I have a hard time understanding the people in a freinds village and he lives 50km away
Comment on The clueless people are out there among us
KingJalopy@lemm.ee 3 weeks agoI 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.
sebi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
gabbath@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I guess it makes sense. I wouldn’t understand you either from 50km away.
Valmond@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Lemmy: We’re just a bunch of dads
zurohki@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
And Linux nerds.
sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Like the way California people say their O’s
As a Canadian, it’s all I can hear when they speak.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks 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.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
… for American English
seralth@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago