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 6 days agoNo, 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.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 5 days ago
ah ok, so PNW was basically battle royale and the final form that got all the distinct pieces of accents smeared into their final form. thank you for correcting me
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Something like that, hahah.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 5 days ago
y’all know there’s more of the state than LA, right?
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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 5 days ago
out of curiosity where were the strawberry fields on I5? i ask out of professional eating curiosity and hunger and I was planning on going to watsonville for their strawberry festival this year but the fields you mentioned might be closer to me and maybe i can go to theirs too. doesn’t woodland have a strawberry festival too? i might be able to con my wife into a third or fourth strawberry festival to fill up our rumtopf this year :3 but i want to find blackberry and raspberry festivals (without having to go to utah i know a great raspberry source in utah but i sure as fuck am not going to utah for raspberries for rumtopf. maybe they will ship.) for the rum buckets as well.
goldfndr@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
World map of strawberry produce (currently 85 instances)
World map of strawberry crops (currently 630 instances)
First was working but right now both are currently erroring out for me.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Unfortunately, all I could tell you is ‘somewhere between San Fran and LA’, lol.
This was also… damn near 20 years ago, at this point.
But I do just remember seeming endless fields of strawberries.
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”
trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf 6 days ago
Huh? You mean the Midwest?
cmbabul@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Naw it’s something I’ve noticed from many native Washington’s ever since I’ve moved here, there is some bleed from the Midwest in my experience so maybe that’s where it comes from originally
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 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.
cmbabul@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
‘Like’ is definitely over used out here but not the same as the Cali one, I can usually pick out Californians in Washington… partially because as a southerner they recognize another person who is aggressively talkative to strangers.
I actually do agree with your take that PNW accent a restrained Midwest accent which actually tracks pretty well. And just to be clear I don’t mean “dontcha know” or “don’t ya know” that is Midwestern as hell, what I mean specifically is y’all tend to add “ya know” to the end a lot of sentences”. When I first pointed out to my best friend, who grew up out here, she sent me a text later that night saying, “Fuck you I hear it everywhere now, ya know”
The other big one that comes to mind is “pre-funk” which is apparently just slang for pre-gaming but I’d never heard it in the south or northeast
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Huh.
Ok… I think I have an explanation for ‘ya know’.
Its a zoomer/alpha thing, not a millenial thing.
PNW is kind of notoriously ‘way too online’ and we suck at / hate talking to people we don’t know already, in person.
I think the ‘ya know’ thing that you are talking about, I think that was basically a tiktok thing for a while, basically a meme.
So… that’s my guess there.
‘Pre-funk’… yeah I remember that starting to catch on, and being annoyed by it, lol, because it literally just is ‘pre-game’… I don’t use that phrase, but yeah, a lot PNW people do.