I moved to California last year from Oklahoma. Occasionally I will say something about moving from Oklahoma and people are like, “oh that makes sense, you have a Midwestern accent sometimes”. We all sound normal to ourselves but everyone has an accent. Like the way California people say their O’s.
Comment on The clueless people are out there among us
Archangel1313@lemm.ee 1 day ago
“I don’t have an accent…YOU have an accent!!”
KingJalopy@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Midwesterners are the only people I’ve ever met who don’t think they have an accent. And I’m like “you have a midwest accent.” They’re stunned because to them it’s just a “normal” accent, and they know it must be so because it’s what the TV man talks like. Obviously I know midwesterners who know they have an accent and the TV man is trained to speak that way. But everyone else I meet and know knows their own accent and can recognize variations of it. They’re not so conscious of how they make their accent happen, obviously, since it is their own. But they know they sound different from other people
seralth@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Part of that is, out side of a few regions of the Midwest that have a really unique accent.
Most of the Midwest is “nutural English”. Yes there’s an accent, but there is a huge lack of slang, regional quirks, and is widely one of the most understandable accents across every English speaking country.
It’s the “universal English accent” in a sense. It’s a large reason why call centers became so popular there. That and low costs.
Functionally Midwestern accent is in a way the English that’s so boring that the banality of it IS the accent. Lol it’s kinda funny.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It’s the “universal English accent” in a sense.
… for American English
sebi@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I have a hard time understanding the people in a freinds village and he lives 50km away
gabbath@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I guess it makes sense. I wouldn’t understand you either from 50km away.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
So, I’m from Seattle, basically, and for the longest time I thought no, I do not have an accent.
Then I learned that the reason I thought that was because well, the accent I have is basically the least distinct from the ‘General American English’ or ‘Region Indistinct American’ accent, out of all other regional accents…
With that ‘General American’ accent being what nationwide newscasters, voice actors and movie stars either developed on their own, or were trained into, for being easily intelligible to any other American accent/dialect speaker, or as just sort of a rounded approximation of ‘American’, with no specified regionality to the character.
Thats not to say the PNW or Cali or just general US West accents are all exactly the same as ‘General American’… they are not… its just that they are the least difficult to understand from a general audience perspective… or at least that is the explanation I’ve heard.
As I am aware, the main difference between PNW/Cali English and other US regions is that we have completed the cot-caught merger. Absolutely no difference in pronunciation, the verb sounds are the same… whereas in much of the rest of the US, these are different, distinct vowel sounds. We just use the ‘cot’ pronounciation for both.
Bot cot thot slot thought caught fraught not spot dot.
All the same. No rolling or bending of the first vowel into the u to make a more complex vowel sound, all just ‘bot’ or ‘dot’.
That and pop vs soda vs coke.
For whatever reason, I usually say soda, but that did make me an oddball of most people around me near Seattle saying ‘pop’.
…
There are a few things that I remember being distinct to Californian accents/dialects as compared to Seattle:
One is the rising tone at the end of the sentence… thing.
I always called this a valley girl accent, and this is because no one I knew as a kid spoke that way… unless their family had recently moved north, from Cali.
Now though, it is more common generally in the PNW, at least in my own experience… but also that could literally be because a lot of Californians have migrated north.
Another silly, but super easy tell someone isn’t from Seattle: Their accent may be essentially indistinguishable from a PNW accent… but they always, always refer to I-5, as ‘the 5’… instead of ‘eye-five’.
No one born and raised near Seattle does this.
I-5 is the main highway that goes all the way down from Vancouver BC, through Seattle, Portland, San Fran, LA, and runs through all of those cities, so its a major reference point of conversation in all those places.
And yeah, the regional vocab difference for how people refer to it is an example of a difference.
sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Like the way California people say their O’s
As a Canadian, it’s all I can hear when they speak.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
Relevant exchange from Suicide Squad (the good one with Idris Elba and Flula, not the bad one with Will Smith and Jared Leto)
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I dated someone who in earnest believed she has no accent. She didn’t understand what could be wrong about that.
SolarMyth@aussie.zone 18 hours ago
People in other countries use all sorts of crazy “languages”. We don’t bother with that here, we just talk normally.
96VXb9ktTjFnRi@feddit.nl 17 hours ago
Why can’t people just be normal. I am being my normal self, but other people seem different. Bastard freaks.
stebo02@sopuli.xyz 17 hours ago
Language proficiencies: Common
HK65@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
Galactic Basic