The Texas Accent: Bush vs. Perry

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Ben

An article in the Star-Telegram this week compares the Texas accents of Governor Rick Perry with that of George W. Bush. Apparently, Perry’s accent triggers some negative associations with our last president.

For reference, here’s a clip of Perry speaking:

I’d suggest that Perry’s Bush-esque haircut and furrowed brow are more to blame for the Bush comparisons than his accent. Both men are from West Texas (sort of), but Perry’s relaxed speaking style doesn’t remind me of “W.”  Nevertheless, there have been a flurry of observations of this sort:

“If you close your eyes and listen to him speak, you’d swear it was George W. Bush,” a writer with ABC’s The Note blog wrote. “His accent, cadence and pronunciations are almost identical.”

I don’t agree with that assessment. And turning to an actual academic’s perspective, this quote a few paragraphs later downplays the association:

But overall, Perry sounds more West Texan than Bush, said Lars Hinrichs, an assistant English professor at the University of Texas, who heads the Texas English Project.

He attributes the difference to Bush’s roots in the Northeast and time spent in schools outside Texas.

“Bush’s accent features are relatively light,” Hinrichs said. “Pen and pin sound the same for somebody with a West Texas accent. Perry does that all the time. Bush doesn’t do that at all.”

Bush’s notable lack of the pin-pen merger (most of the time) is puzzling. I usually find the merger to be the tell-tale sign of Southerners without other salient accent features. To take a celebrity example, Courtney Cox, of Friends fame, eliminated most of her Alabama drawl except the pin-pen merger.* Even I, who left Kentucky at the age of two, will occasionally exhibit a slight hint of the feature. Why does this seem to be the one aspect of Texas English that Bush avoids?

But back to the Perry-Bush comparison.  A problem in analyzing Bush’s speech is that our impressions of his accent mostly derive from his time as president. I found him to be a very uneasy commander-in-chief, which seemed to have resulted in his strange, over-enunciated “presidential idiolect.”  (Watching this interview with Bush from last year felt like watching a completely different man).

If I see any similarity between Bush and Perry, it’s in their “voice quality.”  Trying to imitate either of these men, I find that I tend to tighten my jaw and raise my velum (the part of the tongue near the back of the mouth). That is to say, there seems to be something contricted or “tense” about their speech, which may or may not be typical of West Texans.  Outside of this vague impression, however, Perry and Bush merely seem like speakers of the same accent.

Any Texas dialect fans out there to comment?

*I bring this up this random example after watching a Friends rerun in which she repeatedly pronounced the name “Jennie” in a manner homophonous with Northern American “Ginnie.”

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Quebec English

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Ben
Quebec City

Quebec City (Wikimedia)

Quebec English is a broad term used for the dialects (both foreign and native) spoken in North America’s great Francophone province. There is a cultural divide between Quebec and English-speaking Canada, making it tricky to suss out what marks a “Quebec accent.” So we’ll start with a specific question: what is Quebecois English’s relationship to “Anglo-Canadian” English?

For clarity, I’m going to focus on one obvious feature of Canadian accents: the Canadian raising of the diphthong in “about” before voiceless consonants (resulting in the notorious “aboot” parody).  Let’s look at this vowel in the speech of three natives of Quebec, each with different relationships to the English language.

First up is this interview with former Canadian PM Jean Chrétien.  (No need to listen to the whole thing.) Chrétien grew up a good 130 km Northeast of Montreal, and as such, was raised away from the Anglophone communities of Western Quebec. As such, his accent is quite “foreign-sounding,” particularly notable in his occasional omission of /s/ at the end of plural words.* Likewise, at 1:48 in the video he says the word “about” in a manner which doesn’t strike me as typical of Canadian raising.  I would deem the marked Canadian English influence on his accent minimal, at best.

Then there is this interview with musician Regine Chassagne, a native of Montreal. Chassagne’s accent is clearly influenced by her native language (note the interesting assortment of /r/ pronunciations), but I find her speech much closer to that of a native English speaker than Chrétien’s. Turning to “about,” however, her pronunciation of the word at 1:12 in the video doesn’t exhibit Canadian raising.

But what about Anglophone natives of Montreal? This interview with music legend Leonard Cohen (who was raised and still resides in Montreal) clearly indicates the presence of Canadian raising — note the various pronunciations of “house” and “about” in the first three minutes of the video.  So it would be inaccurate to say that Montreal is entirely divorced from Anglophone Canadian English.

I have no conclusions to offer, of course, since we’ve only looked at three examples and one phoneme. But my tentative impression is that “native” English speakers in Quebec are likely to have features of Canadian English. “Non-native” Quebec speakers, even if they speak the language with near-native fluency, are likely to adopt an accent that, while recognizably North American, is less markedly Canadian.

Interestingly, after doing this quick comparison, I read something on Rick Aschmann’s dialect map site that is quite similar:

For a while I had thought … I had found an area in Southeastern Quebec where Canadian raising did not apply, Specifically the cities of Montreal and Sherbrooke. However, the samples I had selected were ethnic French speakers, and even though their English showed no trace of a French accent, Chris Harvey says that ethnic French speakers are not the best samples of the native English Montreal accent … It seems my entire idea was wrong that, because the Stanstead area was settled by Americans, they would still speak like Americans rather than Canadians. Apparently the “Badge of Identity” applies here, too!

My knowledge of Quebec French itself, I should mention, is quite shaky.  If anybody knows anything about Quebec French and how it influences the English spoken in the province, let me know!

*An obvious point to many readers, but the French language differentiates between singular and plural nouns. However, as plurality is often indicated through vowels or contextual clues in spoken French, this can result in some curiously s-less plurals when French speakers learn English.

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California English and the “Gay Accent”

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Ben
Castro District

The Castro District, San Francisco

Is there such a thing as a “gay accent?”  I wouldn’t even touch this question were there not a decent amount of scholarly research about it.  The notion of “talking gay,” after all, is a staple of homophobic parody.   So before going further, let me state that I believe gay men speak with as wide an array of voices as heterosexual men.  I don’t give credence to the idea of a universal “gay voice.”

That being said, a recent article in American Speech suggests that a certain type of subcultural “gay accent” is not only a measurable phenomenon, but may have a unique relationship to a regional variety of English.

The study in question is Robert J. Podesva’s The California Vowel Shift and Gay Identity.  Podesva analyzed recordings of a single gay man living in San Francisco, Regan, in three different contexts:  a night out drinking, a private dinner with a friend, and a meeting with his boss.  As the situation becomes more informal, Podesva finds that Regan’s accent becomes notably more “Californian.”

California English is marked by the California Vowel Shift, an academic term for something many Americans recognize:  the Valley girl accent is an exaggerated example of this shift.  The vowel in “bid” shifts toward the vowel in “bed,” “bed” shifts toward “bad,” and “bad” toward “bod” (how very Californian).  Meanwhile, the vowels in “bud,” “bode” and “boot” all shift frontward.

What Podesva finds with Regan is that this shift is much less pronounced when he is talking to his boss than when he is out with friends.  In particular, Regan exhibits three markers of California English in this latter situation:  the word “bad” is pronounced with a vowel closer to the vowel in “bod,” and the vowels in “boot” and “boat” are both pronounced fronter.

Podesva concludes:

In this article, I have argued that features of the [California Vowel Shift] can be used in particular gay styles (Regan’s gay “partier” persona) because regional accents index a range of meanings much richer than geographic location. In particular, the CVS indexes “fun” and “laid-back” meanings that derive from stereotypical California character types (valley girl, surfer, stoner, slacker), whose circulation led to the enregisterment of California ways of speaking.

An arguable limitation of Podesva’s study in that his subject lives in California. Does the English of the Golden State influence the speech of gay men elsewhere in the country?

My own impressions suggest this may be the case. I have, even before reading Podesva’s article, noticed some curiously Californian accent features of gay men in New York City. For example, the young (and openly gay) fashion designer Christian Siriano exhibits quite a few features that are typical of California English, despite neither growing up in nor living in California:

Siriano’s vowel for “that” and similar words is notably backer and lower than in most American accents, and, as Podesva notes with Regan, the vowels in “goat” and “goose” are also a good deal fronter as well.

Podesva argues that gay men may adopt these features because California English is associated with “fun” or “lightness.” I’d be interested in seeing if there is a generational divide: most of the pop cultural references Podesva mentions are from the 1980’s and 90’s. Is this a more recent phenomenon?  Do older gay American men exhibit such features?

I’m also curious if there are similar regional accents that influence the “gay accent” of other countries. Is there a regional accent that influences “gay” speech in the UK? Ireland? Australia?

Citation:

Podesva, Robert J (2011).  The California Vowel Shift and Gay Identity.  American Speech, 86.1, 32-49.

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“Craic” on Twitter

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Ben

A Cracked EggCraic (pronounced “crack”) is a word used in various Irish dialects which puzzles me. I understand the general meaning of the word, which roughly translates to “something enjoyable.” Therefore a good craic is synonymous with “a good time.” Craic can be replaced with “party,” “movie,” “date,” or some other kind of fun event.

But there are other meanings of craic that are less clear to me. For example, I was riding in a van with an Irish pub owner a few years back (long story). I had recently begun dating my now-significant other, a fact which prompted the question “What’s the craic with you and Caitlin?”

In this sense, craic seems comparable to the American use of “deal” (as in what’s the deal with that?). Craic can therefore mean something like “situation.” Or, as in the phrase “What’s the craic?” it refers to  some type of news.

To illustrate further uses of “craic,” I decided to do a little experiment on Twitter. I ran a search for “craic,” and found the following uses in various tweets:

“Might have a wee small flutter for the craic of it.” (i.e. craic = “fun”)

“What’s this “moving to Paris” craic about?” (i.e. craic = “nonsense/gossip”)

“I imagine it’s a Guinness and twee craic-fest that would nauseate me” (i.e. craic = “drunken rowdiness?”)

“It’s gonna be the craic!” (i.e. craic = “the best time ever!”)

Although the meaning of all these uses hovers around “fun” or “news,” they’re used in very different ways, grammatically-speaking. I might also draw your attention to  this Tweet:

“Wanna take a craic at Irish Pres engagements?”

Americans will notice that craic is used here in pretty much the same way that an American would colloquially use “crack.” This is most likely because Irish craic and American/Southern British “crack” (in the abstract sense of the word) seem to have a similar derivation.

Craic, despite its Irish-type spelling, is not a term native to the Irish language, but rather a dialect word from Northern England and Scotland that passed into Irish vocabulary at some point.  All of these “crack/craic”-type words have an even earlier ancestor: you can find indications of this in American terms such as “to crack up,” “wisecrack,” or to “crack a joke.”*

And yet, despite the non-nativeness of craic, it seems to have become an unlikely symbol of Irish identity. Craic may eventually be the Irish equivalent of Swedish lagom or Hawaiian Aloha, words the very untranslatability of which becomes a source of national pride. And in a nation known for homey pubs, céilís and impromptu sing-alongs, craic seems very appropriate.

Still, it remains slightly unfathomable to me. Any native “craic” users care to interject?

*To be honest, I’ve cobbled this etymology together from various Wikipedia articles and online dictionaries.  If anyone knows of a more scholarly explanation of craic, let me know!

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Ulster Scots and Appalachian English

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Ben

I’ve had conversations with several commenters about the Scots Irish, and their impact on Appalachian English in the United States. This region was largely settled in the 18th-Century by “ethnically Scottish” immigrants from what is present-day Northern Ireland, hence the “Scots-Irish” moniker. For a frame of reference, this short documentary offers numerous samples of the dialect spoken in the Appalachian region:

The Scots-Irish have lent quite a bit of vocabulary to Appalachian English. But unlike the accents of contemporary Northern Ireland, which are clearly influenced by Scots and Scottish English, Appalachian English isn’t as patently “Scottish”-sounding. Why is this?

I see two possible answers to this question. The first relates to Ulster Scots, the Germanic language that would have been spoken by the earliest Scots-Irish settlers. Notably, this language is still heard in contemporary Northern Ireland, but is emphatically not spoken in Appalachia. This suggests that there was, for reasons that are unclear, much more pressure to speak “standard” forms of English* there than in Ulster. Hence, Scots had far less time to influence the English spoken in the United States.

But there is another important point that is often missed here. Note the following summary of Scotch-Irish migration to the US, from Wikipedia:

From 1710 to 1775, over 200,000 people emigrated from Ulster to the 13 Colonies, from Maine to Georgia. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania. From that base some went south into Virginia, the Carolinas and across the South, with a large concentration in the Appalachian region; others headed west to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest.

As this well-documented migration patterns implies, the Scots-Irish took a detour through Pennsylvania (and perhaps other states) before heading down to the inland South. Which invites the question: what about the children?

It’s logical to think that the offspring of these Ulster-Scots speaking immigrants would have picked up the accents of American English spoken in the areas where they first settled. By the time the Scots-Irish reached Appalachia, isn’t it possible that the younger generation already spoke with some type of “American” accent?

I haven’t come to any conclusions myself, but I find the question of how much the Scots-Irish influenced Appalachian English an endlessly fascinating debate.

*I am aware that Appalachian English might not be considered “standard” by many people.  But, it isn’t Ulster Scots, despite some apparently lexical and grammatical influence.

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When did Americans Stop “Talking British?”

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Ben

North AmericaAs the title of this post suggests, I often hear questions along the lines of, “when did Americans stop talking like British people?” Many readers, of course, know that history offers no such easy answers. But it’s a topic worth delving into.

Most scholars have roughly located “split off” point between American and British English as the mid-18th-Century. There are some clear exceptions. Eastern New England, New York City, and the Coastal South all seem to have maintained various degrees of contact with the “Old World,” and hence adopted some later British innovations. But as a whole, American English started going its own course around the time of the Revolutionary War.

How would these colonials have talked? Everything I’ve read suggests their accent would not have been radically different from today’s General American spectrum of accents.* More marked regional accents would have been different, however. It’s unlikely, for example, that most Southerners spoke with what we think of today as a Southern Accent.

That being said, it’s clear to me that British English has seen at least as much of a change than American English. So the more pertinent question is, when did Britons stop talking like Americans?

Let me answer this by turning to the Survey of English Dialects, a massive collection of (mostly rural) English dialects compiled in the 1950’s. I’ve perused through this collection for years now, and one thing that strikes me the most is how many “cousins” of American English there used to be in the UK.

For example, two obvious indicators of American English are rhoticity (pronouncing the r’s at the end of words) and the use of an unrounded vowel in words like “lot” and “cod” (“laht,” “cahd,” etc). And yet, if you look through the notes for SED recordings you’ll find both these features throughout a huge band of Southern England, extending from the West Country to Kent, with the latter feature (unrounded “lot”) extending further, up to Norfolk.

So in some sense, there are pockets of England where people didn’t really stop talking like “Americans” until the 20th-Century. That is, if you see American English as part of a larger continuum of Southern England-derived dialects*.

Regardless of the degree to which these older rural dialects are extinct now, the fact is not so much that the British stopped talking like Americans, so much as urban British dialects became the type of English spoken by a majority of the English populace. Particularly London.

In essence, something happened in Southern England that didn’t happen in America. Whereas the local dialects of New York City (the largest city in the US) have remained largely confined to a small portion of that metropolitan area, the dialects of London (the UK’s largest city) have been spreading their influence in various ways for hundreds of years.

In my opinion, these two countries went in very different linguistic directions because their populations went in different directions (both literally and figuratively).  England saw rapid industrialization in the 19th-Century, and with it a change in demographics from rural to urban.  The American people, despite great hubs of industrialization like New York and Chicago, remained a mostly rural population for a very long time.  The two types of English reflects their history.

Obviously, though, this is an incredibly complex topic. Anybody have any insights of their own?

*Perhaps debatable, but regardless …

**In Volume 1 of The Accents of English, John C. Wells notes one prominent difference: many people would have still had “raised” pronunciations of words like “kite” and “mouth” (similar to Irish accents today).

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Singlish

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Ben

As I’m strapped for time today, I’ll open up the floor to a question: does anybody know anything about Singlish?

This term refers to a creole language in Singapore, a mix of English and various East Asian languages. The spectrum of English in the country seems similar to that of Jamaica, with several “Englishes” ranging from full-on creole to Standard English spoken with a Singaporean accent. This last variant can be found in the video below, which comes from what I’m presuming is a television show:

For the most part, the actors here seem to be speaking standard English (that is, the “acrolect” of Singlish). I found the speech of the daughter particularly interesting: she speaks with what appears to be a unique, native accent of English that I’m unacquainted with. When talking about non-foreign English dialects, we regrettably tend to overlook this part of the world.

You’ll notice I don’t have a clip for Singlish creole, however. Most videos of this language online seem to serve a political purpose: to portray Singlish as improper and destructive.  This hateful crank call by an FM radio station is just one example. Debates about creole in Singapore make similar conversations in the Caribbean seem tame by comparison.

Why the animosity over a language so unique?

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Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged | 20 Comments

Did Yiddish Shape the New York Accent?

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Ben

One of the first dialect anecdotes I heard was from the director of my high school production of Guy’s and Dolls. “The Brooklyn accent is dying out,” she said. “There isn’t as much of a Jewish presence there anymore.” This analysis might imply that Yiddish, the traditional language of Eastern European jews, had a particularly seminal role in shaping the New York City accent.

What I find fascinating about Yiddish is that, for a language with such an iconic status, you don’t hear much of it in the media or the street. Yes, we’ve all heard borrowings such as klutz, schmuck and spiel, but do we really know what Yiddish sounds like?

Here’s a sample, courtesy of this older gentleman telling a joke:

Spoken Yiddish, I admit, surprises me. It’s very clearly a Germanic language, a fact  forgotten amidst all the mythology surrounding it. And to be honest, I find fewer obvious similarities to New York City English than I would expect.

That being said, Jewish New York English (JNYE?) has long been identified as an ethnolect within the spectrum of the New York City dialect. So this specific variety must have Yiddish influences, right?

Maybe. There has been a theory for several decades now that relates to the distinctive “Jewish” New York pronunciation of words like coffee, thought and raw. In JNYE, these words have a high, diphthongal vowel (“caw-uhfee,” “thaw-uht,” “raw-uh,” i.e. IPA [ʊə].)  Anybody who watched Saturday Night Live in the early ’90’s will remember Mike Myers’ Cawfee Tawk with Linda Richmond segment, exaggerating this very pronunciation.

One supposed explanation* is that early Jewish immigrants, lacking a clear vowel for words like strut and cup would use an “aw” ([ɔ]) sound instead. The immigrants’ children, trying to make a more clear distinction between this vowel and the vowel in “thought,” “coffee,” etc, clearly distinguished it by pronouncing it closer in the mouth. Hence “caw-uhfee.”

I haven’t read enough about this theory to say if I agree or not. But if true, it may explain some of the other salient features of Jewish New York speech.  For example, are the vowels in the words goat and goose, which have very diphthongal qualities in broad Jewish New York accents, reactions against more monophthongal pronunciations in an earlier type of “Yiddish” English?

In other words, are some New York accents reactions against Yiddish?

These are tough questions to answer, because Yiddish is, after all, a foreign language. I doubt immigrants at the turn of the 20th-Century spoke with any kind of uniform accent of English. As such, it’s hard to say which aspects of the Yiddish language impacted the New York accent (or didn’t).

And I must say, many  “Jewish” New York features are pronunciations I’ve also heard in Irish, Italian and Chinese New Yorkers**.  And to be clear, I haven’t remotely read everything there is to read on the New York accent and its possible sources.  So what exactly is “Jewish” New York English (if it exists anymore?) And how much did Yiddish play a part in its development?

*William Labov has mentioned this theory, but I can’t remember the degree to which he endorses it.

**Something I’ve been surprised by (but probably shouldn’t be) is that first-generation Chinese-American New Yorkers who grew up in Chinatown often have some of the most marked New York accents I’ve heard in Manhattan.

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Multicultural London English is not “Jafaican”

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Ben
Brixton Tube Station

Wikimedia

The Telegraph’s Ed West recently published an editorial titled Jafaican may be cool but it sounds ridiculous, that I find appalling.  I respect West for having politics different from my own, but that’s no excuse for slandering a legitimate dialect of English in such a shoddy, clueless manner.

Jafaican is slang for Multicultural London English, a dialect spoken in the inner city of London which has a fair amount of Carribean influence thanks to the city’s West Indian population.  The accompanying accent is marked by vowels that are more “conservative” than those in Cockney or other types of London English.*  This makes “Jafaican” speakers coincidentally sound more like Northern English accents to my American ears, although I admit this is totally impressionistic.

Let’s get right to the meat of West’s piece, though, with this paragraph:

And I don’t think an aversion to Jafaican (fake Jamaican), which according to the Sunday Times (£, obviously) will have completely replaced Cockney by 2030, is racial. The West Indian accent from which it came is fairly pleasant, nice enough for various drink makers to use it to flog us their products. However, its by-product is rather unpleasant, sinister, idiotic and absurd.

Anybody who appears to only associate Carribean English with cheerful Jamaican bartenders doesn’t strike me as the best source of sociolinguistic commentary.  But that doesn’t stop West, who summarizes his thesis thus:

… the rise of Received Pronunciation reflected a desire by the lower-middle class and provincials to embrace the values, lifestyles and habits of the British upper-middle class. In London the adoption of Jafaican, even among the privately-educated, reflects both a lack of confidence in British cultural values and an aspiration towards some form of ghetto authenticity.

West’s argument, such as it is, is that there is something troubling about such a small “minority” (West Indians) wielding a powerful influence over London’s dialect.  Of course, Cockney itself was most likely influenced by such minorities, but I’ll let that quibble slide for now.

What’s more troubling is that West implies that one non-standard dialect of English (Cockney) is authentically British, while relegating another non-standard dialect of English (Multicultural London English) to some kind of “semi-foreign” status.  Which is frankly xenophobic hypocrisy.

Furthermore, West doesn’t expand upon his specific objections to “Jafaican.”  Does he have a problem with how West Indians have impacted the pronunciation of English in London?  If so, I hate to break it to him, but pronunciation in London English has been known to change over the past thousand years.  Even the most conservative of Cockney is quite different in 2011 than it would have been in Dicken‘s time.

On the other hand, if West objects to Multicultural London English from a prescripitivist grammarian standpoint, then why does Cockney = good, while Jafaican = bad?  Cockney ain’t no model of standard grammar.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Perhaps I’m misinterpreting West’s point, though, which is that in the “old days” the lower-classes strove “upward” toward RP, whereas now they stive “downward” toward these Caribbean-influenced varieties.  But “covert prestige” dialects (i.e. dialects that are technically lower on the social scale but adopted by higher classes for a variety of reasons) are nothing new.  Let’s not pretend that middle-class young men trying to sound like they grew up working-class is a recent phenomenon.

So, then, West objects to this specific dialect of English for reasons that are unclear.  This isn’t a writer bravely fighting against an increasingly “PC” world.  It’s just an ignorant rant.

*The details are as follows, for those with a bit more knowledge of phonetics:  the GOAT set is further back and sometimes more monopthongal in quality than in Cockney, the STRUT vowes is also more back, the onglide of KITE fronter and possibly more monophthongal as well, the FACE dipthong is closer, the MOUTH dipthong often becomes a centralized monopthong, but, going in the opposite direction from these pronunciations, the GOOSE vowel is often FRONTER than other London accents.

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Accent Humor: Pittsburghese

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Ben

Accent humor is often mean-spirited and stereotypical. But  I can’t resist sharing this loving parody of the Pittsburghese (created by comedians who grew up in the area):

The actors are exaggerating this accent a bit, but the salient features of the Pittsburgh accent are all here:

*A back, rounded pronunciation of words like “Donny” and “stop” (“dawny,” “stawp”, i.e. IPA [ɒ:].)

*Very fronted pronunciations of the dipthong “go,” “don’t,” and “no,” (IPA [ɜʊ]) as well as the vowel in “do” and “goofy” (IPA [ʉ]) (similar to London, Philadelphia and many American Southern accents.)*

*And of course, the vowel in downtown or now becomes a low-central monopthong (IPA [a:]), most comically at 1:03 in the video (“Go on and get that nah, stop screwin’ arahnd!”)

The characters here are supposedly from Johnstown, about 60 miles outside Pittsburgh, and I’m guessing the actual Johnstownian accent is milder than Pittsburghese.   Accuracy aside, though, this is a pretty spot-on caricature of the regional dialect as a whole.

Pittsburghese has remained a fairly obscure dialect within American culture.  (The city has never had been as iconic as New York, Boston or Chicago.)  As someone not particularly acquainted with the region, its accents sounds like an interesting mishmash of Eastern New England, American Southern, Philadelphia and Great Lakes accents (which is fitting given Pittsburgh’s location between the East, South, Midwest and North.)

Western PA was the original heartland of the Scots-Irish immigrants who arrived in America in the 18th-Century.  There are some indicators of this influence in the dialect, namely the second-person plural yinz (This Pittsburgh verson of “youse” or “y’all.”).  Although the accent itself has very little that would suggest an Ulster or Scottish influence.

The funniest part about the above video, of course, is that the characters seem blissfully unaware they even have an accent.  It’s an absurdity found wherever English is spoken, whether we’re talking about an Oxford Don who thinks his accent is “neutral,” or a Michigander who thinks he speaks “normal American English.”  The English-speaking world is filled with those who think they “don’t have an accent.”

*Rough approximations.  As you can tell from the video, these vowels show a lot of variation.

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