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Out of curiosity, I did an accent test online. I recorded myself saying the Preamble (which I know by heart, something that seems unlikely for our bumbling Chief Justice, but I digress), uploaded it, told people that I was doing a linguistic analysis test, and asked them to group the accent into one of ten American regions (i.e. New England, Midwest, Mountain South, California, etc.) Virtually everybody said California, Lower Midwest, or Upper Midwest; the first two I can see, but Upper Midwest? Those people (Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, etc.) have a serious problem with vowels, and if I thought that I sounded like the people in Fargo (or, horror of horrors, Sarah Palin) I would likely be heading to an accent correction program. But who knows? One outlier said that I sounded like a person from the Mid-Atlantic, between Baltimore and New York, because of the "nasal quality" behind my words. Hmm, not quite sure what that means. But overall, the general consensus was that I have a neutral accent - there's no way I could ever (easily) pass as someone from Maine or Alabama, places with exaggerated regional accents. I remember traveling to Colorado about 6 years ago with some people who had very thick Southern accents. A person asked me, at one point, where I was from, because I didn't sound like the other people with whom I was traveling - but we had all, in fact, grown up in the same town. Hence the point of this post - accents are funny things! For the record, I've never taken "accent classes" or anything of the nature. Like the gay thing, this is part of who I am - this is my natural accent.
Accents are a funny thing, even just looking at the diversity of them on my mother's side of the family (the side that is rooted in Kentucky, and the side that I've spent 90% of my life around, thus the only ones I'll discuss here.) My mother herself could have passed for someone from rural Ohio; she was largely "neutral" and plain spoken, although she did mix in certain regionalisms ("pop" for soda, her "wash" sometimes started to sound like "warsh") that are shared between Ohio River communities in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. My grandmother sounds very much like Steve Beshear, Kentucky's current governor. She's very amusing to listen to, there's a certain melodic quality to her words. She has a brother who lives in Louisville and sounds like John Yarmuth, Louisville's Congressman (and one of my favorite politicians, one of the few unabashed liberals from a state that has as of late a record for electing evolution-agnostic Bible-thumping clowns); it's a flat accent that most people would say could be from Anywhereville, USA. I have some relatives who sound like they just sort of dug themselves out of some hill in Pike County - extremely thick accents - others with "moderated" accents, and some with no accents at all. These are people who grew up together in the same house, and since most of them did not go to college or live elsewhere, those usual factors are not at play. Amusingly, I have an uncle who was born and raised in Kentucky until his adult years, but moved to Canada shortly after and now sounds like a stereotypical Canadian, "eh's" and all.
Florida, too, is an odd case, and my particular Florida story is even odder. I was raised in a part of Florida where people could very easily pass for Alabamans (not just in terms of the accent, either, but I again digress.) Curiously I never developed that accent, even as I grew up largely surrounded by people who did. I sound like my mom, but doesn't it typically work the other way around - for instance, don't the second-generation immigrants, born to parents with thick accents from whatever part of the world they come from, typically develop the accent of their region in America as opposed to their parents? Interesting question. My particular case is also odd (though considering my flat accent it is normal) because overall the Southern accent is quite rare in Florida, particularly on the coasts and south of Gainesville-Ocala. If a Floridian does have an accent, it is typically the one that they brought with them from Brooklyn, Boston, Minneapolis, Tel Aviv, Caracas, or wherever else in the world they hail from. Since we're one of the few places in the world where transplanted citizens outnumber native-born residents (and even most of the "native-born" Floridians, like me, have no history in the state beyond our parents), this is to be expected. I'm actually doing research on the great cultural split in Florida, and had mentioned it in this post. For the record, just over 80% of Floridians live in those green and blue counties on that map.
And even beyond accent, some words are just odd. I cringe when I hear people in the South saying "y'all", but am equally irritated when I hear people in the Midwest (and even parts of Western New York and Western Pennsylvania) use "pop" to refer to soda. How I ended up a "soda" kid when 100% of the people in my family say "pop" is beyond me. And I grew up in a community where they say neither, instead tending to refer to all soft drinks as "coke." That gets really annoying really quickly - to order a Coke in a restaurant and be handed a Pepsi, to the extent that I now automatically ask what type of soda is served, although most Americans understand that "Coke" is not a category, but a brand name for one particular type of soda.
So accents are admittedly funny things. I'm 21 and still sort of confused as to where in the living hell mine came from. My mom, sure, but it's a bit more complicated than that, given both her environment and mine, and the difference on certain key words like the whole "pop" or "soda" thing. So who knows? Just one of those great mysteries in life!
Accents are a funny thing, even just looking at the diversity of them on my mother's side of the family (the side that is rooted in Kentucky, and the side that I've spent 90% of my life around, thus the only ones I'll discuss here.) My mother herself could have passed for someone from rural Ohio; she was largely "neutral" and plain spoken, although she did mix in certain regionalisms ("pop" for soda, her "wash" sometimes started to sound like "warsh") that are shared between Ohio River communities in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. My grandmother sounds very much like Steve Beshear, Kentucky's current governor. She's very amusing to listen to, there's a certain melodic quality to her words. She has a brother who lives in Louisville and sounds like John Yarmuth, Louisville's Congressman (and one of my favorite politicians, one of the few unabashed liberals from a state that has as of late a record for electing evolution-agnostic Bible-thumping clowns); it's a flat accent that most people would say could be from Anywhereville, USA. I have some relatives who sound like they just sort of dug themselves out of some hill in Pike County - extremely thick accents - others with "moderated" accents, and some with no accents at all. These are people who grew up together in the same house, and since most of them did not go to college or live elsewhere, those usual factors are not at play. Amusingly, I have an uncle who was born and raised in Kentucky until his adult years, but moved to Canada shortly after and now sounds like a stereotypical Canadian, "eh's" and all.
Florida, too, is an odd case, and my particular Florida story is even odder. I was raised in a part of Florida where people could very easily pass for Alabamans (not just in terms of the accent, either, but I again digress.) Curiously I never developed that accent, even as I grew up largely surrounded by people who did. I sound like my mom, but doesn't it typically work the other way around - for instance, don't the second-generation immigrants, born to parents with thick accents from whatever part of the world they come from, typically develop the accent of their region in America as opposed to their parents? Interesting question. My particular case is also odd (though considering my flat accent it is normal) because overall the Southern accent is quite rare in Florida, particularly on the coasts and south of Gainesville-Ocala. If a Floridian does have an accent, it is typically the one that they brought with them from Brooklyn, Boston, Minneapolis, Tel Aviv, Caracas, or wherever else in the world they hail from. Since we're one of the few places in the world where transplanted citizens outnumber native-born residents (and even most of the "native-born" Floridians, like me, have no history in the state beyond our parents), this is to be expected. I'm actually doing research on the great cultural split in Florida, and had mentioned it in this post. For the record, just over 80% of Floridians live in those green and blue counties on that map.
And even beyond accent, some words are just odd. I cringe when I hear people in the South saying "y'all", but am equally irritated when I hear people in the Midwest (and even parts of Western New York and Western Pennsylvania) use "pop" to refer to soda. How I ended up a "soda" kid when 100% of the people in my family say "pop" is beyond me. And I grew up in a community where they say neither, instead tending to refer to all soft drinks as "coke." That gets really annoying really quickly - to order a Coke in a restaurant and be handed a Pepsi, to the extent that I now automatically ask what type of soda is served, although most Americans understand that "Coke" is not a category, but a brand name for one particular type of soda.
So accents are admittedly funny things. I'm 21 and still sort of confused as to where in the living hell mine came from. My mom, sure, but it's a bit more complicated than that, given both her environment and mine, and the difference on certain key words like the whole "pop" or "soda" thing. So who knows? Just one of those great mysteries in life!
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