of

Chicago accent done right. Dennis Farina. m.youtube.com

Southern California. Brian Wilson. m.youtube.com

Philly/Baltimore/Most of Jersey/Delaware. It's like Water is Wudder. They weird with O. Hooome, Ooooover. It's like you always have an over bite. It's a bizzare way of talking. Stallone doesn't have it you would think he does but he sounds more New York to be honest. Famous people from Philly tend to lose it but if YouTube Philly accent you'll see.

NY and Boston. I don't think yall need examples super well known in pop culture. They are actually very close but still definitely distinct. In my opinion fucking awful in the wrong hands, amazing in the right hands.

Great Lakes/Midwest area. If you look at the area all near the Great Lakes. From upstate NY all the way out to like Kansas City and Omaha. But it's more pronounced the closer you are to the Great Lakes. It's very pitchy. It's described as talking through your nose if you can imagine that. This might be the most common accent in America actually and to be honest it's the toughest to get used to hearing it's just very high pitched, have is hyyyyaave. Can't is Cyyyyan't.

Minnesota and the Upper peninsula of Michigan and the Dakota's has that scandavien influence so you have an accent that sounds more like what you hear in that movie Fargo.

South. Doesn't bother me at all. Any southerner will sound fairly similar. Jeff Foxworthy.

As you go west (rural) Texas, Oklahoma, West Kansas, Colorado, not in the cities though it's kinda of draws out. Very majestic accent imo. Sam Elliot sounds like this.

Places like Arizona and Florida a lot of people in these areas are very new due to the advent of air conditioning. It's kind of all kinds of stuff. Believe it or not Florida used to be southern state.

San Francisco used to have an accent. It's kinda disappeared but you can still hear it in the bay on some people.

Around New Orleans definitely is different thing. People say it's sounds like NY meets the the south.

The PNW definitely has something wierd about how they talk. Think Kurt Cobain.

"South. Doesn't bother me at all. Any southerner will sound fairly similar. Jeff Foxworthy."

Strongly disagree. Every region of every state in the South sounds different. People who grew up there can tell where you went to high school from your accent.

In New Orleans, my personal experience, you can tell if someone is from Metairie, Chalmette, the west bank, Slidell, upriver, and anywhere else from those accents alone. None of these accents are even vaguely Cajun or French, by the way, you need to get out of the NOLA metro area to find that.

You also got Pittsburghese. Guys like Mike Ditka and Bill Cowher. They call them yinzers. If you can figure out what they are saying lmk cause I have no fucking idea

From my baseball days in Philly:
Picked off is pronounced PICT DAUWF!

There has been some good commentary so far. I'll toss in that the US has about a dozen major accent groups and many subgroups. No one really agrees on the count. What is different from the UK or Germany is that accents are former by isolation and the US was settled just as travel became faster and more affordable. That means that in the US, the east coast has a higher density of accents/dialect ls since those areas have been settled longer and frequently by different ethnic mixed. Once tou start moving west, you see bigger areas that have the same or similar accent.
It is similar to the size of counties in the US, they tend to get bigger as you go west. Part of that is population density and geography, but part is that as travel sped up, you could administer a larger area.
That's why you get bigger shifts in smaller distances in Europe.

There are at least four Boston accents. There's
-- genuine posh (Harvard named a building after your grandfather),
-+ imitation posh (dropped R),
-+ what one of my friends used to call two-toilet Irish
-- South Boston working class (of which TV cop is a dialect),
and there must be something from the North End

@icey that might be why you intimidate people , if they’re saying you have a compton accent… they probably mean you sound like a gangsta

The strangest place I ever encountered a southern type of accent was in rural Eastern Utah. Never expected that there.

New England is the home of regional accents. Vermonters speak like Midwesterners; New Hampsherites all speak with an accent from where they came from originally; Mainers peak Maniac, totally different from everywhere else; Bostonians can either have the fake Upper crust accent of the Kennedys, but most would say "lets go to the package store, get some beer, park the car and drink on Revere beach", as follows: "Lessgo to the packyy, grab a rack of beeyahs, pahk the fuckin cah and drink the rack of beeyahs on Reveyah beach."
Woonsocket Rhode Island is unique in that Woonsocket accents are a weird mixture of New York and french-canadian. In Worcester mass you say woostah if you went to college and wistah if you have a g.e.d. I travel a lot have have a wicked boston accent, people seem to fucking love it which makes me wonder why everyone else i so fucked

Dialects!
English speaking English is dialect.
English speaking German has an accent.

Fundamentally: Regions & variations.
Region can be Multiple States or a large city.
For example, Boston & New England. Boston is heavily Irish influenced.
Point to a major City: New York, Boston, Chicago...very different dialects.
However, someone raised in Springfield, IL (THE state Capital) doesn't sound like a person from Chicago.
However, a person from Springfield, IL visiting most of Iowa, Indiana, or Ohio, wouldn't sound out of place to anyone.

Major Exception: Consumed Culture.
Genres of music, movies, family heritage, and even occupations affect dialect.
Exhibit A: "Country"
It is a music industry that has stylistic vocals that the singers emulate. Look at Keith Urban (Aussie) and Beyonce.
People who consume that as their primary music emulate the 'sound'.
And what occurs is a wide region of people who "talk Country", wear boots, drive a giant truck, have a hat....but work in IT, live in a suburb, never worked a labor job, never detaseled corn, never castrated a pig, never shoveled manure, never hauled dead livestock, never drove a tractor....etc.

There's like two Chicago accents. You have your North Side Denis Farina. South Side is very similar, but Ds and Ts are more interchangeable and Hs are optional.