Regional accents

[altivo]

Haven't done a meme in quite a while, and this one is interesting to me. I've done earlier versions of it, but they are improving the accuracy as time goes on. I only detected one slip-up this time. (Stolen from Corelog over on LJ.)

Which American accent do you have? Northern You have a Northern accent. That could either be the Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Buffalo accent (easily recognizable) or the Western New England accent that news networks go for.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

I was born in Detroit, educated in central Michigan and the Chicago suburbs, and have lived in Michigan and Illinois all my life. When I travel farther, to places like California or Texas, I am sometimes mistaken for a Canadian, but any Canadian influence is largely Ontario and not much different from the upper midwest. I actually have quite a few Canadian ancestors, but they are all three or more generations back and had no direct influence on my speech.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

Heh. It pegged me true for Southern. My accent is straight out of Kentucky, despite being raised in the northeast corner of Missouri.

[altivo]

Yep they should get Kentucky or Tennessee right. The main weakness in their line of questioning now revolves around the failure to investigate consonants more carefully. Vowels tell you a lot, but sometimes the consonant sounds are definitive.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I thought Northern accents were the Canadian/slightly Swedish-twinged accents of Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota. I see Minnesota included there, but also Chicago, and I thought Chicagoans had their own accent I don't recall being much similar to the northern accent I think of?

[altivo]

Well, I'd call this region "North Central" actually. Minnesota does have more of a Norwegian tint, as does Northwest Wisconsin. The upper penninsula of Michigan has a strong Finnish influence and a bit of German too.

You're right that Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo all have distinctive speech elements that can be detected in people who have always lived there, but they tend to fade quickly when folks move away in most cases. This thing has only 17 questions, not enough to break it down so finely. Farther east there are many tiny zones with distinctive speech. The Pittsburgh area alone has three separate ones that overlap. New York City has different patterns for each borough. Boston is different from western Massachusetts.

The questions focus on vowels, which are easiest to distinguish. But to identify Chicago (south or north) you have to look at consonants as well, and also some vocabulary differences.

I have a friend who grew up just outside of Boston, went to college in Maine, and then graduate school in Evanston, Illinois. My ears are pretty well-trained but I can hardly detect any hint of New England in his speech except when he chooses vocabulary that drops a hint. Some people are chameleons when it comes to speech, others are not.

My older brother moved to Texas when he got out of the Air Force back in 1973 or 4. By 1980 he sounded like a Texan to us yankees, though probably the real Texans could still tell...

[schnee]

Hmm, that site appears to have gone down right when I tried to submit my answers. Ah well.

[schnee]

Ah, it worked now. This is what I got:

Which American accent do you have? Northeastern This could either mean an r-less NYC or Providence accent or one from Jersey which doesn't sound the same. Just because you got this result doesn't mean you don't pronounce R's.(People in Jersey don`t call their state "Joisey" in real life)

[altivo]

Now that's interesting. In general, I'd expect most Europeans to come up with Midwestern or Northern on this meme, since they probably have learned UK English rather than American and those are the closest we get to UK pronunciation. (Yes, you can laugh. We never really get very close, but I said "closest.")

That area around New York City is quite distinctive, though it does resemble some of the "working class" British speakers rather than the standard used by the BBC.

[schnee]

*noddles* For reference, here's my answers:

1. "thought" and "lot" do NOT rhyme.
2. "don" and "dawn" do NOT sound the same.
3. "hock" and "hawk" do NOT sound the same.
4. "collar" and "caller" do NOT sound the same.
5. "on" rhymes with "john" (but NOT "lawn").
6. "Mary", "merry" and "marry" all sound the same. ("merry" might be ever so slightly different, but not enough for me to go for the "none of the above" option).
7. "horrible" has the same "o" as "hot" or "stop".
8. "tent" and "tint" do NOT sound the same.
9. "heel" and "hill" do NOT sound the same.
10. "bath", "pass" and "staff" do NOT have the same vowel as "bat", "pack" and "trap" (but that's only beacuse I pronounce "bath" and "pass" the British way).
11. "about" and "mouth" do have the same vowel as "loud" and "down".
12. "right" and "price" do have the same vowel as "ride" and "prize".
13. The first "a" in "pasta" is the same as in "mat" or "cat".
14. "bag" does NOT rhyme with "vague".
15. When I say "I", it NEVER sounds like "ah".
16. The "oo" in "roof" sounds like the "oo" in "food".
17. "bother" does NOT rhyme with "father".

And yeah, I learned British English in school, but I think I'm much closer to US-American English these days; it sounds much more natural to me, at least.

[altivo]

We differ on 7, 10, and 13.

Number 6, by the way, would put you squarely in New England, probably along the coast from Boston north, if all three are different. Two the same and one different, which was a possible choice, puts you in Philadelphia I think.

[schnee]

Ah, interesting!