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Cities of the Dead: New Orleans cemeteries. Because of the high water table, we spend the afterlife buried above ground instead of six feet under it. Elaborate monuments cluster together like small communities. We head Uptown, Downtown, Riverside and Lakeside.
Gris-gris gree-gree : A voodoo good luck charm that protects the wearer from evil. The western states were added to the United States later than the eastern ones, so the linguistic communities of California et al.
On the other side of the map, the entirety of the western United States was grouped together with a single label. As defined in , the East Coast is dense with linguistic varieties, while the West is one big green blob.
People from all over the United States came to California, and they brought their developing dialects with them. All of these new voices contributed to a new way of speaking, but it took a few generations for this hodgepodge of accents to develop into a single western voice. Given a few more generations, the homogeneity started breaking apart. Before getting specifically into what defines California English, it should be noted how many different accents exist across California.
Who are the speakers of California English, then? And because California is no longer a linguistic monolith, California English is really used as the umbrella term for a range of accents throughout the state. Everyone has an accent, however.
As with most accents, the vowels are what really set Californians apart. When vowels shift, it means a person is positioning their tongue in their mouth differently when pronouncing a specific vowel. And when one vowel starts to shift, usually others start to as well. The chain reaction of vowel shifting creates a distinctive Cali sound. The California vowel shift is part of a larger pattern among the youths in North America. The wide usage of these shifting vowels suggests that it will spread throughout the country over time.
While learning about vowels is great, California English is really all about the slang. For most of the late 20th century, the slang in California was relegated to hippies and surfers, but now, new terms are achieving a wider influence in American culture. It literally changed the way people tell stories about themselves. California has a lot going for it in the spread of linguistic variants. The rich language of the area, aided by its intermingling of many different cultures, is perhaps the most influential in the country.
The Midwest is often treated by the coastal states as though it were one massive, homogeneous flatland. This is, of course, not true. The 12 states that make up the Midwest are a unique tapestry, and they have the linguistic diversity to reflect that fact. To be fair, the Midwestern accent used to be pretty much the same throughout the region.
This accent is indeed the closest to General American, but it is rapidly changing. It also has some strong similarities with the English spoken in a few major metropolitan areas of Texas — including Austin — and central Florida.
This accent covers a pretty massive area, which is why Midland American English is slowly splitting into northern and southern halves. Despite this divide, there are a number of traits that still unify this region.
A number of other vowels are pronounced with the tongue slightly closer to the front of the mouth than usual. The region that is defined by this speech is western New York and the areas surrounding the Great Lakes, including the cities Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Detroit. What this diagram shows is that these vowels in this part of the country have changed their location of pronunciation. Inland Northern American English has other characteristics, but this vowel shift is what sets this accent apart from the rest.
It is the accent of most of Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Minnesota. It is associated with the latter, and so is more commonly known as the Minnesota accent. Like with many accents, the most noticeable marker of North-Central American English is the vowels.
The diphthongs vowels that are really two vowels close together are perhaps the most noticeable difference. The combination of these foreign accents merged with Inland North American English to create this new dialect. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan accent is almost the same as the Minnesota accent because of similar immigrant populations. This article presents just a few of the features that are used by Midwesterners, and it could triple in length if we included longer sections about slang.
Also, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift will probably cause this information to become outdated within a decade or so. In this edition, we talk about the accents found in southern Louisiana and the immigrants who brought them there.
Thanks to a societal obsession with youth, the generation constantly under the spotlight right now is Gen Z, or the Zoomers. Is the youngest generation really so different from the ones that came before, though?
Why is this the case? There are a complex set of factors, including age, technology and changing demographics. This is roughly accurate, though other places might vary the definition by a few years.
As of this writing, that means the age group spans anywhere from 9 to 24 years old. The younger side is preoccupied with getting through elementary school, while the older is entering the workforce. This might not sound entirely intuitive, but research into different age cohorts shows that people really do speak differently based on their age. Not politically, but linguistically.
It was first used mostly by young people, and so it may have been assumed that as those young people grew up, quotative like might just become the norm. The real problem is that it changes constantly. As mentioned above, Gen Z is more racially diverse and more gender diverse than the other generations, so it makes sense they would have a vocabulary to reflect that.
If you break it down by age cohorts, though, that percentage more than doubles when you look at the group of to year-olds. And while less than 1 percent of people over the age of 65 had even heard the term before, 42 percent of to year-olds were aware of it. We could keep going through examples, but you get the point. Facebook launched in , only seven years after the oldest millennials were born, and the first iPhone was sold only three years after that.
Gen Z is growing up online — 95 percent of to year-olds have access to a smartphone, 97 percent are on social media — and so is their language. The talk of likes, faves, retweets, subscriptions and more are all decisions some company made when creating the vocabulary for their products. Yet when young people come online, they build their own vocabulary. Preference for the sound of local language is established at birth according to what the fetus hears as its auditory nervous system is developing, but stereotypes based on accents, whether a regional English accent or a foreign accent, are learned in childhood.
The subtle attitudes we attach to accents have a profound impact on others, and on ourselves. Kinzler, K. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in advance of print on-line. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Thanks Adele for the music and the insight! References: Kinzler, K. Get smart.
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