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I'm from DC, was raised there and in New England, and half of my family is from the South. The result is that my accent is a hodgepodge of regional and "from nowhere." That's because, I suppose, my parents and teachers were from the era when folks were taught, required really, to speak "Mid Atlantically," but Dad and his kin's accents were that, blended with a Southern drawl.
In any case, even as I heard that accent at home, I wasn't taught/required to use it, so I didn't develop the Transatlantic accent beyond minor bits of it. Too, all the kids at school had accents from everywhere, and kids being kids, it was "cooler" to sound something like one's peers than like one's teachers.
Depending on where I am, people have said my accent sounds:
Whatever my accent sounds like, what it doesn't sound like is anything that might resemble the accents heard among folks running straight through the middle of the country in a band the width of Upstate NY to Pennsylvania and running across the US to Oregon and Washington.
- Southern --> It does at times, but not usually. If I'm just back from visiting my Southern kin, yes, I sound Southern.
- "Up North Somewhere" --> Some folks, most often Southern strangers with whom I speak think my accent sounds like what they think to be a Bostonian accent. Though my accent is mildly non-rhotic, it's not at all Bostonian, but that's of no matter when someone thinks it's what one sounds like.
So what about you? Have you an accent that's typical? One that's bizarre? Or perhaps you have certain words you pronounce differently from most folks?
- My tees are never dees, and one can tell there's a tee in the word.
- "Wanted" not "wan-ed."
- "Water" not "wadder."
- My short "a" only ever sounds like an "a."
- I say "hwhat" not "wut." "What" rhymes with "swat," not "but."
- Sometimes I drop final ars, and sometimes I don't.
- Saying "mother," I do, but saying "water" I don't.
- I have aunts, not "ants."
I'm from DC, was raised there and in New England, and half of my family is from the South. The result is that my accent is a hodgepodge of regional and "from nowhere." That's because, I suppose, my parents and teachers were from the era when folks were taught, required really, to speak "Mid Atlantically," but Dad and his kin's accents were that, blended with a Southern drawl.
In any case, even as I heard that accent at home, I wasn't taught/required to use it, so I didn't develop the Transatlantic accent beyond minor bits of it. Too, all the kids at school had accents from everywhere, and kids being kids, it was "cooler" to sound something like one's peers than like one's teachers.
Depending on where I am, people have said my accent sounds:
Whatever my accent sounds like, what it doesn't sound like is anything that might resemble the accents heard among folks running straight through the middle of the country in a band the width of Upstate NY to Pennsylvania and running across the US to Oregon and Washington.
- Southern --> It does at times, but not usually. If I'm just back from visiting my Southern kin, yes, I sound Southern.
- "Up North Somewhere" --> Some folks, most often Southern strangers with whom I speak think my accent sounds like what they think to be a Bostonian accent. Though my accent is mildly non-rhotic, it's not at all Bostonian, but that's of no matter when someone thinks it's what one sounds like.
So what about you? Have you an accent that's typical? One that's bizarre? Or perhaps you have certain words you pronounce differently from most folks?
- My tees are never dees, and one can tell there's a tee in the word.
- "Wanted" not "wan-ed."
- "Water" not "wadder."
- My short "a" only ever sounds like an "a."
- I say "hwhat" not "wut." "What" rhymes with "swat," not "but."
- Sometimes I drop final ars, and sometimes I don't.
- Saying "mother," I do, but saying "water" I don't.
- I have aunts, not "ants."
I was born in Oklahoma, moved to Austin, Texas at 6 months, moved a lot more almost entirely in the South, including Louisiana, North Carolina, Alabama and Kentucky, and everywhere I went for as long as I could remember I was told I sounded like a northerner. I was guessed to be from North Dakota, Minnesota, even England once.
Then a linguistics grad student at my university told me I have an "urban Texan" accent. Mystery solved.
Clarification request:Growing up I had the horrible Mid-Atlantic accent at first but the more time I spent up in New York, the more New Yawkuh I became. I lived in Minneapolis for about five years but people insisted I was a New Yawkuh.
Spending almost thirteen years down South (Arkansas for 2.5 years and TX for ten) I picked up a lot of twang but now having been back in California since 2012 it's slipping away and the New Yawkuh is slowly coming back.
Karen grew up in Chicago. Ask her to say "hot dog" or "The Bulls" or "The Bears".
The funniest part is, both our kids twang a little bit because they grew up in Texas.
My older brother's Mid-Atlantic Maryland accent is so horrible that Karen can't talk to him without giggling sometimes.
To which he responds: "I don't HAVE an accent."
Yeah, right :lamo
Some Marylanders have twanged all their lives, it's all dependent on where in Maryland you grew up.
People sometimes say that I have an accent but they can't pinpoint it. I was born in Italy, moved to Colorado when I was 5, then lived in Alaska for 8 years, and now currently living in Florida. My mom was born in Brooklyn and my dad was born in Chicago. So I guess I picked up a slight accent from one or a few of those places.
Clarification request:
You have it pinned very very well, very accurately.
- Do you mean the Mid-Atlantic/Transatlantic accent?
- Or did you, in "red" and "blue," mean the Mid-Atlantic accent one hears with greater and lesser degrees of strength, distinguished easily by the way folks pronounce "u" and "o," throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania.
- Or were you referring to each of them, albeit the "Transatlantic" one when you wrote "Yawkuh" and the MD/PA one when you referred to yourself and your sibling?
To your first question, the latter: "....distinguished easily by the way folks pronounce "u" and "o," throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania."
That was my accent, and of course I spent most of my years there convinced that we did not HAVE an accent, even though we did. "Everyone else has an accent, not us!" (LOL)
(I moved to Minnesota and that's when I realized how different I sounded, watch the movie "Fargo". That's how most Minnesota people speak, it cracked me up.)
I know of the "Transatlantic" accent. It was taught in early and mid-20th century "diction classes" to people in order for them to sound cultured but in reality it was almost as if Americans were ashamed and were trying to emulate the Brits, as if somehow "The King's English" was superior and we were the redheaded stepchildren. It fell out of favor starting in the 1950's but I remember old teachers who still spoke that way well into the 1970's.
By the way, as you hinted, the further down 355 (Rockville Pike) you went in my days, the more twangy everything got.
When I was growing up, Frederick was pure country and people liked to speak like cowboys, and they often lived like them, on ranches and farms, because Frederick was a tiny little berg surrounded by them.
Waldorf? We used to joke about Waldorf, saying that it resembled Aintry, Georgia, the town immortalized in Burt Reynolds' "Deliverance". I made about 80 brass and copper belt buckles for the La Plata Tobacco Grower's Rodeo in 1976.
No question about it, La Plata, Brandywine and Upper Marlboro might as well have been out in the Old West back then.
Same with Western Maryland, might as well be in West "by God" Virginia.
Maryland is three distinct cultures sharing a common state border, each with its own accent.
When I said "New Yawkuh", imagine the guys in "Goodfellas", that's all.
I spent a lot of time with extended family on Long Island, and that's where that story took place, and it's based on real life experiences of Long Island legend Henry Hill.
The bar that they burnt down? It was actually Sid's Golden Dome in Atlantic Beach, three blocks from my grandmother's house, just past the Atlantic Beach Bridge.
My mother's side of the family are Italian immigrants in New York. They all sound like characters from Goodfellas, they can't help it. :lamo
I had a friend growing up who was from Boston, named Frannie Ferrara. We called him "Fwanny Fawahwah" because that's how he sounded and he claimed that "his cah could do a hunnerd and farty" (140 mph) and every time he'd say that it would slay us with laughter...good old Fwanny and his "hunnerd and farty" POS Chevelle.
Our other good friend Gary, who we called "Fathead" and who was from New Yawk, used to slap Fwanny upside the head and correct him. "It's a hundrit and fawty, you dope!"
(Deletions due to character limit)...
You have it pinned very very well, very accurately.
To your first question, the latter: "....distinguished easily by the way folks pronounce "u" and "o," throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania."
That was my accent, and of course I spent most of my years there convinced that we did not HAVE an accent, even though we did. "Everyone else has an accent, not us!" (LOL)
(I moved to Minnesota and that's when I realized how different I sounded, watch the movie "Fargo". That's how most Minnesota people speak, it cracked me up.)
I know of the "Transatlantic" accent. It was taught in early and mid-20th century "diction classes" to people in order for them to sound cultured but in reality it was almost as if Americans were ashamed and were trying to emulate the Brits, as if somehow "The King's English" was superior and we were the redheaded stepchildren. It fell out of favor starting in the 1950's but I remember old teachers who still spoke that way well into the 1970's.
By the way, as you hinted, the further down 355 (Rockville Pike) you went in my days, the more twangy everything got.
When I was growing up, Frederick was pure country and people liked to speak like cowboys, and they often lived like them, on ranches and farms, because Frederick was a tiny little berg surrounded by them.
Waldorf? We used to joke about Waldorf, saying that it resembled Aintry, Georgia, the town immortalized in Burt Reynolds' "Deliverance". I made about 80 brass and copper belt buckles for the La Plata Tobacco Grower's Rodeo in 1976.
No question about it, La Plata, Brandywine and Upper Marlboro might as well have been out in the Old West back then.
Same with Western Maryland, might as well be in West "by God" Virginia.
Maryland is three distinct cultures sharing a common state border, each with its own accent.
...
I had a friend growing up who was from Boston, named Frannie Ferrara. We called him "Fwanny Fawahwah" because that's how he sounded and he claimed that "his cah could do a hunnerd and farty" (140 mph) and every time he'd say that it would slay us with laughter...good old Fwanny and his "hunnerd and farty" POS Chevelle.
Our other good friend Gary, ... who was from New Yawk, used to slap Fwanny upside the head and correct him. "It's a hundrit and fawty, you dope!"
Blue:
In that part of the US' history, Americans looked to Europe as went matters of culture -- France and Italy for art and fashion; England for behavior, speech, social norms, etc. I don't know whether folks felt ashamed of being Americans, but they certainly thought of Europeans as the models of what sophistication was.
Brown:
A Chevelle was a great car, or at least I thought so. One of the guys in my club had one. It was "chick magnet."
You have influences from "all over." I do too. Do you find that if you spend a lot of time in a region that sometimes your accent begins to slightly mimic theirs?
Ages ago, I spent several months living in London. When I got home, my wife, kids, the neighbor, the guy at the dry cleaners, etc. said I sounded British. Folks in London didn't think so, but folks back home sure did. Two days later it was gone.
When I visit my relatives in the South, I come back with a light Southern lilt. Of course, Dad was Southern, so even as a kid, I had plenty of Southern influence. Dad's Southern accent softened when he was in DC, but got stronger when he vacationed in the South. Momma's accent gets more "old movie" when her siblings visit, and softens a day or so after they leave.
Let's boil this down to the heart of the matter...
Do you say ant or aunt to describe a relative?
You have influences from "all over." I do too. Do you find that if you spend a lot of time in a region that sometimes your accent begins to slightly mimic theirs?
Ages ago, I spent several months living in London. When I got home, my wife, kids, the neighbor, the guy at the dry cleaners, etc. said I sounded British. Folks in London didn't think so, but folks back home sure did. Two days later it was gone.
When I visit my relatives in the South, I come back with a light Southern lilt. Of course, Dad was Southern, so even as a kid, I had plenty of Southern influence. Dad's Southern accent softened when he was in DC, but got stronger when he vacationed in the South. Momma's accent gets more "old movie" when her siblings visit, and softens a day or so after they leave.
I have a thick and unmistakable 6:00 O'clock news accent. Numerous accent reduction classes have not diminished it.
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