dialects

[mmcirvin]

I'm fascinated by regional dialects in part because everyone says I sound like I'm from somewhere else. My Midwestern accent was more pronounced when I was very young (it's been modified by some borrowings from Mid-Atlantic, Southern and even Massachusetts English), but it's still pretty recognizable even though I've lived almost my whole life outside the Midwest.

A Harvard kid from the Northeast claimed I sounded like the people in Fargo, but my accent isn't really Scandinavian-flavored Minnesotan (I've never even been to Minnesota). I think it's more Southeast Iowa/Cleveland, gotten from my mother and early childhood: some indistinct mixture of North Central and Inland North. But according to this survey, it looks as if my word usages are not Midwestern or Inland North at all but pretty standard Mid-Atlantic Eastern, as you'd expect from a kid who grew up in suburban northern Virginia but didn't have Southern roots.

Something I always wondered about was the regional distinction, if any, between the two major pronunciations of "aunt". It seemed like it ought to be a North/South thing, but it wasn't. No wonder I was confused: while "ahnt" is mostly Northeastern, I was living near a narrow inclusion of majority "ahnt" that looks like it cuts diagonally through Virginia from Williamsburg through Richmond and Charlottesville. Unless that's just a statistical artifact.

(I say "ant".)

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Everyone laughs when I say the word "measure" as "may-zure" since apparently only people from Northern Colorado (like me and my sister) say it that way with the long "a". Everyone else seems to say it as if it had only a short 'e'. Same with any word that rhymes, pleasure, treasure, etc.

My sister is a professional classical musician (french horn) and when giving a presentation in a class once during her graduate Conservatory years in SF, said this word in some musical context, and was actually laughed at by the entire class.

If I spend a long time with my in-laws, I start picking up Rhode Island-isms a bit, like sometimes dropping the 'r' off the end of words.

No one, however, can compete with East Bay folks who say "rampid" for "rampant" (sounds oddly like a combo of 'rampant' and 'rapid'), or "banken" for "bank" as in "his cat ran down the banken and into the ocean".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've definitely heard other people from the West say "may-zhure". I think my Nebraska relatives might say that.

One interesting thing about that one paper I linked to is that, unlike earlier studies, it says that a Western dialect distinct from Midland speech is emerging.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, I keep thinking that maybe David Letterman (who is from Indiana) says it like that, though I could be imagining that.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

The thing that has always confused me is where the border between South, West, and Midland really lies. My own opinion is that there is less a definitive line between the two and more a gray spectrum-y area of transition. For example, the town of my childhood (Eastern Colorado -- Fort Collins, Colorado) is at a veritable crossroads, a blended grey area.

Colorado's eastern neighbor Kansas is usually considered Midland, yet southern Kansans have a bit of a Southern accent. Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado are often indistinguishable in most ways -- flat, dry plains, cows, factory farms, ranches, oil wells, redneck homophobes, tornadoes, nearly similar linguistic features.

Yet Ft. Collins is also considered to be part of the "Front Range", i.e. those towns in the foothills whose eastern and central regions rest on very flat desert lands with tornadoes, yet whose western regions rest in greener foothills, and whose wealthier residents spend much time a very short drive up into the mountains proper. Our famous reservoir, Horsetooth, dominates the vista to the west from almost any vantage point, so that a lost wanderer need not find a star for compass but need only turn to face the looming mountains.

Twenty or so miles north lies Laramie, Wyoming. Thirty miles southwest lies the legendary hippy town of Boulder. Sixty miles to the south lies Denver. Further south and east, residents live close to Oklahoma and Texas. Unlike in Rhode Island, where insular folks on the East Bay think of Warwick and the West Bay as a whole other planet, everyone in Northern Colorado knew people or visited people from the other side of the mountains, people from Grand Junction, for example. And sixty, a hundred, even up to five hundred miles was not considered a far drive at all (unlike out here on the east coast). Rich folks probably frequented Aspen and the other large ski resorts. A large Hewlett Packard plant employees most people who are not employed at the big aggie college (Colorado State). Both institutions brought in people from around the country, although the town remained largely WASPish throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with a large addition of Hispanics. Finally, in the 1970s, rural farms and culturally isolated mountain villages still helped define the local patois.

So this location guaranteed a very odd linguistic mix indeed, neither Midland nor Western, sort of both. Many say that in the 1970s, the predominant accent was more Midland than Western, with a dash of Southern thrown in, but it was always a bit hard to tell. Ever since the Californication of Colorado during the 1990s, the accent seems to have become much more regularized. Add to that the generation of children raised entirely by television, and accents become much more homogenized across all regions.

Sorry to have babbled on at such incredible length. This topic fascinates me inordinately.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Absolutely; they all blend into each other, not least because people move around and have kids over in the next state. I grew up in another really heterogeneous area near Washington, DC populated largely by government employees and contractors from all over. It wasn't really Southern and wasn't really not-Southern. (Now it's even more diverse, because there are so many people from dozens of other countries living in my old neighborhood, as well as the mix that was there before.)

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

What you say about the DC area is very true. I have two friends who live there. When they first moved to Northern Virginia right befor the tech boom, it was a little less diverse than it is now. Of course, Fairfax county is kinda white and wealthy due to all the techies living there, but certainly David's company had departments that were almost all people from India, or almost all gay people, or almost all women, so there was some diversity. Now the other friend, Darian, has just moved from Vienna into D.C. proper, and the neighborhood is extremely diverse -- white, black, hispanic, middle eastern, asian, etc.

In the 1970s, we were nearly the only Chinese-American family in Colorado, and there seemed to be just as few Jewish people. That town has since diversified a bit, but the WASPs and Catholics still seem fairly prevalent. I don't understand that, but maybe the coasts are generally a bit more diverse.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I am tempted to start talking about finno-swedish dialects here, which are crazy enough that people from Sweden don't actually understand them at all, and are varied to the extent that a small town of a thousand people will have a noticably different dialect than the next town 10 kilometers down the road.

But I'd be talking all day, I suspect.