Besides coating your hotdog in a thick layer of ketchup, or implying that the Packers are better than the Bears, there is nothing that makes a Chicagoan cringe more than suggesting that we have an accent. You always get the same repudiate answer; “What do you mean I have an accent? I don't have an accent, you’re the one with the accent.” Chicagoans, are struck with one of the worst cases of “Midwest accent denial syndrome” we simply don’t hear it, and we can’t fathom the fact that we sound different to those in other parts of the states. There are hundreds of accents within the English language, and dozens within American English, and contrary to popular belief, Chicago is among one of them.
Last summer I took a trip down to Panama City Beach,
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Linguists have identified up to six vowels Chicagoans are pronouncing in non-standard ways. But those vowels in BAT, BOT, and BUT are, McCarthy says, the big three” (qtd, in Minnoff.)
In an experiment, around 350 Chicagoans, were recorded reading the following paragraph, titled “Too Hot for Hockey”, this script was written specifically to force readers to vocalize vowels “that reveal how closely key sounds resemble the accent's dominant traits” (Wbez). The paragraph is as follows:
“Don and Patty took the bus to the gym to watch some hockey. They met their pals Dawn and Chad. They snacked on nachos, hot dogs, sausage, and pop. Then they noticed something odd: The gym was getting hot! Don and Dawn took off their jackets. Patty wiped the sweat with a paper towel. Chad took off his hat and used it as a fan. The puck never hit the ice, which sadly had begun to melt. They couldn’t get the gym cool enough. The match was canceled, so the friends headed to a bar to watch the Sox game” (Wbez).
The five traits looked for within this experiment were; a fronted “o” sound, characterized in words like; hockey, nachos, hot, sausage, pop, odd, bar,
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Unlike the Mary-merry-marry merger, Chicagoans pronounce cot and caught differently, as well as words like; Don and Dawn.
Out of 362 samples, only 8, or .02%, had all 5 traits. The majority (111 samples or 30%) had three traits. Around 15% has four traits, 16% had two traits, 18% had one trait, and 17% had none of the traits looked for.
Chicago’s accent situation is almost identical to those in other cities, you cannot expect everybody from New York to have a thick Brooklyn accent, and this lies true within the Windy City. As shown through the script experiment, a large percentage of people do have three of the characteristic vowel changes that distinguish the accent, but only a small minority speaks with all the vowel changes that make up the quintessential accent.
What About the Others? The Chicago accent is typically characterized as belonging to the caucasian, lower and middle class, and in some parts this is true. It has been stated that most speakers of the Chicago accent happen to be of European descent, however according to McCarthy “ the idea that the Chicago accent is a class thing, a sports fan thing, or even a guy thing is misleading. In a 2010 study of the Chicago accent, McCarthy found that women actually raised their BAT vowels more than men”
An accent, according to www.dictionary.com, is defined as “Vocal prominence or emphasis given to a particular syllable, word, or phrase.” Around the world, different cultures have different accents because of their language and the way they say words. In Allison Joseph’s “On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person”, this description is shown. Joseph uses her mother as an example of having an accent and her mother was from Jamaica. In World War I, 250,000 workers from the Caribbean were recruited and 90,000 of them were Jamaican.
Session #1: The speech language pathologist (SLP) modeled and role-played different types of voice tone. According to Jed Baker (2003), when demonstrat...
Vaux, Bert, and Scott A. Golder. "Dialect Survey Results." Harvard Dialect Survey. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2014. .
Finegan says this is something “living languages must do”. For me, I was raised in a military home in which we moved to a new region every couple of years. Coming from Germany, moving to Rochester, and then to Lowville, my dialect is a combination of all three speech communities. It is different than my parents, and will mostly be passed down to my children. As I age and move locations it is opted to change again as well. So it is not that I speak differently or incorrect than the rest of my family, my speech community is merely growing and changing as it is passed generation to generation. Richard Lederer stated in his article, “We are a teeming nations within a nation, a country that is like a world.” (150) He was portraying how our country, with a universal language, can be so diverted by each region’s version of the English language. I agree completely that although we all “sing” the same song of the American language, “we talk in melodies of infinite variety.” (150) The way our country was built was by different American regions doing their own work, for example, the south had plantations, where my ancestors were small town farmers who worked with manufacturing in mills and
African American English also has different sound systems than Standard English although not all sounds are different. An example is variation in the use of consonants. As an example, when two consonants appear at the end of the word, they are often reduced examples include t in the word west which is reduced to wes as in wes side instead of west side. Exceptions to this case have been noted to occur especially when the next word begins with a vowel as in west in west
Often, the language spoken by Northern Spaniards sounds identical to the language spoken by Southern Spaniards. However, the northerners speak with the “the emission of the consonants ‘d’ and ‘r’, the aspiration of the consonant ‘s’ at the end of words, and the dropping of final consonants”, whereas southerners do not. (Khodorkovsky, 2008) Again, both types a Spaniards are conveying a message when speaking. Likewise, Americans have differing dialect. The way someone from the West coast speaks contrasts the way someone from the East coast speaks. But yet again, both people are conveying a message when speaking. Although their verbal communication may sound different, Hispanic and American culture’s are still accomplishing the same goal. There are also many similarities and differences in each culture’s nonverbal communication
Language in the South varies according to which area someone is in and what the person’s ethnic background is. Most white people that live in the South have a country draw in their accent or talk very proper. Most black people in the South talk using Ebonics or are really proper, but some do have a draw in their accent. The other ethnic groups talk in their native language or in English with a distinct accent associated with their ethnicity. If one is in Southern Louisiana their accent will be Cajun. The language in the South is alike in most places according to the person’s race except in Southern Louisiana.
Evidence for the existence of the phonological loop comes from Baddeley (1966 in Passer, 2009) They examined the word length effect in which they presented participants with visual presentations of word lists and asked them to write t...
I once heard someone say, “I can hear your Washingtonian accent.” “Me?” I questioned him in disbelief. “Yeah,” he replied. Then with a little more cheek than I should of, I responded with, “no ya don’t!” and walked away. I remember thinking to myself he was the one that was dropping letters out of words when he spoke. Later on, I realized why I had responded the way I did. I had a perception about accents and dialects that I had subconsciously acquired as I grew up.
In the partial alphabetic phase individuals pay attention to different letters in a word in order to attempt its pronunciation, usually the first and final letters of a word are focused on, Ehri referred to this as ‘phonetic cue reading’. This is a skill which along with others which shows phonological awareness.
“You have such an interesting accent; where are you from?” That is the question I have heard over and over again since I moved from Puerto Rico to Houston, Texas. While aspiring to a more challenging educational environment from the one exposed to, I made the decision of moving with my aunt and uncle to the United States. Consequently, I sacrificed the time spent with my family and discerned the obstacles that were prone to surface for an individual whose native language is not English.
Language is a universal trait that every culture has, whether it is written or spoken, people around the world have a need to communicate with one another. Language reflects your background and where you come from, according to Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams (2011), an accent is a regional phonological distinction (p. 433). That being said, in the United States the most prevalent language is English, but depending on the region, your language might sound different to other people. If someone from Wisconsin visited one of the southern states, they would definitely notice a drawl in a southerner’s language, whereas the native southerner would think the Wisconsin resident’s accent sounds nasally.
Style has been an integral component in the field of linguistics. Linguistic style refers to a person’s speaking pattern, which can include different features such as pace, pitch, intonation, syntactic patterns, etc. Styles of speech is learned, and is often influenced by location, gender, ethnicity, and age. As different cultures and sub-cultures arise, linguistic variations occur and different sociolinguistic styles come into being. Each style can index social meanings such as group membership, personal attributes or beliefs.
...teresting links to older forms of Middle English and linking aspects of Canadian English and certain dialects of American English to certain small sound changes in isolated parts of England, in that small language change can link the Fens of England to Canadians today. Even though Canadian Raising is unique and is an important aspect of Canadian English, Canadian Raising affects various different dialects in the United States. From many different parts of New England to the upper Midwest, Canadian Raising is affecting diphthongs in spoken language in different ways, depending on the region and who is speaking. It is uncertain as to how Canadian Raising will be used or changed in the future, but depending on how many people continue to shift the diphthong in their speech, then one will be able to understand the true origins of this interesting phenomenon came to be.
These three groups were then asked to complete three different tasks. The first was to repeat and segment 20 different words (5 consonant-vowel-consonant, 5 CCVC, 5 CVCC, and 5 CCVCC) and two overall scores were administered to the participants. Both scores were out of a maximum of 20 points; the first score was based on giving 1 point for each correctly analyzed word, and the second score was based on giving 1 point for correctly analyzing medial vowels.