Comment on We dunking on England again

• 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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      • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Huh? You mean the Midwest?

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      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah, I’m with trackball_fetish, that’s not really a PNW thing as much as it is a Midwest thing.

        Now, in many ways, the PNW accent is a kind of… less exciting version of the Midwest accent, watered down Midwest.

        The only time I can remember PNW people using ‘ya know’, its either because they just actually are from the Midwest, or they are intentionally trying to sound folksy.

        A good portion of the PNW was originally settled (cough colonized) by… basically originally Germans and Nordics who moved from the East Coast to approximately Minnesota, but then moved even further east to basically either Portland or Seattle.

        … maybe you could say ‘ya know’ is part of the rural/eastern PNW accent, as the sparser areas of the PNW today tend to be more affordable for a Midwesterner to move to, just by way of economics, relative cost of living.

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    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨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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      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        No, its the opposite.

        PNW accent is basically what happens if a whole bunch of Americans with originally different accents from different regions all try to cross the great divide either by wagon or train, to find either farmland or a ticket to the Alaska gold rush…

        And then everybody who isn’t dead after the attempt more or less averages out their accents into a rough middleground.

        Some linguistic evolution has been going on since then, beyond that, but thats what I mean by end point; the PNW was the literal geographic last stop on the physical colonization of the contiguous US.

        Only thing that might be more ‘final’ than that would maybe I guess be Alaska, but I do not know much about an Alaskan accent.

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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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      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah, been through and around the state a few times.

        The Redwoods are… just absolutely stunning, and thats coming from an Olympic / Hoh Rainforest stan.

        Pacific Coast Highway is incredible as well.

        San Fran’s gotta be the only city in the English speaking world that is more hilly than Seattle, fuck.

        I remember driving south on I5 and just… actually seeing endless strawberry fields, not long after I’d discovered the Beatles, lol.

        On another trip, I somehow ended up on Rodeo drive… not long after discovering Rage Against the Machine.

        … maybe you could say I’ve had a very Lynchian experience of California.

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