Your region's accent

[Adash 193]

Original word v. Eastern PA pronunciation

 

water-wuter

orange-arange

envelope-anvelope

creek-crik

you guys-yous guys

-ing- -in'

sometimes our sentences sound like we are asking questions when we aren't 

 

Anthracite Region

Geographical extent: Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties, western Lackawanna County--region of extensive anthracite coal mining.

Urban centers: Scranton/Wilkes-Barre

Summary: Northern dialect, with a complicated linguistic history. Upstate New York-type in origin, with later mixture of Eastern Pennsylvania (German) features, and more recently Slavic superstrata due to immigration. Schuylkill county somewhat different situation: originally heavily Germanized dialect of Lehigh Valley-type, now following Scranton-Wilkes Barre pattern.
The area's first settlers from Connecticut and Upstate New York brought with them a "Yankee" dialect, but Pennsylvania Midland dialects began blending with it soon after, as Pennsylvania Germans began immigrating in numbers. More recently, there seems also to have been input from metropolitan Philadelphia. Interestingly, there are some significant parallels with New York City pronunciation: consistent reduction of hard and soft TH: dis (this), tink (think); full pronunciation of the G in final -ng, e.g. coming gup (coming up), and use of the glottal stop for medial -tt-: bo'l (bottle). The reduction of TH is common to many other urban dialects of the north, but in the Scranton area it appears to be practiced much more consistently and is even recognized as a local shibboleth (De Camp 1940).
It is possible that such changes are due to Eastern European immigration at the turn of the century. One particularly recent characteristic of the Anthracite dialect attributed to Slavic influence, is the merger of O and AW in cot and caught. Herold's study (1990) determined that this was not an extension of the Western Pennsylvania merger, but was rather an independant local development among coal mining immigrants, which is now establishing itself in the entire speech community.

 

Edited February 5, 2015 by Adash

[Lucky Bolt 35,063]

The accent here in Florida is pretty diverse...the majority of us though, have a southern twang. 

[AveryGamerDude 4,640]

In Arkansas, the only 2 accents that exist are the standard American and redneck. Just like literally every other state I've been to. Minus Florida, Texas, and Illinois.

[Here No Longer 5,276]

Mist people here in Texas speak in a southern accent, though of course a bit different. If you've watched SpongeBob, I'll tell you a lot of people sound a lot like Sandy but with less of an accent. That's actually about accurate...

 

Though being a transplant, mine's a bit different. I'm from the northwest, so it's more like what you'd hear in Seattle or somewhere like that. Though with a very slight amount of Texan mixed in, I think.

Edited April 29, 2019 by Dusklicious

[Cyclone 1066 3,619]

Normal? Idk, I don't really thing of it as an accent cause I grew up with it.

[Dreambiscuit 9,691]

Southern Cal has a lot of diverse accents swirling around, but there is sort of a dominant undercurrent that I call ‘Stupid.’ It’s a derivative of Valley speech characteristics which have been adopted and bastardized into an aimless mish-mash by other segments of culture and region.