TV news producers stifling all regional accents so that everyone can enjoy the same bland Americana at home.
It should be at least the fun way they spoke in the 30s to 1960s
We should bring back regional accents but not Boston or New York. I do not want to be reminded of Boston’s existence any more often than I have to
some of them are just straight up horrible and it's inversely correlated as to how proud people are of it
The accent she's affecting just sounds like someone affecting a 'neutral' American accent.
I suggested the name Waitergate for this debacle, but was shouted down at the press conference
I have to wonder if you all can tell the difference between accents in Maine (barbarians), New Hampshire (weird), and Massachusetts (working class Kennedies). I've also heard that different parts of NYC have different accents, but I'll be damned if I can tell the difference.
I associate the Maine accent with petite bourgeois / white supremacist working class folks whose families have been here for two hundred years. People who have this accent are almost always either lobstermen or associated with cars or machinery of some kind. In rural Maine they are always conservatives; around Portland they can even be Bernie libs. It's common enough for younger dudes but seemingly increasingly rare for young women. Occasionally Maine boomers can have such strong accents that they become difficult to understand.
Local news is already popular enough but people might watch it more if the anchors and reporters utilized regional accents.
I can’t tell the difference between the various NY accents (including New Jersey) or the New England ones. I can maybe pick Long Island out of the other NY ones. I also have a lot of trouble understanding what the fuck they’re trying to say.
I can do a much better job identifying southern accents though, I’m pretty confident I could differentiate between Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, etc. accents pretty consistently. And even comical southern accents are easier to understand than a New Yorker speaking pretty clearly - when I hear Boomhauer talk in King of the Hill I’m mostly like “Yeah I got it”
I am bizarre freak and I can tell the great lakes accents apart. I can tell if you like saasitch, hot deesh, pirogies just from hearing you speak. I can tell if your pa works for fords or if your ma works for carnegie mellon...
I don't think I could tell southern accents apart, although maybe Texas is more distinct from the rest of the deep south and almost lighter somehow? Accents in the US are complicated, it generally seems like the "stronger" or "less educated" your accent is, the more racist you are, although that only applies to white people. For people with darker skin it seems stronger accents = more working class. Stronger accents with white people = I'm an asshole. And there are always exceptions of course. The W. years meant experiencing physical pain whenever I heard that guy speak. There was a Texan girl in my high school class who almost seemed like she was afraid to open her mouth because people made fun of her so relentlessly, they just assumed she was a fucking moron, she could have been describing a solution to quantum gravity and everyone would have just laughed at her.
I have the standard white lib American PMC accent, which I think means that I sound like a celebrity or a bloody yank to English speakers from outside North America. Have to wonder what southerners think about my accent though. Mainers assume that it means I'm educated.
In South Korea, it took me the longest time to pick up on Korean accents and I'm still pretty shaky with that and the Korean language in general. I lived in the southeastern part of the country which has a very different general accent from Seoul—Seoul is basically the educated standard accent for the country and it's the one you invariably hear whenever anyone is speaking on any kind of screen. All I can really say is that when I hear someone speaking with that accent, it sounds incredibly careful and fake to me, like I can't believe someone would seriously speak Korean that way. Koreans I've spoken with tell me they think it's odd that Americans have such disdain for the New York accent or accents. They think that biggest city = most prestigious accent because of Seoul.
All I know about Spanish accents is that Spain Spanish sounds ridiculous (Barthelona, como te jamas), Mexican Spanish sounds really rough (que onda güey, chinga tu madre!).
GWB was a large factor that made me suppress my southern accent for like 15+ years. Only since like, senior year of college have I come to realize that hating southern accents is just classism again and that it’s okay to say things like “Y’all”
Best part is that GWB's accent is an affect, he didn't talk that way at Harvard and Yale, and his brother, Jeb, doesn't talk like that at all.
Yeah definitely. I feel deeply uncomfortable saying ya'll. I grew up hearing everyone, including girls, saying "you guys," but I know that's gendered and incorrect. People here say "folks" or "everyone" or find some other way to address groups of people, but it almost always ends up sounding remarkably fake.
I grew up hearing everyone, including girls, saying “you guys,” but I know that’s gendered and incorrect
If you and everyone around you understands "you guys" to refer to any gender, how is it gendered?
There's probably some rule written in some book says "'You guys' only refers to men", but this doesn't reflect the way anyone uses the language.
If you text a group of men and women "you guys come at 3:30 to help set up, everyone else try to be here by 4", they're gonna have no idea that you wanted only the men to show up early.
The general rule seems to be that in most contexts, "guy" is gendered, "guys" isn't, but not always.
Eg, I could say "I fucked 7 guys last week", and it's still gendered. I could say "They hired some guy to help out", and it's not
grew up hearing everyone, including girls, saying “you guys,” but I know that’s gendered
I think it needs to be used as a gendered phrase to be gendered. Where I am at least no one says folks or y'all and the usage of you guys is not gendered
Stronger accents with white people = I’m an asshole. And there are always exceptions of course.
Stronger accents with white people mostly means that their family have lived in the area for multiple generations, which tends to imply less mobility and lower economic standing. Part of the reason why large cities often don't have the local accent (or are increasingly losing it) and sound more General American is because they are being flooded with people moving in from elsewhere. It's the people who couldn't or didn't want to move out that retain it.
Barthelona
There's a couple different things at play here. Historically Spanish had two different S type sounds. One was pronounced with the tongue a bit behind the teeth like in English, which is spelled <s>. The other was pronounced basically the same but with the tongue against or between the teeth, spelled <c> or <z>. Both of them are made with a groove in the middle of the tongue. Every dialect outside of Spain and some in southern Spain merged them to be pronounced like <s> historically was, and that's called "seseo". Other dialects in southern Spain merged them to sound like historic <c> and <z>, which is called "ceceo". The majority of Spain, however maintains the distinction, fittingly called "distinción", and in fact made the sounds more distinct by pronouncing the one spelled with <c> and <z> with a relatively more flat tongue, like the English <th> in "thick" (not "this", which Spanish often uses with the letter <d>). There are words that are distinguished only by these sounds, like "coser" (to sew) and "cocer" (to cook) or "casa" (house) and "caza" (hunt), so while it's weird to people who are unfamiliar with the accent, it does disambiguate certain words that are homophones in other accents.
como te jamas
This is happening in quite a few Spanish speaking regions, and actually mirrors what happened with French - the French <j> used to be pronounced like the <y> in "young", then came to be pronounced as the <j> in "just" (itself borrowed from French), before becoming the modern sound. Interestingly, the <ll> sound used to be distinguished from the <y> sound in Spanish, and is now only preserved in a handful of Spanish accents in Spain and in areas of the Andes where indigenous languages with the sound may have helped keep it around.
Additional fun facts: Some dialects in Spain have developed several new vowel sounds by deleting /s/ at the end of a syllable, which means that the only difference between the singular and plural forms of nouns ending in vowels is the pronunciation of the vowel. For example, "casa" would be /kasa/ and "casas" would be /kasæ/ or /kæsæ/ (with /æ/ being the vowel in American English "cat"). Some dialects in Mexico are actually losing the distinction between vowels in unstressed syllables so that words like "meses" (months) and "mesas" (tables) are becoming homophones as /mesəs/. They also often borrow sounds from indigenous languages, like the Nahuatl sound /tɬ/ in borrowed vocabulary, and some even use it and pre-existing vocabulary like in "atleta" and "Atlántico".
I have to wonder if you all can tell the difference between accents in Maine (barbarians), New Hampshire (weird), and Massachusetts (working class Kennedies).
I wonder too. I'm crap with accents.
if the anchors and reporters utilized regional accents.
I've always thought it's weird that local news adopts a generalized accent.
You don't want to be off-putting to tourists, especially those who speak in the correct American fashion
I grew up in Boston and I can tell whether someone grew up in the Northern vs Southern suburbs based on how they say certain words.
this is fake, everyone knows that all americans talk with a texan drawl like they got a mouth full of chew and a six shooter on their hip
most of his movies are set in new york. the departed is his only picture set in boston (though that one does feature some great, over the top accents). fake fan detected
I learned to talk when my family lived in the Upper Midwest, and when I'm around people from that region long enough, I start to get the accent back. :negative: I don't wanna talk through my nose!
The PNW doesn't get any cool accents, but when I left my hometown I learned that most of the country is unfamiliar with what a muckymuck is, and that potlatches are more commonly called potlucks. We just stole a bunch of Chinook Jargon words and nobody told me growing up.
Also nobody can agree on what to call those little segmented bugs that roll up into a ball when you poke them. They're potato bugs.
The normal name is pill bug. The second most common name from what I can tell is roly poly. I don't really see how they look like potatoes.
I don't know why they are called potato bugs, but that's their name. I have also heard pillbug, roly-poly, and woodlouse, but they'll always be potato bugs to me.
