Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/18/50-people-from-50-us-states-sp.html
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Colorado has no accent. You might “like” meld into one or another for effect. But CO has none. Phonetically it just doesn’t.
Ok So I have heard Warshington but I have never said it. When I was a kid we did a soccer exchange with Canadians and he said we had a drawl. on words like out
ALL of the US has an accent.
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they couldn’t find 50 people who naturally speak with their state’s stereotypical accent? the one from maine made feel like i was watching pet semetary.
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The universal rule: Your state has an accent. Mine doesn’t.
Some years ago my wife picked up immediately that a tour guide we met in Austria was from Michigan five minutes away from where I grew up based on her accent. I didn’t even notice. I’ve since started to notice it now on those rare occasions I go back home.
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The way the woman from Texas sounded, I felt like she was terrified by public speaking. Her voice was vibrating.
I’m native of Colorado Springs, and have lived most of my life in this area. Thanks to military bases, and so many people immigrating here from other states, I’ve felt as though we are a melting pot of accents and driving styles.
I’ve often heard we don’t have an accent, but there’s no denying we sound different when we leave our area.
I tend to mimic the accent of the people I’m around, without meaning to. Especially when drinking as I found out while I was stationed in England.
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Despite the way they gloss over it, Texas has several. East Texas skews traditional “southern”, Austin ends up as more of a pan-US blend, Waco is a bit high pitched due to all the extraterrestrial experiments… and so on.
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All of us USians have a USian accent.
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Most of these people sounded neutral midwest to my Michigand-ears.
Same goes for Canada. People talk about a Canadian accent, but a Newfoundlander sounds nothing like an Ontarioan , much less someone from BC.
And then you get someone like Shaun Majumder who switches seamlessly between middle-Canada, Newfie and Hindi and you just have to stare in admiration.
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Sadly the video didn’t represent the more extreme accents found in Michigan, I have a feeling she was from South-east Michigan from the way she talked.
I learn to talk more slowly and say all the syllables of words when I moved to California because people had trouble with my West Michigan accent.
Then there is the Yooper accent, which is just ridiculous. Beautiful place up there, but some of the folks talk kinda funny.
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Disagree. Mark and I grew up about 12 miles apart, and the dropping-the-final-“g” (“sittin’ and thinkin’”) is real.
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I moved to Oregon about four years ago from California, and the “ing” form of a verb is often pronounced “een” instead of “ing”. Newscasters, radio broadcasters, and even “The Thom Hartmann Program” are great ways to hear it.
What accent is this?
My lived-her-whole-life-in-PA mom frequently lets loose a positive anymore that always sounds so odd to my ears.
Do Californians really sound like that to other people? It’s, like, something I never noticed in my speech.
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As someone who grew up on Lawn Guyland and now lives near Oh-awwwlbenny, let me observe that New York State has considerable diversity in local accents. Although the Brooklyn accent is pretty much dead - the curl-coil merger was so much a marker of lower-class ascriptive status that everyone tried hard to expunge it from speech, and now nobody grows up hearing it. There are no longer toity doity boids on the koib at Toity-Toid and Toid.
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Alabama Guy was on the nose about the “squee-leh”(squealy) Alabama accent. My maternal grandmother pronounced my name, Kelly, as “Keel-eh”.
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