Comments on: Voices of California

By: Do Californians have an accent? « Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Do Californians have an accent? « Arnold Zwicky's Blog — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 23:34:52 +0000

[...] the language of adolescents, and director of the Stanford Voices of California project, described here) and Geoff Nunberg (semanticist, public intellectual commenting broadly in the media on issues [...]

By: arnold zwicky

arnold zwicky — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 13:18:17 +0000

December 9: Ellen Seebacher adds this public radio coverage of the project: "Stanford Researchers Try to Define the California Accent" (reporter Charla Bear, in the KQED California Report for the weekend of Nov. 23-25).

By: Brief mention: Accent perceptions « Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Brief mention: Accent perceptions « Arnold Zwicky's Blog — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:24:58 +0000

[...] In folk dialectology — the dialectology of ordinary people (not professionals) — some people are perceived as “having an accent”, while others don’t. Many times, but far from always, the people reporting on these phenomena believe they are accentless; accents are something other people have. (Typical folk reflections on these matters, in a California context, are noted here.) [...]

By: W

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:52:54 +0000

A similar project is going on in Australia, called AusTalk: https://austalk.edu.au/

By: Jenny

Jenny — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 05:46:09 +0000

I am not that good at hearing accents, but I have lived my whole life in Southern California and I can definitely hear an accent here. It isn’t present in all of the state, either. I don’t hear it in the Central Valley or the Bay Area. The band Sublime has it, and I can hear it there very clearly. My friend who grew up in the San Fernando Valley (where Valley Girls come from) said she can hear six different LA basin accents.

The SNL skit didn’t really sound like our accent to me, except for the bit about the 405. We always call it “the 405,” not “405.” And we do talk about traffic.

By: arnold zwicky

arnold zwicky — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:47:57 +0000

From David Johnson on Google+, this SNL skit about California accents. There are plenty of representations of stereotypical "California" accents (usually of young women from SoCal), but that isn't linguistics (though the stereotypes are a field of study in their own right). In this case, there are a fair number of systematic studies of (aspects of) the stereotyped varieties.

By: Wilson Gray

Wilson Gray — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:59:32 +0000

Perhaps Mr. Conlon needs to visit the Northeast, as well as the Southeast. I’ve heard the pronunciation of _California_ – by Californians! – mocked, in Cambridge, MA. The Cantabrigians felt that something like “cali-PHONE-yuh” was the proper pronunciation. A friend from Pacific Palisades told of being laughed at by her Somerville, MA, housemates, because of her inability to pronounce /ɛ/ as [ɛ] before a nasal.