The Accent Game

I would agree with you about the Southern accent...I recently transplanted to South Carolina from Iowa. As Neo in the Matrix would say, "Whoa!". So far my favorite has been "Sir?" if someone doesn't understand me, or didn't catch what I said. Never mind the typical "What, pardon/excuse me, come again?" that I was used to up North. I've got a lot to learn...by the way, that accent game is difficult! I got the first one right, but failed on the next five I tried.

J. Chem -- "Sir?" is highly cultured and enormously higher in IQ and class than "Huh?" (which is a stupid grunt).

44 points. The scottish accent was the most evident.

Well, that and the Spanish accent. The minute I heard that thick accent, by far the worst English in the bunch, I knew that guy HAD to be Spanish lol.

Not so much in Manhatten, where on an average day you hear six languages( and I wonder how many of those are accented )- go to the outer boroughs and you'll get the New Yawka , da Broncks, the South Shaw, the Lawn Guyland and Brucklyn accents.

DLS,

Of course "Sir?" is more intelligent than "Huh?". That's why I didn't mention it. I was just saying that in Iowa, I never heard it before, so it's taking some getting used to. Perhaps that says more about the vernacular in Iowa?

J. Chem: The Wall Street Journal did a story several years ago about Northeastern "transplants" to Charlotte. "If I hear 'sir' or 'ma'am' one more time, I'm going to be sick!" I found that to be a saddening reaction to the cultural difference.

People in Iowa are plainly spoken, and pretty straightforward, and friendly, you likely noticed. The same is true, believe it or not, here in Detroit.

Incidentally, California includes differences in language from elsewhere, including pronouncing "e" like "i" in a somewhat-Southern way. "Engine" and "Injun" are pronounced the same way, for example, in California (at least by natives).

Meanwhile, what has taken over so much of the country is a bland version of the Midwest accent. That includes the media, even in places like the South (where there are classes offered to people to get rid of their Southern accent or dialect, unbelieveable or terrible as that may seem to everyone else).

I'll take an elegant brunette with a Noo Joisey accent any day.

"Yawmberld?" That was my first encounter with an accent inscrutable to me. It was asked of me in a little neighborhood fish market in New Orleans. I was trying to buy some crabs.

I had never been down south before, and I had no idea what the guy was saying. I responded with something like, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question." He repeated it in exactly the same way, only louder. That didn't help. After a few more cycles through the impasse the guy was clearly getting upset and was feeling very stupid. Finally another customer came to my aid, "He's asking if you want them boiled."

Ohhhhhh.... Anyway, I got my crabs.

"But the accent of the Roosevelts, Julia Child and Katherine Hepburn pretty much up and vanished sometime in the late 1950s. Why did this happen?"

1. The Northeast and Midwest-California satellites ceased to run this nation as the effective analogue to the "branch plant" model of US-led industry in Canada that to this day may still be an insult to Canadian nationalists, though to this day much of the resource-rich West remains treated to some extent as a colony of the federal government.

2. More importantly, I would say, the middle class expanded after World War II.

"The Northeast and Midwest-California satellites ceased to run this nation..."

It began its end after World War II. It accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. And after 1980, wow.

Some lib-Dems (including many in the media) may never have gotten over this.

The accents you are speaking of is often called Atlantic. It's an odd accent in that it, even more than some, was an expression of social position as well as geography (well, this is true of all accents, but I'd say it's even stronger with "Atlantic"). At some point, the "standard American" accent of the newscasters became the ideal accent from a social position and so all impetus to retain a separate prestige accent disappeared.

The accents you are speaking of is often called Atlantic.

When I was a kid I knew it as "Boston Brahmin", though I suspect it was a misnomer. It was more Boston/New York Brahmin. I remember it well. But you know, as I think about it, I think the emergence of the Kennedy's and the whole Camelot mystique, doomed that dialect. All of a sudden it was street creds that mattered more than legacy. Legacy isn't dead, of course. Look at the Ivy League.