- Hi, Eric Singer, dialect coach.
The map tour of North American accents continues.
[light music]
Now if you missed parts one and two,
you can check them out here.
We're diving into part three from the West.
Let's talk about California.
Let's talk about Southern California.
Another part of the country
where we have some really exciting, ongoing change.
So, just like in some contemporary English accents,
a more open oral posture,
the lower jaw is lowering some vowel sounds,
most noticeably the DRESS and TRAP vowels.
There are a bunch of vowel sounds moving around here.
GOOSE and GOAT can both be very fronted.
And the short [I] vowel, the kit vowel,
is being split in two.
For "ng", it's likely to sound
like [i] so "thing", "going"
just like the rest of the West,
but otherwise it's lowered like dress and trap.
So bid gets closer to bed.
Miss begins to sound like mess, and so on.
So of course, if you take this accent,
and like turn the dial up to 11,
we're talking about a stereotypical surfer accent
like sort of a Bill and Ted's kind of thing.
You can hear that in a clip here when they say
"excellent" that's a lower dress vowel.
- Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!
- It's very much change and progress,
so... stay tuned.
And of course, LA County has the highest Latinx
population in the country, so
I'm going to turn this over to Megan again.
- Hi again. Now I'm going to talk about Chicano English.
The majority of Chicano English speakers reside
in the US Southwest and California, and in Chicago.
Chicano English is heavily influenced by Mexican Spanish.
Spanish has been in this region longer
than English has.
In 1848 Mexico ceded this land to the US.
Because of this history, Mexican Spanish
has been influencing the English of the area
for a really long time.
One of my favorite features is devoicing
of word final /z/.
So the sound /z/ is a voice sound.
You can actually tell if you put your fingers here right
by your throat and you do the /z/ sounds [long z]
you'll feel a vibration.
With devoicing, we use the voiceless equivalent,
which is an /s/.
So the /z/ sounds at the end of words
turn into more of an /s/ sound.
You can hear this devoicing
in the plural form of chair.
"Chairz" becomes "chairs".
You can hear that feature here.
- He did things, He did things, He did things.
- Another remarkable feature of Chicano English is
that there's less vowel reduction.
So it's a little subtle, but I'll try to show you
how it sounds.
I say "be-cause", and someone who would reduce
the vowel would say "buh-cause".
I say "to-gether", and some will
reduce the vowel to "tuh-gether."
"To-day", "tuh-day."
You can hear the features in this native speaker clip.
- To hear and to listen to everyone...
- Thanks Megan.
While we're in the Southwest with Chicano English
let's make a quick stop in the Navajo nation.
Kaleena?
- On this stop, we will be visiting
the traditional homelands of the Navajo people
in the Four Corners area.
The same devoicing feature found in Chicano English,
can also be found in Navajo English.
You can hear a native speaker here:
- I want him to recognize all Indian tribes.
- The second feature here is a glottal replacement
of final consonants.
You can hear the glottal stop, instead of a T.
- What I wanted to hear.
- Back to Erik.
- Thank you, Kalina. Next up, here's Nicole
to talk about African-American language in California.
- We know that African-Americans in California,
participate in local features,
such as "Ooh" fronting and uptalk.
You can hear that here:
- Uh, I'm Amani Dorn, Dorn, Dorn,
Tuesdays too soon to do that, Tuesdays, Tuesdays
- A 2016 study found BAT retraction,
or the /a/ vowel being pronounced
further back in the mouth
among Bakersfield African-Americans.
You can hear that in this clip:
I'll be right back, and then
we can stack those boxes, right back, right back.
- And now the map tour continues with Erik.
- As we move north from California
up in the Pacific Northwest we've definitely got
that cot-caught merger.
They sound the same up here, just like
they do everywhere in the West, and in Canada,
but one thing you hear a lot up here
is a lip-rounded vowel for it. [awe sound]
So here we might talk about a "hot pot".
Oh! There's a little pocket around San Francisco
that doesn't have the cot-caught merger, by the way.
So unlike the whole rest of California,
the whole West coast really,
cot and caught sound distinct here.
Like they do in most of the South and the East.
Just a little dialect Island
Up over the border in Vancouver,
you'll hear that same LOT rounding,
but you'll also start to get raising and tensing
in the TRAP vowel when it comes right
before a [g] sound like in bag, agriculture, flag,
similar to what you can hear over in Minnesota.
Speaking of Minnesota again,
there's a fascinating dialect pocket in Alaska,
the Matanuska-Susitna Valley that can sound
uncannily like those broad Minnesota accents.
A lot of people suddenly noticed this in 2008
when Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska,
shot to national fame as
the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.
You can see that here in this clip:
- I appreciate this privilege of
being able to be here and speak with Americans.
- And we want to keep our AAA bonding rating in Minnesota.
- It turns out that in the 1930s,
there was a huge migration of farmers
to the Matanuska Valley from Michigan, Minnesota,
and Wisconsin. So that's how that happened.
Okay. Back to Canada.
Now, Kalina is originally from the Northwest territories.
Let's go back to her.
- There are nine official languages spoken
in the Northwest territories, including North Slavey
which is a part of the Athabaskan language family.
I'm inspired by the many revitalization efforts
by our people to save our languages.
For example, language nests in Hawaii.
This is where young people are immersed
in the language every day with elders in the community.
[children and teacher singing]
Another revitalization method is a translation
of popular television shows and movies
into indigenous languages.
Because of all of this, I have tremendous hope
for both the future of our Native American languages
and of Native American English.
- Thank you, Kalina.
Okay. Let's go to Toronto and let's talk for just a minute
about probably the most famous Canadian accent
feature there is.
It's called Canadian Raising, though you may
not have heard it called that, but you're
probably familiar with "oot" and "aboot", yeah?
Of course, Canadians aren't actually saying
"oot" and "aboot" what they're doing is
raising the start of the diphthong in words like
out and about so that instead of it starting very open,
"ow," it's starting from somewhere
in the middle of the mouth, "oh".
It only affects syllables that end
in an unvoiced consonant.
So words like out, about, house, mouth.
In words like how, now, loud, rouse
Canadians still use that wide "ow" diphthong.
Canadian raising isn't only
in that class of words though, the mouth vowel,
it also affects the price vowel in the same way
so that the starting point of worlds "like",
"right", "life", "type", "mice",
can get raised too, but words like
"rise", "five", "tide", "fly",
keep their full [aI] diphthong.
You can hear the contrast between both of those
If I say something like,
"that's a fine price for a brown house."
So out in the Atlantic provinces of Canada,
we'll hear accents that are in some cases almost
unrecognizably different from what you'll hear
in most of the rest of Canada.
And once again, isolation and length of time
are the key factors here.
Newfoundland accents...
are maybe the most distinctly different of all.
I'm giving this one a go, even though
I've never done it before, so,
be gentle, please, ya Newfies.
Now there's lots of variation here, of course.
And most younger folks aren't going to sound like this,
but this'd been an accent
from the far Southeast of Newfoundland,
down below St. John's.
We could go on about this one all day.
Sounds a bit Irish, doesn't it?
This part of Newfoundland was, in fact,
settled by Irish people, mostly from County Wexford.
There's quite a lot of reasons why this
particular old Newfoundland accent sounds Irish.
Vowel sounds, of course, intonation, aspiration,
but you'll also hear the Irish Slit T.
What's a Slit T? It's a [t] sound made
with a very soft closure at the tip of the tongue
or not even really quite a full closure at all.
There's a slit left for the air to escape through,
"what"...
"that"...
"hit it".
I could stay here all day,
but it's about time to wrap this up.
So let's dip back down across the border
back into the States and then close
to where we started, in Northeast New England.
Now remember that cot-caught merger?
Well the whole Western US has it, and all of Canada.
And so does this part of New England.
Goes down about as far as Boston.
Rhode Island doesn't generally have it but
here in Maine, you've got that cot-caught merger.
So all the vowel sounds and those two big groups
of words merged, they all sound like "aw" here.
You know what doesn't all sound the same though?
"Mary, Marry and Merry."
Now they do in my normal accent,
"Mary, Marry, Merry."
And the same is true for almost all of North America.
But most speakers up here still have
distinct pronunciations for all three.
"Mary, Marry, Merry."
Even more interestingly,
at least in some older folks' speech still,
the historical distinction between horse and horse
is still preserved.
So if your horse has a sore throat,
you might have a "horse horse".
You could still hear this distinction in parts
of Ireland and Scotland and parts of the US South
but that's about it.
This is one of the last places you'll hear it.
And that's it, that's our last stop.
So listen, let me just say again
this is not meant to be a comprehensive tour
of all North American accents.
We tried to be at least somewhat representative
and to include some insights into how
and why accents might differ from place to place.
Uh, I sincerely want to thank all of
the linguists and language experts who've helped out.
And if you want to follow them here they are one more time.
- You can find me on Twitter @MeganDFigueroa
and you can also find me at my podcast,
the Vocal Fries Pod.
- You can find me on Twitter, I'm @mixedlinguist.
- If you want to learn more about the Gullah language
and what I'm getting into, follow me on Instagram
at @sunnmcheaux, Twitter @sunnmcheaux, or
sunnmcheaux.com.
- You can find me at AmaniDornDialects.com.
- This video would have had to be about 10 times longer
if it were really going to be systematic and thorough.
But these are some sounds I love,
and some things I think are interesting.
And I had a lot of fun sharing it with you.
If I've piqued your interest about accents and variation
here are some cool resources for finding out more
and we'll throw some more in the description below.