Adam Rogers writes for Alta (archived) about a subject some think doesn’t exist:
Penelope Eckert was, like, mad? A now-retired sociolinguist at Stanford University, Eckert studied accents and how they change—particularly the accents of California. This was around 2010, and what was gnawing at her was that a bunch of influential East Coast linguists were insisting that there was in fact no such thing as a “California dialect.” However Californians might fold and squish their vowel sounds was actually—you know, I almost can’t bear to say this—Canadian.
That’s right. The judgment of the East was that if Californians had an accent at all, it was a minor variant of a whole other country. Eckert’s team of linguists wasn’t having it. “We were getting pretty pissed off,” she tells me. Eckert had been researching accents in San Jose and was toh-duhlly sure that she was seeing something unique.
But they needed proof. The scant research that existed on cities like San Francisco wasn’t enough, and it didn’t really answer whether San Franciscans sounded different from Angelenos—much less people from anywhere else. “We thought, Well, if we don’t do it, no one will,” Eckert says.
That realization turned into a project called Voices of California and nearly a decade of fieldwork. Eckert and a dozen graduate students trooped out to Central California—Merced, to be precise—and, eventually, Redding, Humboldt, Sacramento, Shasta, and so on. They’d ensconce themselves in each city for a couple of weeks, interviewing everyone they could, canvassing the local historical association, the library, and museums for volunteers. “Mostly we would just go downtown, walk into stores, and ask people if they’d be willing to participate,” Eckert says. “We’d go to malls and harass people.”
Nobody else was particularly interested in this level of California dialectology, but at Stanford it became a whole-of-department effort, a “particularly joyful experience,” Eckert says. The interviews covered anything from childhood memories to healthcare. The topic didn’t really matter; the sessions just had to be long enough that people would relax and talk the way they really sounded. That could take hours. And when the interviews were done, the team would hire transcribers and use software programs to label all the vowels, consonants, and pauses and measure how they sounded. It was a massive pain.
But it worked. Voices of California got 800 interviews in the can—more than a thousand hours. The evidence for a California sound was clear. […]
Turns out no one region can claim to be the home of American English. “Most places have a prestige standard in terms of region,” Holliday says. “That is not true in the United States.” Usually it’d be the capital city, like the poshest London version of British English. But in the United States, Washington, D.C., was considered too Black and too Southern by linguists and the kind of upper-crust folks who look for class markers in speech. And the great Northeastern metropolises were too full of immigrants—“people that we didn’t consider white yet,” Holliday says. This left the people of the Midwest—white people of northern European descent, mostly farmers, a little bit industrialized—as exemplars of the standard American English of the 19th century.
And then those Midwesterners became a wave of migrants to California—mostly Southern California—in the 20th century, bringing that accent with them.
But they were newbies. California had Spanish speakers long before the formation of the United States, a big influx of Northeasterners who traveled to San Francisco in the 1840s looking for gold and silver, Chinese immigrants soon thereafter, Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese people, Black people making the Great Migration out of the American South… By the middle 1900s, the state encompassed a rapidly forming linguistic mélange entirely unlike the you-betcha monoculture of the Midwest.
The various communities of speakers along the Acela corridor had hundreds of years to develop highly regional accents, back when it took a day to get across Boston, much less down to New York. “There was less time to become regionally differentiated here,” Holliday says. “Further and further west, these historical, regionally marked ways of speaking are less salient.” But, she says, linguistic differences were already baked in. Language in California would reflect its speakers’ points of origin, socioeconomic and racial divisions, and, with the arrival of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, a stark line between the urban enclaves of the coast and the agricultural Central Valley.
He goes on to talk about Labov, chain shifts, “Valley Girl,” trap-backing, and the “mosaic of California accents”; yes, it’s in overwritten journalese, but there’s good stuff in there, and as a quondam Californian I’m glad to have read it. (Via chavenet’s MetaFilter post, with the excellent title “Everyone thinks they don’t have an accent. But everyone does.”)
Maybe we can compromise and say Californians aspire to sound Canadian?
The point about “trap-backing” is useful/insightful and shows the journalist was listening to the sources. But then the journalist uses a Southern-California-distinctive lexical/syntactic feature (prefixing “the” to the numbers of highways) as an example of “accent.” That’s not overwritten; that’s just hopeless. Also, inexplicably turning the empirically-grounded claims that most California speakers have the cot/caught merger” into the different claim that most Americans with the cot/caught merger are Californians! “Math class is hard,” to quote a famous fictitious Californian. And assuming that the nth-generation US-born descendants of immigrants who learned English as a second language would speak with the same accents as their ESL ancestors if they hadn’t been specifically pressured by family to assimilate?
I guess the idea is that the cot-caught merger spread from Canada to the US…?
Anyway, from the article:
Ah, that’s for dialectology in service of historical linguistics. That’s Eberhard Kranzmayr traipsing about Austria in the 1950s and going mad from the revelation. For that purpose, you want non-mobile older rural males, the oldest ones you can find who can still speak comprehensibly, because they are (for patriarchal reasons) the least likely to have non-local influences in their dialect. If, instead, you simply want to map how people are speaking today, this approach will mislead you, obviously.
I suppose it’s true enough that non-urban, older, rural females were all young women at the forefront of linguistic innovation once.
Seems a bit of a trade-off is involved if you really want to get to the oldest forms still spoken, though, given that women live significantly longer than men on average.
On the other hand, grumpy old men are commoner than grumpy old women, and grumpiness no doubt preserves one’s idiolect from contamination by the ghastly speech of the Young People of Today. Also, get off my lawn.
You can’t blame the journalist for accurately reporting what Prof. D’Onofrio said, but her facile conflation of scholarly interest in older male rural speakers as such with some sort of white supremacy suggests that she is lamentably unaware of the demographics of large stretches of rural America in the South or Southwest. (Before her doctoral studies at Stanford, she got her undergraduate degree in linguistics at Penn, which is only 50 or so miles north of where you start to get some rural black populations whose families have been in the same place for many many generations, but I don’t think Labov’s grad students traditionally went quite that far from campus.*)
Now, it is possible that the focus on NORMs (Jesus, don’t capitalize the S, it’s a plural marker, not part of the acronym) as of specific language-archeological interest is based on Europe-specific dialect fieldwork that may not generalize to other locales, and in particular may not generalize to places like California where even your “old-timers” in a locale may have comparatively shallow roots in the region.
*Philadelphia is exactly the sort of place where the very adjective “urban” became a racialized euphemism for “black” about a half-century ago, but this is again simply treating the 20th-century demographic patterns of some regions within the U.S. as “normative and typical” to the exclusion of others.
To David E.’s point, in the current U.S. average female lifespan is about five years longer than average male lifespan. So the question is whether greater-on-average male idiolect conservatism is sufficiently strong to outweigh an additional five years of time-depth. Although of course you can elicit information from both old men and old women to hedge your bets.
her facile conflation of scholarly interest in older male rural speakers as such with some sort of white supremacy
Yeah, that was pure knee-jerk intellectual idleness.
I can’t say that I’ve been forcibly struck by the high social status of older male rural speakers around these parts. Perhaps these things work differently in the US. Or perhaps not. USian Hatters can enlighten us.
They’re also less likely to be quite that non-mobile – they’re commonly from the next village over. And in that case, they’re more likely to have adapted their speech to that of their husband and his village than the other way around.
@David E.: Every few years there will be a mainstream US media story reporting on the supposed discovery that Appalachian hillbillies (or people in other left-behind locales like coastal North Carolina or islands in the Chesapeake) speak Pure Elizabethan English. Leaving aside the imprecision of this diagnosis of their dialect, these stories seem newsworthy precisely because of the discrepancy between the assumed poshness of Talking Just Like Shakespeare and the understood non-poshness of the demographic groups alleged to do so.
I’m a California dude (born and bred, Southern and Northern; 75 years now, except for 15 years in Japan), and I’ve always wondered where I picked up that Canadian pronunciation of “house” (heuse? hause? — how do you even write it?).
My maternal grandmother’s people were from eastern Canada, but neither my grandmother nor mother spoke like that. Did I get it from growing up in California?
Like, doood, I just don’t know! Gag me with a spoon!
There was something like that going on with Classical Arabic, as with the famous story of the highly successful ambush of the pre-eminent grammarian Sibawayh by a jealous rival*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibawayh#The_Question_of_the_Hornet
I believe there is still a trope that the Bedouin speak the “purest” Arabic, but there are Hatters who know much more about that than I do.
* Linguistics Wars are nothing new (nor are underhand tricks in the waging of them…)
[hɜʊ̯sː]…?
I grew up in California (several decades more recently than David J.) and I definitely do not say “house” in the stereotypical Canadian way.
I just tested this by listening to a couple house-tour videos from Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, and the vowel difference pronunciation of “house” jumped out at me. Its not as dramatic or consistent as before /t/ (“out and about” is the staple phrase in Canadian accent jokes for a reason) but i could definitely notice it.
The vids I used if anyone else wants to see:
Vancouver (particularly clear example at 0:29 or so): https://youtu.be/ac2ucNfBbTA?si=3Or3oSL5TsNwgHrf
Toronto: https://youtube.com/shorts/ZWk47lj5M3A?si=A_9El9UQYvqQoCkk
Ottawa (“housing” got raised at 1:08!! Maybe he’s devoicing the /z/ in “housing”?): https://youtu.be/Px12HXDb2io?si=EBRoAYgRM18KkQDf
(…and now I’ve probably convinced Google that i want to buy a house in Canada. Oh well)
Conversely, the /aɪ/ side of the vowel shift is way less noticeable to me. I think i hear it occasionally hear it in these videos, but I’m not sure. I DEFINITELY don’t hear it in the sound files on Wikipedia but i think those sound files might just be wrong — i dont even hear the raising on the “about” in the last sound file!
…unless this means that us Californians (or just me) are raising /aɪ/ in the same way?? I also used to kind of think the COT-CAUGHT merger was fake until i taught myself to hear the difference between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ (i guess i didnt grow up with much exposure to unmerged dialects).
I mean, there are supposedly all these dramatic vowel shifts going on in California English but frankly the demonstration videos I’ve watched on that have not been convincing*. I can’t tell from the wikipedia page if the /aɪ/ diphthong is supposed to be affected, but that might be my own lack of understanding of phonology.
*Another youtube cite — this is a video i watched a few weeks ago where i kept thinking “your recordings do not demonstrate the things you claim that they do”: https://youtu.be/lL8wdwopO24?si=tiTKy4PJFY8FdJF2
I have a comment in moderation (too many youtube links, probably) about “house” and in general how Canadian Raising sounds to me as another Californian.
But moving on from fraught (for me at least) matters of phonology to vocabulary — when we were in school, my sister and I thought we discovered a dialect variation confined to our school district!
You guys might know the slang term “waterfall”, to take a drink from a water bottle or cup without touching the vessel to your mouth (an important skill at summer camp, where you might borrow a friend’s water bottle but to our germaphobe generation it would be RUDE to put your MOUTH on it). I grew up calling it a “birdie”.* When I was in middle school or early high school (dont remember exactly) i first became aware of “waterfall”. I thought it was just a weird quirk of one neighboring town at first (obviously i assumed “birdie” was the “normal” word), but somehow talking to my sister about it we decided to embark on a project of asking all our friends about it, and a pretty clear pattern emerged:
* Kids who attended schools in our district used “birdie”
* Kids from other cities (our school district mostly lined up with the city boundary) used “waterfall”
* Kids from our city who went to private schools mostly used “waterfall”
* [I really wanted to test whether kids who loved in our city but went to public schools on other districts — remember the school district boundary only mostly lined up with the city boundary– used “birdie” or “waterfall”, but i don’t remember if I ever managed to ask any]
This was really fascinating to me, because I’m sure I learned the term “birdie” from summer camps, not at school. Some of those summer camps were very local and probably mostly served our specific city or school district, but others definitely had a broader customer base.
“Waterfall” is pretty well known slang in much of the US, you can find it on Wiktionary (noun sense 4, verb sense 2). But I’ve never found any attestation … EDIT: Nvm, since the last time i tried to google this (probably about 8 years ago) Reddit has had several threads about it! It’s actually bigger than my city or school district but does seem to be restricted to just part of Orange County. That explains my experience at summer camps, probably, but not the sharp divide we noticed between our school district and neighboring ones… I wonder if we were near the edge of the “birdie” area? I wish i could remember what “other cities” those friends were from, but it was 13+ years ago and if i took notes at the time they’ve since been lost…
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8pkudd/birdie_meaning_to_drink_from_a_bottle_without/
https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/16gggcy/birdie/
*Syntax quibbling: “waterfall” in this sense can be a noun or a verb but “birdie” for me growing up was only a noun. You could ask your friend to “take a birdie” from their water bottle, or promise that you would “do a birdie”. I do see some reddit commenters in the second thread using it as a verb though.
Fascinating — I love that kind of microdialect investigation. (Also, I rescued your earlier comment.)
@ David Marjanović: “[hɜʊ̯sː]…?”
That sounds close to it. Does the half-circle (ʊ̯) indicate rounding? If so, then BINGO!
I have commented a few times on how hyper-local elements of culture (memes, in the original sense of that word) could be among teenagers. Another example I don’t think I have mentioned concerns the sound effects from Street Fighter II. The second-to-last boss, Sagat, had a move set very similar to that of the main characters Ken and Ryu. (This was because Sagat had been the final enemy of the far less popular first game, and he was a larger moveset clone of the playable characters.) When Sagat does his hadouken attack, he says, “Tiger!”; and with his uppercut, “Tiger uppercut!” Yet every teenager who played the game in the mid-Willamette Valley seemed to absorbed the idea that he was saying “Hyper!” In Salem and Albany, everyone at the video arcades “knew” this, but up in Portland, the erroneous notion never seemed to have taken hold.
Here’s an abstract (w/o full paper attached, although perhaps it’s out there somewhere else on line) of an interesting-sounding paper titled “Perceptions of TRAP-backing in Oregon English,” which contends that Oregonians (esp. younger ones) do it themselves, but perceive it as a distinctively/stereotypically Californian pronunciation. https://zeos.ling.washington.edu/cwsl/pdfs/AdcockBecker.pdf
At Berkeley, we Angelenos found ourselves clubbing together because we were aware that to Northern Californians we all sounded like dumb bland Beach Boys. Developed a wry sense of humor about it, dude.
As a SoCal native, I can confirm the there’s an appreciable difference between LA area people’s accents that’s different from San Diego, Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. The main tip off that someone was from NorCal was the term “hella” slipping into their usage, from what I remember. Things may have changed since my move states eastward in the early aughts.
Unscientific anecdote: I was born in and spent part of my youth in the upper mid-west, and lived the rest in MD, PA, NY, NH, and Vermont. In my early thirties first visited southern California on a business trip. I noticed at least two distinctive—to my ear—accents.
One was widespread. It sounded like something derived from, but not the same as, what I was used to hearing in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. The other was new to me, and hard to describe. It was the native speech of U.S. born people of Hispanic, mostly Mexican, parentage.
I could hear the Spanish influence, but there was no foreign accent whatsoever. This was clearly American English, with a regional flavor unlike anything I knew from the eastern or mid-western parts of the country.
And then I married into a family from the sprawl that stretches from the Mexican border up to and beyond Los Angeles. Mother-in-law was an immigrant from Pierre, South Dakota. She sternly advised me that her hometown was pronounced “Peer” and I’d best not forget it! I grew accustomed to odd SoCal locutions: A P U (as per usual) and terms of endearment I’m ashamed to mention in public while remaining aware of the accents.
I think it all goes to show that Trump is wrong. The US shouldn’t be annexing Canada; Canada should be annexing the West coast.
I think President Krasnov’s plan is to give California back to the Russians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross,_California
No, but [ʊ] is already rounded.
The “inverted breve underneath” means this is the subsyllabic part of a diphthong. It isn’t used often because within English that doesn’t need to be spelled out.
Oh no. As a narcissist, he doesn’t understand and isn’t capable of understanding he’s working for someone else. The way to get him to do what you want is to convince him it was his brilliant idea all along, and that doesn’t work for everything every time.
Hat recently posted about Vladivostok-born Viktoria Yankovskaya, who spent the last decades of her life in Healdsburg California, less than 30 miles inland from Fort Ross as the crow flies and right on the banks of the Russian River (called the Славянка back in the day – it discharges into the Pacific about 12 miles down the coast from Fort Ross).
Preparations for the Reconquista have been underway for a while, comrades. (Although letting the Russians have the northern parts and the Mexicans the rest might be a fair compromise.)
slava aztlani!
The Voices of California project is very interesting, but is disappointingly unfinished. There are no maps or any summaries of dialect variation within California, either geographical or social, other than tantalizing mentions of its existence. The bibliography has a lot of interesting titles to dig through, but I wish they had done some of that digging and summarizing themselves. The website hasn’t been unpdated since 2020, and the Twitter and Instagram accounts not since 2019.
This interesting study fits with my subjective impression that the so-called California Vowel Shift is fundamentally a compression of the vowel space, roughly speaking pulling the vowels closer to [ǝ], driven primarily by iconicity rather than the usual phonetic factors.
Another study shows Bay Area Spanish following the same pattern of vowel space compression, presumably due to contact with English. I haven’t heard this variety of Spanish that I know of, but I’d like to.
Speaking of Russians, the 19th century Russians in California brought some people from their Alaska colony with them, most of whom went back to Alaska. A descendant of one of them, the Dena’ina writer and ethnographer Peter Kalifornsky, was one of the most prolific writers in the 20th century in any North American native language.
In addition to the hazards inherent in long-distance travel in those days, the Russian expeditions down to California sometimes led to conflict with the Spanish-and/or-Mexicans (depending on the year), with casualties on both sides, including both sides’ indigenous allies. Thus e.g. the martyrdom of St. Peter the Aleut* (17??-1815), who nobly refused the offer of the wicked Spaniards who had taken him captive to spare his life if he would embrace their heresies.
*Probably not what we would today call an “Aleut” but a member of the separate ethnicity confusingly sometimes called Alutiiq. The early Russian archival sources are understandably sometimes vague or muddled about the taxonomy of the indigenes, just as they were were ditto about the exact taxonomy of heretics and thus inaccurately assumed the proverbially wicked Jesuits were somehow involved with the martyrdom when it is clear from the Spanish sources that there were in fact no literal Jesuits in Alta California at the time so it must have been some other subgenre of Vatican-affiliated proselytizer.
Canada should be annexing the West coast
And the Northeast. See Tim Bray’s 2004 map of North America, which I’ve discussed here before. Of which needs some updating.
Thanks John. Your link has a stray double-quote. Perhaps our host could fix?
Fixed!
I’ve known upper-middle-class people from the Bay Area who had a fronted GOAT vowel that sounded RP to me. Mid-Atlantic, Midland, and Southern accents can have something similar, but I didn’t hear anything else like those regions from the people I’m talking about. Anyone else notice that?
I have been listening recently to a series of newly-released autobiographical/memoiristic songs by underground-rock legend David Lowery, and thought I noted a few odd/interesting pronunciations. Lowery was born in 1960 and after a peripatetic early childhood in places like Spain (his dad was a career military guy) grew up from the age of 9 or 10 in the “Inland Empire” region of Southern California. I realized that singing voices vary from speaking voices, so used the internet to find various interview clips. I commend to your attention this fairly lo-fi one from 1988 (linked below: there are potential distrations from the clueless interlocutor from a Cleveland local-access cable tv show, plus background noise from soundcheck in progress), because I think what’s going on with many of Lowery’s vowels is quite interesting and sort of stereotypically Californian-for-the-time, even if not all Californians shared these features. My memory is hazy but I think some guys from San Diego I went to college with back in the Eighties had more muted versions of some of these features, and more recent interviews with Lowery suggest that those features may have become more muted with time in his own speech, whether because he’s older or because he has lived away from California or because California accents have themselves shifted.
One interesting sociolinguistic thing about this 1988 iteration of his idiolect is that it makes him come off (to East Coast ears, at least) as perpetually “laid-back” in a then-stereotypical Californian way, which means the East Coast listener may misunderestimate him when he says something substantively shrewd or critical or otherwise non-laid-back in substance. I’m not sure how much the “laid-back” affect is coming from the vowel pronunciations versus other intonational details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mS2O1DKplM