Posted on 08/24/2012 2:10:57 PM PDT by JerseyanExile
On July 4, 1960, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard rang in Independence Day with a dire Associated Press report by one Norma Gauhn headlined “American Dialects Disappearing.” The problem, according to “speech experts,” was the homogenizing effect of “mass communications, compulsory education, [and] the mobility of restless Americans.” These conformist pressures have only intensified in the half-century since the AP warned “that within four generations virtually all regional U.S. speech differences will be gone.” And so as we enter the predicted twilight of regional American English, it’s no surprise that publications as venerable as the Economist now confirm what our collective intuition tells us: “Television and the Internet are definitely doing something to our regional accents: A Boston accent that would have seemed weak in the John F. Kennedy years now sounds thick by comparison.”
Before you start weeping into your chowdah, though, I have some news: All these people are wrong. Not about the Boston accent, necessarily; that one might really be receding. But American linguistic diversity as a whole isn’t dying—it’s thriving. Despite our gut-level hunch about the direction of the language; despite the fact that 70-cent, three-minute, off-peak, coast-to-coast long-distance calls that cost four inflation-adjusted dollars in 1970 are now free; despite cheap travel, YouTube, and the globalization of film and television, American dialects are actually diverging.
There are multiple examples of such divergence. But none is as dramatic, as baffling to linguists, and as mysteriously under the collective radar as what’s happening in the cities that ring the Great Lakes. From Syracuse, N.Y., in the east to Milwaukee in the west, 34 million Americans are revolutionizing the sound of English. Linguists first noted aspects of the change in the late 1960s.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Many years ago, George Carlin [rest his warped, funny soul] did a monologue of *colloquialisms* that was brilliant! I’ve never been able to *find* it again.
Ayuh. ;-)
More recently I noticed Paul Ryan using the almost-two-syllable short a, as in cyat for cat.
We have that whiny sound in Chicago as well as the ‘dis’ and ‘dat’
That's a Pennsylvania thing and probably a number of other places.
I know a guy in Pittsburgh named Bawb who has a jawb working in a shawp. I also know a guy in Cleveland named Bob who has a job working in a shop.
I know a goy from lawngoyland who can draw-ur great cartoons. I went to see the guy from Long Island to learn how to draw cartoons.
My Chicago accent really comes out on words like “car” and “God”/”Wisconsin”/”C’mon!”
Note: this topic is from . Thanks JerseyanExile.
Not to worry.
100 years from now the lingua franca will be Spanglish
I was born in Indy and we don’t talk like that.
Not exactly. For instance: In the City of Monroe people have southern accents because so many moved up from Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, you get the picture.
Out county, however, the accent is NOT southern at all. My spouse who is from Western Wayne county calls it Monrovian and he can pick it out when people speak. It is very fast speech and sometimes mumbly. I have been asked if I was from Cleveland...yeah, sort of, my family moved from that area 150 years ago.
Toledoans also have distinctive speech and since I have always lived so close to the border that is probably in there, too.
NO ONE I know says jab for job.
I’ve been trying to get rid of my chicago accent for over twenty years ;)
“I have a shorter name for them.”
Is “sucker” still part of it?
I have relatives buried in almost every cemetery in the UP.
When I called back to the remaining few above ground I enjoy hearing the accent. My wife and I took a tour of the UK years back and we were seated at a pub bar when a fellow patron asked if we were Canadians! We had to explain close but not quite!
Go Pack Go!
I have 2 daughters-in-law from TN. Folks from Tennessee don’t consider themselves “Southern”, at least that’s what their parents told us at the wedding rehearsals. But, some of them do have a “twang”.
Southern Ohioans were drinking cwuffee back in the 70s.
Where I live 60 years ago the speech was classic Southron which is soul melting when
in a soft feminine voice. That accent is almost entirely gone now and speech is almost all some sort of Midwest Standard. You have to go out a bit from Birmingham now to hear it.
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