Accents and dialects

Post Reply New Topic

I speke da Yooper accent, ya know, da Yoopanese, eh? It kinda sounds like dat dere MinneSOtan and dat dere Visconsin vit a little Canadian thrown in. Dese downstate people, dey tink we talk funny but it is really dem dat talk the funny talk, ya know.

Yoopanese or Yooperese is the national language of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and comes in two varieties, Finnish/Scandinavian and French Canadian. The Finnish/Scandinavian version is what I used here. The Canadian is similar but a little more subtle, lacking the exaggeration of the Finnish. Most outsiders can't distinguish between the two. Both Yooper dialects share some features with the speech of neighboring Wisconsin and Minnesota but are not the same. I can tell who's who.

South of the Mackinac Bridge it is a different story. Here the speech is rather bland, and sounds very much like what you hear on national newscasts. I have heard that this is no coincidence, that the lower Michigan accent was chosen precisely for its lack of extremes. It certainly does not draw any attention to itself. This is basically how I talk, with the occasional "Canadianism" thrown in.

I'm one of dem dere Minnesotans and I aso have many "Canadianisms" too. I do the "Eh?" thing and I have the Candian vowel rasing ("oot and aboot").

Very few people in Jordan have this affliction...

1. Because you're in southern Minnesota.

2. Most Americans with Canadian Raising don't know they have it until it's pointed out to them, us with it generally can't perceive the difference, for example, between the diphthongs /əʊ/ and /aʊ/ (the lattr being the normal "ou" sound in "about"). People without the raising can and the difference often becomes perceptually exaggerated into "oot and aboot"

Why the heck is OUR pronounced HOUR? (Like ow-er, instead of similar to ARE.)

Is YOUR pronounced You-ER or YUR?

Because the "ou-" in "our" represents the /aʊ/ diphthong.

From the video, what accent do I have?

Here's a quiz for American English dialects.

http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action ... bj_id=9827

I was born in Oak Cliff, then moved to Irving, then Carrollton, then Denton. That was 17 years of my life. Then in 2003, I moved to Saint Paul Minnesota, and in 2005 to Jordan Minnesota.

What kind of accent is a Dallas accent? Another person said I had a Minnesotan accent... I feel quantized.

Still, why the two syllables? Does aʊ have to break into two? Couldn't /our/ be /aʊr/ instead of /aʊ'r/? Owr instead of ow-er, intiendes?

I say it is between Northern/Neutral accent. I actually had some trouble with the quiz cause there were subtleties in my pronunciations (on, John, and lawn all carry different sounds for me). I just answered whatever seem closest. Looking at our news, there is nothing Southern, except by certain sports analysts. Us Dallasites most certainly dont have that southern drawl like them Forth Worthians. No sir!

I do notice that many of us do not differentiate between was and were and had and has and got an have. "They certainly was!"




On your video, you really have an American accent when you speak Spanish. Mine is much thicker with fricative J's and slight lisps. I basically sound like a typical news analyst either in english or spanish.

Father-bother merger

The father-bother merger is a merger of the Early Modern English vowels /ɑː/ and /ɒ/ that occurs in almost all varieties of North American English (exceptions are accents in northeastern New England, such as the Boston accent, and in New York City).[1][2][3] In those accents with the merger father and bother rhyme, and Kahn and con are homophonous as [kɑn]. Unrounding of EME /ɒ/ is found also in Norwich, the West Country, the West Midlands and in Hiberno-English, but apparently with no phonemic merger.

Cot-caught merger

The cot-caught merger (also known as the low back merger) is a phonemic merger, a sound change, that occurs in some varieties of English. The merger occurs in some accents of Scottish English [2] and to some extent in Mid Ulster English [2] but is best known as a phenomenon of many varieties of North American English.

The sound change causes the vowel in caught, talk, and small to be pronounced like the vowel in cot, rock, and doll, so that cot and caught, for example, become homophones, and the two vowels merge into a single phoneme. The presence of the merger and its absence are both found in many different regions of the continent, and in both urban and rural environments.

The symbols traditionally used to transcribe the vowels in the words cot and caught as spoken in American English are /ɑ/ open back unrounded vowel and /ɔ/ open-mid back rounded vowel. For many American speakers, especially in the Inland North region, /ɑ/ is actually fronted to [a], and, to a lesser extent, /ɔ/ is lowered to [ɑ].[4] The precise phonetic value of the merged vowel varies from region to region, as do the phonetic values of the unmerged vowels in regions where the merger has not occurred.

According to Labov, Ash, and Boberg,[3] the merger does not generally occur in the southern United States (with exceptions), along the American side of the Great Lakes region, or in the "Northeast Corridor" extended metropolitan region from New York City to Baltimore. It is very widespread across Canada, the Boston, Massachusetts area (see Boston accent) and northeastern New England, the Pittsburgh area (see Pittsburghese), and is also heard throughout the western U.S. The latter seems to be the source of its introduction into the Midwest as it appears to be spreading eastward. A recent survey directed by William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that the merger can be found today among younger generations (roughly people under 40) in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. It is also heard across much of Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri. Similarly, the merger affects central portions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, though its appearance in these areas may represent a westward expansion of the change from Pennsylvania. The distribution of the merger is complex, even without taking into account the mobility of the American population; there are pockets of speakers with the merger in areas that lack it, and vice versa. There are areas where the merger has only partially occurred, or is in a state of transition. Labov et al.'s research is based on telephone surveys with subjects who grew up in the city where they lived at the time of the interview. The 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey,[5] in which subjects did not necessarily grow up in the place they identified as the source of their dialect features, indicates that there are speakers of both merging and contrast-preserving accents throughout the country, though the basic isoglosses are almost identical to those revealed by Labov's 1996 telephone survey. Both surveys indicate that approximately 60% of American English speakers preserve the contrast, while approximately 40% make the merger.

For merged speakers in Canada and most of the United States, the two sounds [ɑ] and [ɔ] are allophones; they often do not perceive differences in their usage, hear neither of them as a separate phoneme, and hear the distinct vowels used by speakers whose dialects do distinguish them as variations on the same vowel. They hear the broad A of British Received Pronunciation as the same, single vowel sound. But in Received Pronunciation, there are three sounds distinguished: the long /ɑː/ of cart, the long /ɔː/ of caught, and the short rounded /ɒ/ of cot.

Speakers with the merger in northeastern New England still maintain a phonemic distinction between a fronted and unrounded /aː/ and a back and usually rounded /ɒː/, because in northeastern New England (unlike in Canada and the Western United States), the cot-caught merger occurred without the father-bother merger. Thus, although northeastern New Englanders pronounce both cot and caught as [kɒːt], they pronounce cart as [kaːt].

Labov et al. also reveal that about 15% of respondents have the merger before /n/ but not before /t/, so that Don and Dawn are homophonous, but cot and caught are not. A much smaller group (about 4%) has the reverse situation: cot and caught are homophonous but Don and Dawn are distinct.

Pin-pen merger

The pin-pen merger is a conditional merger of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before the nasal consonants [m], [n], and [ŋ][3][4][5][6][1][7][8][9]. The merged vowel is usually closer to [ɪ] than to [ɛ]. The merger is widespread in Southern American English, and is also found in many speakers in the Midland region immediately north of the South, as well as in less densely populated inland areas of the Western United States, particularly in Bakersfield, California. It is also a characteristic of African American Vernacular English.

Although this merger was not complete in the South even in fairly recent times,[7] there is very little variation throughout the Southern States in general, except that Savannah, Miami, and New Orleans are excluded from the merger.[9] The area of consistent merger includes southern Virginia, most of the South Midland, and extends westward to include all of Texas.

The northern limit of the merged area shows a number of irregular curves. Central and southern Indiana is dominated by the merger, but there is very little evidence of it in Ohio, and northern Kentucky shows a solid area of distinction around Louisville.

In the west, there is sporadic representation of merged speakers in Washington, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. But the most striking concentration of merged speakers in the west is around Bakersfield, California, a pattern that may reflect the trajectory of migrant workers from the Ozarks westward.

The pin-pen merger is one of the most widely recognized features of Southern speech. A study[7] of the written responses of Civil War veterans from Tennessee, together with data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle South Atlantic States, show that the merger was at a very low level through the first sixty years of the 19th century, but then rose steeply to 90% in the middle of the 20th century.

Outside the South, the majority of North American English speakers maintain a solid distinction in perception and production, though there are in almost every region of the United States—and even a few places in Canada—a certain number of speakers that perceive the pairs of words as close or pronounce them acoustically closely.

The pin-pen merger also appears in slightly different form in the forms of English spoken in Counties Cork and Kerry, Ireland.

People that have the merger will often use terms like ink pen and stick pin to make a clear distinction between the two words that are otherwise homophonous.

Mary-marry-merry merger

One of the best-known pre-rhotic mergers is known as the Mary-marry-merry merger[4], which consists of the mergers before intervocalic /r/ of /æ/ and /ɛ/ with historical /eɪ/ [5]. This merger is quite widespread in the American West, Inland North, Midland, and in Canada (cf. sample 1). A merger of Mary and merry, while keeping marry distinct, is found in the South and as far north as Baltimore, Maryland, and Wilmington, Delaware; it is also found among Anglophones in Montreal[6]. In the Philadelphia accent the three-way contrast is preserved, but merry tends to be merged with Murray; likewise ferry can be a homophone of furry. See furry-ferry merger below. The three are kept distinct generally outside of North America, as well as in the Philadelphia accent, the New York-New Jersey accent, the Boston accent, and the accent of Providence, Rhode Island[7] (cf. sample 2).