Accents

There was a linguist on NPR the other day who created this test http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/yankeetest.html. He analyzed speech patterns and things and devised a test to determine just how much southern people have in their speech. It's actually neat. Give it a try.

Then he went on to say that west of about Ohio there are no accents because accents arose from people adopting the mispronunciations of immigrants. But I don't buy that. First off, I've heard plenty of non-Southern accents from the western part of the country. Second of all, in a highly mobile society, how do you track that sort of thing?

I grew up in New Jersey. Never had too much of an accent, but then I move to Ohio and my dad started making fun of the way I was flattening out my vowel sounds and things. Now that I'm in Kentucky, there are certains words that I say with a distinctive light twang. And there are words that I never used to use that I use now. So, how would my speech patterns get analyzed now. According to the test I'm 25% Dixie (my Kentucky born and bred husband was 96%...), but what happens five or ten years from now?

And on a related note: one of the girls on our tour group in the UK was a nice girl from Arizona, reasonably bright, but when one of the Australians said to her, "I don't have an accent, you do," she really didn't get it. She didn't understand how someone with such an obvious Australian accent could say she was the one with an accent. And I tried telling her three times that to Australians, she has an American accent...