Quote:
Originally Posted by Zarnium
I got your messages, thanks.
I find it strange how many different accents there are in other countries in such a relatively small geographical area; compare, say, England to the American midwest. They're a roughly equal area, but the midwest doesn't have much accent variation, while English accents can change significantly just because of what side of a single city you're from. So I'm told, anyway.
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When I was in the Army we had people from all over the U.S. from just about every state. I learned a lot about dialects/accents in the U.S. then. I had four black room mates and other black friends and learned about black
ebonics which is very similar to the dialect my mother spoke from Arkansas. When I go to Mexico I have less
cultural shock than when I go to Arkansas. I never knew my mother and father had a southern accent until I
was older and people started pointing out to me. In school I would speak one dialect and at home and when I
went to Arkansas I would speak another dialect/accent. The dialect/accent of California is as different as night
and day compared to the Arkansas accent. Add to this the rural accents of Arkansas and you really see a difference.
Mississippi and Alabama even more so especially in the rural/small town areas. Have a friend from Mississippi
and I love to hear her talk. There are people from Louisiana that speak English with a southern French accent.
And Zarnium, have you ever seen the movie Fargo?
The most thorough and systematically-defined classification of American dialects we have to date can be found in the
Atlas of North American English by Labov et al. Even though the overarching geographic classifications ignore some important regional dialects due to insufficient data in the survey (e.g. New Orleans & Cajun), each region can be demarcated by a bundle of linguistic isoglosses. The boundaries shown below are not precise because of the ambitious undertaking it would require to collect and analyze enough geographic data (the project that led to this atlas lasted over a decade). Hopefully, collaboration between dialectologists working in various regions of America will eventually yield more exact dialect definitions.
