North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)

The bit I find neat is the rhotic 'R'. Most of the US says 'R'... not quite as strong as pirates did (I'll get to that) but the 'r' is there. A British woman who I worked (from London) didn't have the 'r' sound "car park" sound to my ear like "ca pack". In England, the rhoticity was found in the poorer and rural parts of the country during the age of discovery. The ship builders, the people who were…

Reddit[1] made me aware of 2 specific examples: "pin" == "pen" : http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/81929757765/cather-wren-... "soda" vs "pop" vs "coke": http://popvssoda.com/ All the examples I've seen overlap closely with the Southern belt of states. For a more HN-flavored survey, I wonder if there's a clear regional boundary for "tuple". I've heard it pronounced "too-pull" (sorta like "pupil") and "tuppel" (like "couple"). Don't know if that's an East vs West coast thing or a Cambridge/Oxford/England vs…

I was wondering if the map would capture the Alaska Mat-Su Valley/Minnesota connection. Back in Fall 2008, people started asking me why I, being from Minnesota, talked like Sarah Palin, doncha know. I was amused to discover an article that October which explained that the US Government had relocated a bunch of Minnesotans to Alaska in the 1930s[1] as part of a government relief program, eh. edit: regarding that American accent quiz elsewhere in the thread[2], I score a 93%…

New Orleans drops mic... I'm from River Ridge in the Jefferson Parish suburbs ( within the city area ) and if I meet a stranger somewhere else in the country they, after one or two sentences, usually think I'm from New York. But slipping into one of the many dialects we have here is never far away, depending on who you are conversing with. Only locals will understand, but my wife used to tell me that after 2 sentences my…