Speaker 1: New York City. Trenton. North Carolina. Apricot Island. Mississippi. Northern Florida. That's where you get the sort of Blanche DuBois, Scarlett O'Hara kind of classical Southern accent. Hi, my name is Eric Singer. I'm a dialect coach. Today we're gonna take a little tour of some of the different accents of English-speaking North America. ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"] Now, a couple of quick disclaimers. These are by no means all the accents in North America or even all the English-speaking ones. And not everyone from the same place sounds the same. Accents vary by socioeconomic background, generation, ethnicity, and race, and all kinds of individual factors because in a very real way, accent is identity. Different people from the same place have more or less localizable accents, and that usually has to do with identity, too. Now, on some of our stops, we're gonna be looking at some of the most distinctive and interesting local features, but it doesn't mean that everyone from there has that accent or has it to the same degree. I'm also gonna have some linguists and language experts from around the continent join me today to lend their expertise in some of these areas.

Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Megan Figueroa. Hi, I'm Nicole.

Speaker 1: Peace. I'm Sanmichel.

Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Kalina.

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Amani Dori. One of the things you'll notice along the way is that accents often don't follow political boundaries, especially ones like state lines. They'll follow major geographical boundaries, things like mountains, for sure, but what regional accent differences mostly reflect is settlement patterns and contact. Historically isolated communities, like Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina or the Sea Islands in the Lowcountry in Georgia, can have really distinctive speech ways. They've had the time and isolation necessary to diverge and develop them. That's the other thing that makes for accent variety, time. There's a lot more accent diversity in the British Isles, for example, where there are local populations that have been speaking English in their particular way for hundreds and hundreds of years. And there's more accent diversity on the east coast of the US than there is west of the Mississippi. It's been settled by English speakers longer. The first places English was spoken in North America were Roanoke, Jamestown, and of course Plymouth, Massachusetts where the Pilgrims landed in 1620. So let's start there. The Pilgrims spoke with what we call rhotic accents, meaning they said all their Rs. In fact, so did almost all English speakers in 1620, including the ones in England. That's right. A Southern English accent might have used to sound something like this. It was only in the late 18th century that fashionable young people in and around London started dropping their Rs. And from there, the trend spread to America. Now, north of Plymouth Rock, we have Harvard Yard, one of the places you might hear a Boston accent today. Stereotypical Boston accents, of course, are non-rhotic, meaning no R sounds in park your car in Harvard Yard. Let's all get in the car and head south down the coast now into Rhode Island. Traditional Rhode Island accents here are still non-rhotic, but there's a key vowel difference, the placement for that vowel sound in park your car in Harvard Yard. We call this the start vowel. In Boston, it's usually pretty fronted. Park your car in Harvard Yard. In Rhode Island, it's back. Park your car in Harvard Yard. Ah, ah. Rhode Island accents were shaped by a lot of Irish and Italian immigration, just like New York City. So many accents. They don't vary by borough, by the way. That's a myth. I know you guys are gonna tell me to forget about it, but I'm sorry. Sociolinguists have studied this really carefully, and there just really isn't any such thing as a specifically Brooklyn or specifically Bronx accent. There certainly are a lot of different New York City accents, but they vary by socioeconomic background and by ethnicity and other aspects of group belonging and identity more than by neighborhood or by borough. They're historically non-rhotic, though that's changing some in the youngest generations for sure. Here's something fun most of them have in common. The tongue tip hits the teeth or close to them on T, D, and N sounds instead of a little further back. So you can hear that in like this kind of New York City accent, tongue tip on the teeth, Times Square, New York City, and this kind of New York accent. 22nd Street, Times Square, Dumbo, taxis, traffic, and so on. Okay, so you may have noticed that all of these accents I've talked about so far sound pretty white. I'm gonna take a pause here, and linguist Nicole Holliday is gonna go a little deeper on African American English varieties. My colleague, Amani Dorn, is going to demonstrate some of those accents.

Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Nicole Holliday, and I'm a linguist. As we know, New York has all kinds of people in it. African American English has a lot of shared features across regions because of its history. So black people in Africa were kidnapped and brought to what is now the United States. At the time, they didn't all speak the same languages. They spoke multiple different African languages, and those languages came into contact not only with each other, but those languages were also coming into contact with the English spoken by the colonizers. This created a situation where there was a really unusual learning exposure to English, right? So there are all of these languages in contact with each other, and for economic and survival reasons, the enslaved people had to, in some ways, acquire English, but the English that they were acquiring was not like what you learned in the classroom, right? It was under this really unusual situation of acquisition. So some of the features that we see in modern African American English are a result of this contact between the African languages as well as the English spoken by colonizers, and those features have persisted over generations. After slavery was legally ended, the majority of African Americans remained in the South but experienced really extreme segregation. This led to different varieties of English being spoken in black and white communities within the South, and even as they moved north during the Great Migration.

Speaker 1: Nicole, how did the Great Migration influence accents?

Speaker 3: The English that we see today spoken by African Americans has some features that have persisted throughout generations. TH stopping, so that might be using something like a D sound for where you see a written TH, so dat for that. You can hear that in this clip.

Speaker 4: They said I could participate online. They said I could, they said I could, they said I could participate online.

Speaker 3: L vocalization, so that's an L turning into a vowel in a word like pool or pull, might sound something like pool or puh.

Speaker 4: He said that's cool, cool, cool, cool, that's cool.

Speaker 3: We also see consonant cluster simplification. If you have a series of consonants at the end of a word, you might see them turn into just one consonant. So in a word like West, you might hear it pronounced as West.

Speaker 5: It's been a minute, but she just left, she just left, she just left. And anything specific to New York?

Speaker 3: One feature common in New York City is what we call a raised vowel in words like thought and cloth. It sounds something like ah. Coffee without froth on top isn't coffee at all,

Speaker 6: so let's get it together. Okay, let's go back to Eric.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Nicole. And even that's just the tip of the iceberg for linguistic diversity in this incredibly diverse city. Around 50% of New Yorkers speak languages other than English at home, and for half of those, that language is Spanish. Megan Figueroa is here to tell us a little bit about one of those varieties, a variety linguists call New York Latino English.

Speaker 2: New York Latino English is heavily influenced by Puerto Rican Spanish and Dominican Spanish. One remarkable feature of this variety is a light L, the sound that you would find in a word like like, love, leaf.

Speaker 1: Right, so New York Latino English speakers have a particularly light L. You can hear that in this native speaker clip.

Speaker 7: I guess growing up I know what it's like to not have a lot. I know what it's like to not have a lot, lot, lot.

Speaker 2: In contrast to the light L, when you produce the dark L, the back of your tongue blunches. So think about the words milk and pull. The lighter L was a feature of New York Latino English, but Latinx people are a very diverse group of people and they speak a variety of varieties. We'll get to more of those later.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Megan. And this single feature is a good contrast with other New York accents, by the way, because most other New York accents are pretty dark Ls. Lots of lemon lollipops, la la, I like to lick them. So now as we leave New York and head south into Jersey and towards Philadelphia, we cross a major dialect boundary, the on line. North of this line, most people say on, rhymes with Don. South of it, they say on, rhymes with Don. Of course, this doesn't apply at all if you rhyme Don and Don, only if you have two distinct pronunciations. That's called the cot-cot merger, but we'll talk more about that later. There are a few major dialect areas in the US and one of the biggest dividing lines is between Northern dialects and Midland dialects. The on line basically runs right along this boundary. So as we cross over it somewhere around Trenton, we've crossed from the North to the Midlands, dialect wise. Now another thing that starts to happen as we get down towards Philly is that the goat diphthong starts to move forwards in the mouth. So we get go, hoagies, wanna go get some hoagies? Goat gets maybe even a little further forward as we get down to Baltimore, especially, you know, down the ocean. You wanna go down the ocean on Wednesday? Let's make a quick stop in DC where Nicole has some really interesting stuff on the prosody of local African-American speakers.

Speaker 3: In my research, I study prosody, which has to do with the tone and intonation of the phrase itself. In a study, I found that African-American speakers may be more likely to ask a yes, no question with a level tone or a falling tone. For white speakers, we expect a rising tone in questions like these. So something like, did you do the dishes? But African-American speakers may be more likely to say something like, did you do the dishes? Another feature that we see in DC, similar to New York, is the raised thought cloth vowel, that ah. This is a new feature in DC, and we think it's part of a pattern of DC varieties becoming more like Northern cities as opposed to the South. You can hear that in this clip.

Speaker 8: Change is needed, but at what cost? At what cost, cost?

Speaker 6: Okay, let's go back to Eric.

Speaker 1: Now we take a quick detour over to Pittsburgh. Yids are the only people in all of North America that smooths the mouth diphthong, except for maybe Chicago sometimes. The smoothing is when you take a diphthong like ow and smooth it out so it's just one sound, ah, just like we have price smoothing in much of the South so that I smooths out to just ah, price. Same thing here, except with the mouth vowel, smoothing out to a long ah sound. Yids want to meet downtown, go shopping for catches? Heading back over to the Delmarva Peninsula, as we head down into Virginia, we get something different happening with that same mouth diphthong. Here it's gonna sound like oat, mouth, house. So it's not smoothing out here, it's raisin. The tongue starts a little higher up, uh instead of ah, so it's like oh, oat, about, house. This feature's called tidewater raisin. Something similar happens with this vowel in Canada, and there we call it Canadian raisin, but it's essentially the same thing happening. Time to get out of the house, keep heading south. Down in North Carolina, we really start to hear pretty significant goat fronting again. So the vowel sound in boat, most, hope, starts with the tongue further forwards in the mouth, oat. Interestingly, goat fronting, which is now widespread in a lot of the American South, seems to have originated in North Carolina sometime in the last part of the 19th century. Remember that regional dialect boundaries don't necessarily follow political boundaries. They follow settlement patterns and contact patterns between populations. So the inland part of North Carolina, which is in the Appalachian Highlands, the original European settlers were Scotch-Irish folks, and Germans moving southwest from Pennsylvania. Due to being relatively inaccessible and isolated for a long time, the accent is distinct from the lowlands and from the coastal areas. The isolated speech communities are fascinating, because we can get some really interesting sound patterns. Up here, you get some really dramatic face lowering, for example. So the diphthong in face starts real low, down around ah, ay, face, light, day. You'll also get some particular dialect features, so words and word order and grammar things that stretch way back to those original settlers from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Things like a-huntin' and a-fishin', and extra sounds, too, like the R sound in wash and the H sound in hit, get on with hit. Here's Nicole again to talk a little bit about African-American speech in Southern Appalachia.

Speaker 3: Hi again. So African-Americans in Appalachia are understudied, mostly because stereotypes of Appalachia are very, very white. African-Americans in Appalachia may be more likely to be rhotic, so in words like floor.

Speaker 5: Why up there on the fourth floor? Fourth floor, floor, floor.

Speaker 3: You'll get the R, whereas in other places, you might get flul. African-Americans in Appalachia also tend to follow the more general Southern pattern with respect to I monophthongization, ah in wide turning to ah, so you get wad. And now the map tour continues with Eric.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Nicole. We're picking up again in North Carolina. Over in the Outer Banks, there's an even more historically isolated community. Because of a shift in shipping patterns in the mid-19th century, and probably also because of sympathizing with the Northern cause in the Civil War, Ocracoke Island was relatively isolated from the mainland for a long time. It developed maybe one of the most distinctive and different dialects in North America. Obliging islanders will sometimes say to tourists, well, it's high tide on the sand side. Last night the water far, night the moon shine, no fish. Ocracoke Islanders are sometimes called high tiders because of that particularly distinctive I sound. And their accent is sometimes taken to be British or Australian, even by Brits. Truth be told, there are some similarities with some regional English accents, including that high tide vowel sound, which is similar to both Southwestern English accents, like Devon or Gloucestershire, and East Anglian accents like Norfolk and Suffolk, those easternmost counties of England. Curiously, another distinctive thing about the old Ocracoke accent is it's also got a real sort of bounce to it, which is something that both those Southwestern and those East Anglian accents also have in common. North Carolina is actually one of the most linguistically diverse states in the country. I wanna bring in Kalina Newmark now to talk about Native American English.

Speaker 7: Hello, my name is Kalina Newmark and I am Toledo Dene First Nations from the Northwest Territories, Canada. I come from a strong line of Dene and Metis leaders who are passionate about our language and cultural teachings. The Lumbee tribe is the largest state-recognized Native American tribe in North Carolina. Lumbee speakers combine and pronounce English words that distinguish them from African American and Southern speakers. Since encountering white settlers in the mid 1800s, the Lumbee have carved out a dialect of English that is uniquely theirs. One interesting feature is that Lumbee English speakers share vowel sounds present in the Outer Banks accent, where tide is pronounced toid. You can hear that in this native speaker clip.

Speaker 9: Well, when he got halfway, that little ditch on the sun. Ditch on the sun, ditch on the sun.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Kalina. So that Ocracoke Island high tider accent is an accent that's disappearing fast. The younger Ocracokers tend to speak much more mainstream American English. There's a popular idea that we're losing regional accents, that people are sounding more and more similar. That's true of some people in some places, especially some of these isolated communities, but it's not true across the board. There are actually plenty of accent differences that are getting more and more distinct over time. But of course, it's a complex picture. There are parts of the South that don't have all that much Southern about them, accent-wise. Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas are two good examples. A lot of people from those two cities may be pretty hard to identify by their accents. Which brings us to what is sometimes called General American. What's General American? The first thing is, it's not one accent. It's basically a terrible term for a wide variety of accents that essentially don't have a lot of obvious regionally distinctive features in them. We're gonna talk to Son Michaud now. Son is a native speaker of Gullah, a fascinating and really important Creole language spoken in the Low Countries, in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

Speaker 10: Gullah is a language spoken in a region of the United States called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which extends officially from Wilmington, North Carolina down to Jacksonville, Florida. Gullah's an Atlantic Creole, most similar with Bohemian Creole English and Bajan Creole. In fact, when I visited the Bahamas, a bunch of the local immigrants thought that I'd been a local too. There are a variety of factors that inform the language. For instance, the secluded plantations on the Sea Island, a mixture of African languages, as well as the accents of lower class English and Irish indentured servants and slavers. European slavers were so ill-suited for the Sea Island's environment that they would often afford long periods of solitary time to our ancestors with little to no oversight. Slavers would mismatch the languages in order to confound them and hinder their ability to organize rebellions. Now, the scheme of this tactic was designed for our Gullah Geechee ancestors to be forced to speak English so that their overseers could be privy to their communications. But what slavers didn't predict is that this first generation English-based African pigeon would develop into a Creole, a fully mature, rule-governed language of its own, much of which remains with us today due to generations of forced segregation and eventual separation by choice before the building of bridges that increased easy access to and fro. I'm gonna walk you through a few distinct features of the Gullah Geechee accent. For example, the kit foot vowels are reversed for the words fish and foot to sound like fush and fit. The lot trap vowels are reversed for god and pat to sound like gad and pot. The softening of the Ts, where butter and bent would sound like butta and bean. Gullah speakers also drop consonants for vowels where the two words meet. For instance, in the sentences da gale and da boire, the word for there, de, adds or subtracts the D depending on if there's a consonant or a vowel preceding it. The importance of accent to the Gullah Geechee language simply cannot be overstated. It is the clearest bond between ourselves and other displaced Africans throughout colonized spaces in the Black Diaspora. How we sound is as important as what we say because our accent is a statement in itself. This has been your Gullah teacher, Son Michel. Stay safe, and as always, we outcha.

Speaker 1: Peace. Thank you so much, Son. So if you're keeping count, that's six Southern accents already, even though we're not being remotely comprehensive here and we've only been through a few states. Lots more to come. As we get into the Piney Woods bale, Southern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Northern Florida, we get into one of the parts of the South that's always been rhotic. A lot of the South was historically non-rhotic. That's where you get this sort of Blanche Dubois or Scarlett O'Hara kind of classical Southern accent. You can hear that in this clip here.

Speaker 9: I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Speaker 1: You hear how there's no R in strangers?

Speaker 9: Stranger, stranger, stranger.

Speaker 1: That's a non-rhotic accent. But that's changed, and changed fast over the last few decades, so most younger white Southerners are now rhotic. In most of the Piney Woods bale, though, they always have been. Now, Nicole talked about the fact that some African-American speakers in the Southern Appalachians smooth out the I diphthong, the price vowel, in some words, and we get a long I sound. But in other words, it stays a diphthong, I. And this is a pattern we find in a lot of the South. In most of the Piney Woods bale, though, there's always been what we can describe as full price smoothing, where some Southerners smooth the diphthong in words like fly, rise, and ride, but use diphthong in rice and right. Here in the Piney Woods bale, we're gonna smooth them all. Fly, rise, ride, and rice, right, life, night, and so on. There's an interesting posture thing here, too, which is that you start to get tongue tips that are very edge-focused. And what I mean by that is that instead of using this part of the tongue, the blade, for things like T and D sounds, so that there's a lot of surface contact, tuh, duh, we just use the narrow edge of the tongue, so it's a more focused contact area, tuh, duh, 10 tired turtles talk about dentists. We're gonna end part one right here, but we're gonna continue this all the way across the continent. We're gonna go to Chicago and Southern California, and yes, absolutely, we'll get out in a boat up in Canada. See you next time for part two.