The State of Regional Dialects and Accents: “Hahvahd Yahd” is Here to Stay

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  10.24.06 | 10:22 AM ET

Conventional wisdom says that, given the rise of mass media, regional accents and dialects would disappear and “everyone would sound as distinctly indistinct as a television newscaster.” It won’t be so. In fact, “The Atlas of North American English, the first work to plot all the major speech patterns in the continental United States and Canada, has found the opposite: regional dialects are actually becoming more pronounced,” according to a story in October’s Smithsonian.

“Radio and television don’t seem to have much impact on how people talk,” University of Pennsylvania linguist Bill Labov says. “People want to sound like their friends, their boss.”

And what exactly do we all sound like? The story has a link to the Speech Accent Archive, a project of the Program in Linguistics in the Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, Technology Across the Curriculum, Center for History & New Media, at George Mason University. Here you can listen to how speakers from around the world sound when they read this passage:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Hear how a 22-year-old Frenchwoman in Nice sounds in relation to a 22-year-old man in Karachi, Pakistan or a 29-year-old man in Nairobi, Kenya. Or, listen to 184 different dialects of English from 184 different English speakers around the world.

Tags: Global Village, Languages, North America, News and Briefs


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