There are so many unique dialects hyperlocal to New Orleans, it's amazing.
Started work there at the same time as a school classmate who grew up in Jacksonville. Spent a lot of time doing engineering work on offshore drilling rigs. Told my friend I really had trouble understanding people a lot of the time. He said he did as well :-)
As much as I’m happy that kids now have access to YouTube, and thus can use the neutral influencer dialect, something about our culture is being erased.
I grew up speaking both a neutral California accent and bits of AAVE. AAVE itself is drastically different depending on the part of the US you’re in. I can barely understand southern AAVE. NYC AAVE is much faster, but I think NYC people think faster in general.
I really do believe YouTube can bring gaps. If your a kid in Albania you can see life though the eyes of someone in Oakland.
And hop on a zoom 30 minutes later to chat. This would be unimaginable 50 years ago.
This is even more true if you find old recordings.
https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=find&lan...
It was pretty easy to imagine 50 years ago. For example, Star Trek started airing 60 years ago. The Jetsons started airing a few years before that.
It was for serious business, not small talk. If you somehow knew Zoom would happen you could have created Zoom and you’d be very rich.
TBF, unimaginable is a strong word. Impractical would be better.
An unanticipated result is I have a record of our conversations, which would have all been lost if it was phone calls.
The next one down is a home system on a subscription, though just after Star Trek and expensive at the time.
I'm guessing you either don't remember or weren't alive in the 1990's. It was a whole grassroots movement and pretending it didn't exist is extremely insensitive, to put it mildly.
https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistake...
Actually you might be right depending on how integrated the area is:
Exhibit A: Your Old Droog Exhibit B: Lord Sko
As an adult my normal speaking voice is closer to a relaxed California accent. It’s clear , but it always leaves room to weasel out of certain situations.
If I could I’d probably use a Mid Atlantic Madmen accent. That accent gets things done.
Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part One) | WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A&t=271s
In previous seasons/series they didn't have the formula down yet, so 2/3rds of the episode were one literally starving person after another, just sighing into a camera about how hungry they are, how cold it is, and how nothing is changing.
Whereas in this one some people did incredibly well, others tapped out after setbacks, illness, or made thinly-veiled excuses about illness (even though they just lost the drive to stay in it). 5/5 would recommend.
The curious thing is they all claim to be survival experts, but they don't know how to build a proper fireplace (either burning down their shelter or asphyxiating themselves). None of them who used a fish net would take it out of the river during a storm, so it isn't destroyed. And there were always contestants who would spend all their calories building a log cabin, and then starvation would force them out.
You want at least one or two people to hear a bear and tap out in ep 1 or 2. And it has to be guys tapping out: if you include women, they have to be the hardiest contestants, so they don't tap out too early.
I'm not an expert on accents or anything but I think you can hear it in "dinner". Boston is the typical "R's don't exist" thing. Maine is more like "dinnyah" - your jaw kicks back a bit.
In southern Maine, the accent is moderate and is more of a general northern New England accent. Yahd = yard, that kind of thing.
The iconic Maine accent is the Downeast accent and is still kicking up/down there. It's kind of nasally and has a lilt to it. You have to dig through a morass of influencer content on youtube to find an authentic example of it, but this is a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc
But there are a number of different accents throughout Maine. My favorite without a doubt is the accent in way northern Maine, from the Allagash Valley. It's just a pleasant accent. This is a good example: https://soundcloud.com/mpbn/troy-jackson-allagash-logging
It also seems that whoever created this kind of gave up when figuring out Canadian speech patterns spanning longitude from east to west. Somebody from Kenora or Dryden or Timmins Ontario does not speak like a person from North Vancouver, BC. Vancouver region English is much closer to general west coast as it's spoken in a big city in WA, OR or California.
She goes to college in Kansas now and is still confused. Perhaps growing up with me it just sounds "normal".
I'll point her to the band, "The Embarrassment" in various interviews:
I was taught British English. I think America English is in many ways simpler, but my brain is wired to british spelling as well as pronounciation for the most part. Now it depends who has good spoken british english. One of my all-time favourites is Rowan Atkinson, but his english is kind of more theater-trained really; if you compare it to the Monty Python guys for instance. War criminal Tony Blair also has a good spoken english - not that I like the guy or find anything useful he said or did, but british english wins. Or we could go scottish - I don't quite like it as much as british english (Patrick Stewart also has a good intonation, but it's also more theater-trained than "real", per se), but one of the coolest thing ever is Gerard Butler teaching people scottish. What keeps scots apart from English is the language really. (Though, I also have to say, Sean Connery's dialect was nowhere near as funny or entertaining as Gerard's dialect. Guess even in Scotland there are diffferences.)
Irish english sounds more melodic - no wonder they kept on winning Eurovision. Paul David Hewson's voice in his prime is a great example.
I've also found African American english very interesting. One thing that keeps on tripping me up is "asking" versus "axsking". To me only the british pronounciation works, but I hear sooooo many axxing examples on youtube that I concluded that this must be widespread in the USA. I always have to think of an axe when I hear it though.
I like people who speak a more modern English from my part of London. Check out TV personality Big Narstie or football pundit Clinton Morrison. You'll love 'em.
I thought the House of Picard was from France…
My favorites are David Attenborough and BBC in general.
Examples:
Orion = "or-ee-un", Ionia = "eye-ON-nee-ah", Charlotte = "shar-lot", Milan = "MILE-an", Saline = "suh-LEEN"
Ooh, thought of another good place name like that: Quincy (/ˈkwɪn.zi/), Massachusetts! Massachusetts has a fair number of those, owing to its English settlement heritage.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
Can people here give examples of non-standard grammar or vocabulary (that goes beyond some temporary slang or subculture words)?
"Your car needs washed" instead of "you need to wash your car"
Replying "You're good" after someone apologizes.
Adding an S to the end of brand names, especially grocery stores.
I don't do this one, but my extended family in Ohio just says "please" when they mean "could you repeat that?"
Another very close variant would be "Your car needs washing".
1) AAVE's use of Copulas. In most English you form present progressive with a copula and the present participle: I am walking, I am driving, I am working. The copula contains no information on its own. In many languages, a low information word is dropped. In Spanish you say "(yo) soy Americano" meaning "(I) am American." There can be no doubt of the subject of the verb "soy" because it is inflected to match the subject, so the pronoun "yo" communicates nothing in a normal sentence and is dropped. In Russian you take the opposite tack: you say "ya Amerikanets" meaning "I (am) American)" so you drop the copula. You either need the pronoun or the verb to communicate who is American, and in this case the pronoun won. Well in AAVE you drop the copula in those present progressive sentences: "I walking," "I driving," "I working." But then there's an opportunity to put a higher information in all of these sentences: you can use "be" as a copula to express the habitual aspect. "I be walking," "I be driving," "I be working" (usually with emphasis on the "be") mean "I am in the habit of X, but don't assume that is what I am doing at this moment." Degrees can be expressed here: you can replace "be" with "stay" to get more habitual and less present. It's a trip! I'm scratching the surface here but that's a big one.
2) Related: "Needs" + past participle vs "needs" + present participle. I was working with a handyman from Colorado and he said "This sink needs sealed" or something like that. I (Northeast) would have said "this sink needs sealing." Colorado has always had over 50% of the population born outside of the state, so I don't know if that's a thing from there or from wherever his parents are from (not sure and didn't ask).
"pop" vs "soda" is a commonly discussed one. (Google to see maps).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English_regional_voca...
Another example... 'they're all' is shorthand for 'they're all gone' in Pennsylvania.
Firstly, there's regional dialects of Canadian English, and I don't just mean Newfoundland vs rest of Canada. The Ottawa Valley for example has some strong dialect markers. There's marked differences between central and southern Alberta (often not noticed by people living there, but there). Between coastal BC and Ontario, etc. etc.
Secondly because in fact the upper midwest of the US is contiguous and overlapping with much of various Canadian dialect markers. In fact many of the things people consider to be stereotypical Canadian are even more pronounced in upper midwest US dialects than they are here.
TLDR he could pay more attention to Canada :-) There's 40m of us after all.