Linguistic question

[ATFFL]

The reason NC is so messed up is because it is the home of Pepsi.

[DA]

It's interesting how soda is spread by the larger cities. You'll notice not only are the southwest and northeast soda sayers, but also the area surrounding St. Louis and the area north of Chicago. Not sure whats in that area of Florida or that one huge county in Nebraska. Also note the isolated yellow counties in the southwest of Missouri is the city of Springfield and it's southern suburbs (just giving a shout out to my home city and the evidence that it is actually a large city.. well large enough to say soda... Did I just write "shout out?" ~shudder~)

Also an interesting thing is that in the south "coke" is in the 80-100% range moastly as is the same with "soda" in the northeast and St. Louis area AND the same goes for "pop" in the midwest to some extent. The west coast is generally weak in sticking to a naming convention. As is NC and VI.

And the only other I can think of is "soda pop" (which I prefer) "carbonated beverage/drink", and "we're voting in an internet poll and want to be different from everyone else so we'll select other"

[DA]

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That is certainly a Missouri thing (southern MO). "worsh" Also there's the infamous MissourA. My granspa adds an S to the end of almost any stor name. Actual examples from my g-pa: Wal-Marts, Best Buys, Targets, Aldis, and Woodses (the store is called Woods' but he goes through the extra effort of calling it Woodses/Woodzez somehow)

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

A professor and some students at Harvard a couple years ago put together an online survey testing out over a hundred different regional variations in pronunciation and regional terms...It go about 20,000 responses.

All of the results are here, including maps.  The maps are a little hard to read, and many of them don't show anything conclusive, but you can get all the data from each state if you're really into it.

[DA]

This one is the best!
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/staticmaps/q_118.html

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Just for fun, I did a map of question 66 of the Harvard dialect survey.
Maybe I'll do a couple more of the interesting ones if time permits.

[DA]

Illinois never can fit in with thier neighbors can they?
And what's Utah's problem?! Crawfish... pleh!

[ATFFL]

A professor and some students at Harvard a couple years ago put together an online survey testing out over a hundred different regional variations in pronunciation and regional terms...It go about 20,000 responses.

All of the results are here, including maps.  The maps are a little hard to read, and many of them don't show anything conclusive, but you can get all the data from each state if you're really into it.

What was their methodology?  That should be featured prominently.

I did a study on regional identification based on vowel length once.   Lots of fun.

[??????????]

Instead of "Lets get it done" we say "Get'er dun". Or another good one is instead of saying "I'm about to do that" we say "I'm fixin to do it".

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The evidence shows that conservatives say coke, libertarians say pop, liberals say soda, and other....uh, what else can you call it?

"Soft drink" which is what I use when talking of fizzy stuff in general.  I don't use "pop", "soda" is always fruit-flavored as in "orange soda", "cherry soda",  or "peach soda", and a cola-flavored soft drink is always a "coke" even when it's a Pepsi or an RC.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Why do Americans say "ideaR" and "ideaRs", instead of pronouncing the words as they are spelled? It seems kind of unnecessary to add a sound that isn't there. Do all Americans pronounce them this way? Do you have more words in which you add funny sounds?

As has been pointed out, this is a NY/Boston characteristic.  Most American dialects don't do this.  But there's still the question of why northeasterners have a trailing R, on this and other words.  My specualtion:

Generally, in all English dialects, there are two ways of handling a word that ends in a vowel followed by a word that begins with the same vowel:
1. Put a glottal stop (the ' in Hawa'i) between them (this is what most Americans do, although most are unaware of it)
2. Put an R sound between them.

I've noticed that in dialects that do not pronounce the R after a vowel (such as Boston, NY, and many British dialects), the second solution is used.  Hence John Lennon's "I sawr a film today, oh boy."
My guess is that the R on the end of "idea," and other similar words, is a remnant of this strategy.  Instead of the R only being there when the next word started with the same vowel, it stuck, showing up in all instances of the word's pronunciation.

Sorry to bore you with that.  Linguistics is one of my passions, even more so than politics.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

A professor and some students at Harvard a couple years ago put together an online survey testing out over a hundred different regional variations in pronunciation and regional terms...It go about 20,000 responses.

All of the results are here, including maps.  The maps are a little hard to read, and many of them don't show anything conclusive, but you can get all the data from each state if you're really into it.

What was their methodology?  That should be featured prominently.

This study is not very useful for two reasons.  First, it's based on self-identification, which is highly inaccurate.  Much of the way we speak is ingrained, and we are unaware how we really pronounce things.  Our conception of a sound and our production of a sound are often two very different things.  The proper way to take such measurements is to have the participants speak these words in normal conversation, then analyze the recording.  The second reason is that the maps aren't weighted for population distribution, so it's very difficult to get an accurate picture of where what variations exist.  You may see one dot in the middle of South Dakota and 15 around New York City, but this doesn't mean the sound is less common in South Dakota.  It just means that there were fewer participants there.

OK, no more armchair linguistics.  I promise .

[??????????]

Why do Americans say "ideaR" and "ideaRs", instead of pronouncing the words as they are spelled? It seems kind of unnecessary to add a sound that isn't there. Do all Americans pronounce them this way? Do you have more words in which you add funny sounds?

As has been pointed out, this is a NY/Boston characteristic.  Most American dialects don't do this.  But there's still the question of why northeasterners have a trailing R, on this and other words.  My specualtion:

Generally, in all English dialects, there are two ways of handling a word that ends in a vowel followed by a word that begins with the same vowel:
1. Put a glottal stop (the ' in Hawa'i) between them (this is what most Americans do, although most are unaware of it)
2. Put an R sound between them.

I've noticed that in dialects that do not pronounce the R after a vowel (such as Boston, NY, and many British dialects), the second solution is used.  Hence John Lennon's "I sawr a film today, oh boy."
My guess is that the R on the end of "idea," and other similar words, is a remnant of this strategy.  Instead of the R only being there when the next word started with the same vowel, it stuck, showing up in all instances of the word's pronunciation.

Sorry to bore you with that.  Linguistics is one of my passions, even more so than politics.

Which is closer to the original British Accent? New England or the South? I always was told it was New England. Also their was some island off the coast of Virginia that was "rediscovered" in the 1870s and the people had been living there isolated since the 1790s. They still wore 1790s clothes and spoke in a British accent!

[ATFFL]

A professor and some students at Harvard a couple years ago put together an online survey testing out over a hundred different regional variations in pronunciation and regional terms...It go about 20,000 responses.

All of the results are here, including maps.  The maps are a little hard to read, and many of them don't show anything conclusive, but you can get all the data from each state if you're really into it.

What was their methodology?  That should be featured prominently.

This study is not very useful for two reasons.  First, it's based on self-identification, which is highly inaccurate.  Much of the way we speak is ingrained, and we are unaware how we really pronounce things.  Our conception of a sound and our production of a sound are often two very different things.  The proper way to take such measurements is to have the participants speak these words in normal conversation, then analyze the recording.  The second reason is that the maps aren't weighted for population distribution, so it's very difficult to get an accurate picture of where what variations exist.  You may see one dot in the middle of South Dakota and 15 around New York City, but this doesn't mean the sound is less common in South Dakota.  It just means that there were fewer participants there.

OK, no more armchair linguistics.  I promise .

What are the odds of two linguists meeting on a forum this size?

I am thrilled  if people don't ask "How many languages do you speak?" when I tell them linguistics is a hobby.

I thought they did it by self ID.

They should have interviewed each person and found out everywhere they lived.  Then you provide a list of words and ask them to pronounce it.  Then you describe things you want to see what word they use for (the drive through liquor store stuff.)

[??????????]

Some other words around here

Yall = you all
Nair = never (ex I nair dun that before)
Dun = done (see above)


Many many many more that i can't think of off hand.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Accents in the U.K actually differ even more than in the U.S
Even within a small geographical area:

Standard English: Make, Take
Tyneside [Geordie]: Myek, Tyek
Durham: Mak, Tak 2
Teeside: Mark, Tark

"Idea" in a broad Geordie accent is *something* like: "AY-dE-Ah

Someone try to translate this:

"Wy Aye"

And what does this mean in Geordie:

"Canny"

Moving away from the North East, this is a much used phrase in most of the West Country:

"Oi be drinken Zoider"

Where the nickname "Mackem" comes from. Alternatively it could be from Shipbuilding

[??????????]

I would enjoy hearing one of the brits on this boards accent.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some other words around here

Yall = you all
Nair = never (ex I nair dun that before)
Dun = done (see above)


Many many many more that i can't think of off hand.

"Yall" has been a feature of Southern Speech for hundreds of years.
"Dun" is very common in dialects in the U.K

[David S]

Some people in the midwest and the south tend to drop the "g" from words ending in ing. So "going fishing" becomes "goin fishin".  Also some folks in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have what sounds like a Canadian accent eh.

[??????????]

Some other words around here

Yall = you all
Nair = never (ex I nair dun that before)
Dun = done (see above)


Many many many more that i can't think of off hand.

"Yall" has been a feature of Southern Speech for hundreds of years.
"Dun" is very common in dialects in the U.K

Sometimes I feel that Southern is very close to a true English accent. We always drop the "g". Fixin, Doin, goin, workin, chawin (chewin).

[David S]

Some people in the midwest and the south tend to drop the "g" from words ending in ing. So "going fishing" becomes "goin fishin".  Also some folks in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have what sounds like a Canadian accent eh.

How about "pertnear"? Where I grew up in Michigan we always said things like "it's pertnear time to go" instead of "it's pretty nearly time to go".

I haven't heard that one. What part of Michigan were you from?
Its funny how you can notice a change in accents as you travel south from Michigan. In southern Ohio I start to notice more of a southern drawl, a little more in Kentucky and much more in Tennessee.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Moving away from the North East, this is a much used phrase in most of the West Country:

"Oi be drinken Zoider"

All across Britain, there are wonderful remnants of older stages of the Great Vowel Shift (700 years ago, our long vowels were pronounced roughly the way they were pronounced in modern Italian).  The long I, which used to be pronounce "ee," moved to uh-ee, then to ah-ee (and in Southern US speech, "ah").  What you actually hear in West Country is the middle stage, which was probably how Shakespeare pronounced the vowel.  Canadians also pronounce this vowel this way before voicesless consonants (p, t, k, etc), as part of a feature known as "Canadian Raising."

One of my favorite movies is the 1995 production of Cold Comfort Farm.  Kate Beckinsale visits rural Sussex, and most Americans need captions to understand what everyone (including Ian McKellen) is saying.  But I listen to it, and hear all kinds of not-quite-fully-shifted vowels.

You also hear a lot of unshifted vowels in Scouse.

The really interesting thing about the diversity of British accents is that I think, at least phonetically, RP/Queen's English is a lot closer to American than it is to, say, Scouse or Yorkie.  Before WWII, the educated speech on both sides of the pond was nearly identical.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Which is closer to the original British Accent? New England or the South? I always was told it was New England. Also their was some island off the coast of Virginia that was "rediscovered" in the 1870s and the people had been living there isolated since the 1790s. They still wore 1790s clothes and spoke in a British accent!

I thought, for some reason, that it was NC, but maybe it was VA, come to think of it.  Linguists almost universally agree that it is a relic accent of 18th Century English.  There is a phenomenon in which transplanted languages tend to be conservative, and small, isolated communities speaking transplanted languages tend to be even more conservative.

But the question of what English dialect is closer to 17th Century English is a very difficult question to define properly, much less answer.  Closer how?  Gramatically?  Phonetically?  Lexically?  Also, which "original" British accent?  There were a lot of them.  There is a theory that a lot of the underlying differences between the various American dialects has to do with what part of England the original settlers came from.  I can't recall exactly, but I think New England was settled by East Anglians.  So it could be that New England English is very similar to the 17th Century dialect of Norfolk/Suffolk, but not to the London speech of the time.

What we could do is compare the various dialects to texts of the period - maybe do a statistical analysis of word usage.  But, of course, the written language may not reflect at all what's being spoken by the people in everyday life.

Anyway... all dialects have diverged from 17th Century English.  Probably you wouldn't be able to say any one dialect, including the modern British dialects, is "closest" in any meaningful way.

(Yeah, I said I promised, but I just can't help myself...)

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

What are the odds of two linguists meeting on a forum this size?

Probably pretty high, considering how popular Tolkien has been in the past few years .

I am thrilled  if people don't ask "How many languages do you speak?" when I tell them linguistics is a hobby.

Eh.  If you study linguistics formally (which I haven't done beyond 101 in college) they make you get fluent in at least one language, and study another in depth.  At UW-Madison, one of them has to be a non-Indo-European language.  So, it's not an entirely unreasonable question.

Anyway, I'm glad to see a fellow linguist here.  At least I won't be boring everyone .

[dazzleman]

I have not read the whole thread, so forgive me if I say something that somebody else has already said.

Pronunciation has a lot to do with social class.  I read about a study done in New York of the speech patterns of customers of three stores -- Alexanders (low class), Macy's (middle class) and Saks (upper class).

Those who shopped at Alexanders were most likely to pronounce an "r" where none existed in a word.  Ironically, these same people were most likely also to drop pronunciation of the "r" in words where the letter existed.

I always thought this was a New York thing, but I guess it's northeastern in general.