Comment on We dunking on England again

• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  We (I) prefer ‘neutral’, but yes.

  Just don’t lump us in with Californians, or we will just start talking to you in the valley girl / infuencer accent, derisively.

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  • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ok, just checking as a fellow PNWesterner who feels like we sound bland or sure “neutral” if you wish while all other US accents sound pretty interesting and unique. I can’t think of a single thing genuinely unique to PNW accent, personally. I lived in the South for a while, so I’m very familiar with the wide variety of accents down there, and we just don’t have any real depth of variety of that sort I feel. Maybe I’m wrong, I haven’t hung out everywhere in the PNW.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      No, you’re right, we are essentially the… linguistic evolution end point of American English… the type O blood of American accents, if you will.

      As far as ‘unique’ things… well basically, my vote for most unique thing would be for the intonation patterns we use, or more accurately, basically the lack of them.

      We tend to just stress all words in a sentence very close to the same, monotone.

      We tend to have (at least what others call) falling intonation at the end of a sentence, that can make it so people don’t recognize questions… as questions.

      Because they’re often expecting a tonal shift at the end of a sentence, or some other tonal pattern, as a cue that indicates a question is being asked.

      Which is the opposite from a Californian, who do rising intination on even non questions, and thus acts as the easiest giveaway that a transplant is in fact a transplant, beyond them having no clue how to pronounce most local place names.

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      • cmbabul@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yall have a lot of verbal ticks, so many PNWers end a large proportion of sentences with “ya know”

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      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        linguistic evolution end point of American English

        if the accents start at pacific northwest and end up adapting to whatever regionalised version they end up being, doesn’t that make you the evolutionary source of american english?

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      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        y’all know there’s more of the state than LA, right?

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• Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  White bread.

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