![]() Cindy Blanco, a senior scientist at Duolingo, writes that accents are concerned with pronunciation, whereas dialect “refers to a whole group of language features, including pronunciation, but also differences in vocabulary, grammar, and how the language gets used (like the rules of what counts as polite).” The Midwest accent follows most of the same grammatical structure as American English, which is considered to be a dialect of the English language. All three linguistic concepts are wrapped up in a deeper question of what constitutes “proper” English. The line between an accent, a dialect and a language isn’t incredibly clear. What does it mean for the Midwest accent to lose its status as the “standard” American accent? And what do the speaker’s regional flourishes - or lack thereof - actually tell us about them? The Midwest accent has emerged at an unlikely time, where regional accents are fading and linguistic heterogeneity threatens the development of new ones. In cities across the country known for their distinctive accents - Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, among others - local varieties of English are fading in favor of generic “newscaster” accents, a voice that exists without a sense of place or time, that could be spoken by any American, anywhere. In 2013, that number had declined to just one-third of Texas’ population. In 1980, 80% of Texans had a Southern accent. Regional dialects as a whole are declining, demonstrative of a larger, inherently problematic, aim towards a “neutral’’ accent. ![]() This is why Canadian accents sound very similar to the “Yooper Accent” found in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.īut the Midwest accent may prove to be short-lived. Canadian accents are also the result of lengthening and the eh and ah sounds becoming more prominent in speakers’ pronunciation. In the California vowel shift, ‘u’ is moving towards a ‘y’ or ‘e’ sound, so that rude begins to sound like reed. Californian and Canadian accents are also both the result of vowel shifts. Speakers with particularly strong Midwest accents will pronounce job like jab, for example. The most distinct characteristic of the Northern Cities vowel shift is the lengthening and lifting of certain sounds: the short A sound turns into a vaguely Canadian ah. This isn’t the first time English speakers have shifted their pronunciation of vowels: between 14, the English language underwent what’s known as The Great Vowel Shift, a linguistic event that radically altered the way words were pronounced. If current trends continue, Midwest accents may no longer be the desired “neutral English.” But now, depending on the speaker, it can be quite obvious. Before, it would’ve been difficult to hear someone speak and immediately identify that they were from Michigan or Wisconsin or Indiana. Since the 1950s, the Great Lakes Region of the Midwest has been experiencing what linguists have dubbed the “Northern Cities vowel shift,” giving rise to a new and distinct Midwestern accent. Linguists sometimes call Midwestern accents, formally known as the Inland North accent, “general English” or the “neutral English” accent.
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