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I grew up in a very homogenous suburb, and was quite shocked when I moved to Philadelphia for college and started hearing how many different dialects exist even within one city. My untrained ear could not tell you the difference between a New York or Philadelphia accent, but some of my friends swear they can tell the difference between North and South Philadelphians, and spot someone from Jersey in a syllable. Just recently I moved to San Francisco, and I was shocked to hear several people observe that I had an East Coast accent. Throughout your travels around the country, what observations have you made about the different dialects in America? How do different regions differ in terms of syllable emphasis, sentence construction, or even slang?

tchrist
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Kam6761
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    This seems too broad a question; the answer would be a book. – ShreevatsaR Dec 09 '10 at 20:14
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    @ShreevatsaR- I'm sure a fully comprehensive answer could span many tomes, but I just thought this would be a fun question for Americans who love language to think about! – Kam6761 Dec 09 '10 at 20:29
  • I agree with ShreevatsaR - the answer really is a research paper/book! – Noldorin Dec 09 '10 at 21:26
  • @ShreevatsaR, Noldorin: not necessarily. As JSBangs has demonstrated, the answer can be a link to a research paper/book/website. – Marthaª Dec 10 '10 at 00:45

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You might be interested in The TELSUR Project, which is a high-granularity phonological survey of North American dialects. Note that the information presented on that site is very detailed and highly technical.

In particular, there is an overview of major dialect regions, of which they distinguish five major groups:

  1. West (basically everything west of the Great Plains)
  2. North Central (MN, WI, and the Dakotas)
  3. Midland (most of the Great Plains and the Midwest)
  4. Inland North (MI and inland NY)
  5. South (um, the South)

The Northeast presents special difficulties, as it has the most diversity of any region, and isn't represented in the regions above. Here is a detail map of Northeast dialect regions.

However, there are a multitude of subtle gradations in these divisions, which can be explored by reading through the materials presented on those sites.

You might also like to look through the Harvard dialect survey results, which plot an enormous number of phonological and lexical differences across the country.

JSBձոգչ
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  • Where's the East Coast on that list of dialect regions? Or is the East too fragmented to make the top 5? – Marthaª Dec 09 '10 at 20:22
  • @Martha, added link to the Northeast map. – JSBձոգչ Dec 09 '10 at 20:24
  • +1 for the great resources (and for your fully comprehensive description of the South!). – Kam6761 Dec 09 '10 at 20:33
  • New England accents often get lumped into a generic "Boston" (ahem. BAWSTIN) accent, when there are actually MANY. I grew up in CT, and can hear the difference between Providence, Boston, NYC, Vermont, and Seacoast NH/Downeast Maine. – Darwy Jun 05 '11 at 18:07
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I can't tell apart the various accents, either, other than to know that I'm hearing one.

My one story about dialect differences came shortly after I moved to the Philly area, and happened to mention the 202. The person I was speaking to got inexplicably amused, and brought her friend over and had me repeat what I just said. That was when I learned that putting a definite article before a road number is a left-coast thing. Having grown up next to the 101 and spent many hours so-called driving on the 405, it hadn't occurred to me that this could be a dialect thing.

Marthaª
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  • Yes! This was one of the first things my husband and I noticed when we moved to SF. In fact, my mind is still so geared towards the East Coast way that it took me a solid 30 seconds to even register "the 202" as 202, the biggest road that goes through my hometown of West Chester! This is an excellent example. – Kam6761 Dec 09 '10 at 20:37
  • @Kam6761, my sister lives in Downingtown. Small world, huh? – Marthaª Dec 09 '10 at 21:23
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    Wow, I didn't even know you were referring to route numbers until the moment I got to the term. – Jon Purdy Dec 10 '10 at 09:43
  • Oho! I thought this was a difference between US and UK (we say "the M1", "the A650"): I've never heard the left-coast variant. – Colin Fine Dec 10 '10 at 13:01
  • @Martha: Wow! It really is a small world. If you think of any other fun East/West Coast variants, I'd love to hear them (particularly because it sounds like you're familiar with the two dialects out of the ENTIRE country that I'm most interested in!). – Kam6761 Dec 10 '10 at 13:58
  • It is common to hear the 408, the 417, and the 528 in the Orlando area for the East-West Expressway, Greenway Expressway, and Beachline Expressway. However, it is awkward to hear the X for non-expressway state roads, U.S. roads, or interstates, e.g. the 50 instead of 50, the 17-92 instead of 17-92, or the 4 instead of I-4. – Jaime Soto Dec 10 '10 at 16:49
  • @Colin Fine: Wow at "Oho"! Besides my mother, I've heard only few, if anyone else at all, use that exclamation! (Apologies if this is off-topic!) – Jimi Oke Dec 21 '10 at 00:37
  • @Kam6761: I believe the West coast prefers freeway to the East coast's interstate, though perhaps that's Southern California versus the Mid-Atlantic. – Wayne May 24 '11 at 19:27
  • @Wayne Because freeway covers all such roadways and not just the interstates, perhaps the difference springs from how much more common (and likely) non-interstate freeways are here in the West due to state size. It would sound bizarre to refer to the half-dozen city-only freeways here in Phoenix as interstates. – Matthew Frederick May 24 '11 at 19:36
  • @Matthew: Yes, you're right. Now that I think about it, I wonder if there is a generic word for "multi-lane, limited access highway" here in the East. I certainly would not call the Baltimore-Washington Parkway an interstate -- even though technically I think it is I-295 or something like that -- but neither would I call it a freeway or anything like that. Am I just having a brain freeze? – Wayne May 24 '11 at 19:41
  • @Wayne, my GPS uses "freeway" for all limited-access highways, even the PA Turnpike, which manifestly is not a free way. Bugs me every time. – Marthaª May 24 '11 at 19:53
  • One thing that bugged me no end was the switch from route numbers in Colorado (I-70, Highway 82) to route names in Texas. "Take the George Bush to the John Carpenter Freeway..." Huh??? The only named highways I knew were ones that had no number. – George Erhard Apr 06 '17 at 18:22
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    @GeorgeErhard: it gets especially confusing when the traffic reporters use nicknames that don't appear *anywhere* - not on maps, not on road signs, nowhere except in people's heads. For example, in the Philadelphia area there's the "blue route": apparently, when they were planning on building interstate 476, they color-coded the options, and the one that got accepted and built was the blue one. – Marthaª Apr 06 '17 at 19:27
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Pennsylvania Dutch country is interesting to me. Perhaps it was only the first-generation immigrants, but my father has a couple of phrases he used to hear, such as "Throw the cow over the fence some hay", or "Throw me down the stairs my shoes", which are the result of English words with German grammar.

Twenty years ago, I had friends who moved to Pennsylvania Dutch country and they had a baby and when some neighbors came over, they asked, "Is your baby strange?", which meant "Is your baby afraid of being handled by strangers?"

Then there's the whole regional naming/pronunciation of location names. For example, I went to school in Rochester, New York and they have a bunch of crazy city name pronunciations up there. Chili is pronounced with both i's long (Chai lai), Avon, on the other hand, is pronounced with a short a, as in avid, then there's Geneseo (Jen eh see oh), and Lima pronounced a la espanol (Lee ma).

Wayne
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