So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Hercule]

Very little will diminish my opinion of somebody faster than hearing them say "exspecially" and (especially so) "ax," as in "ax a question."

 

[LizzieMaine]

What are your thoughts on stopped fricatives? Dey don't bodda me a bit.

 

[Hercule]

I don't seem to encounter that in daily life, outside of television caricatures. And even then I tend not to watch anything that would have such a thing.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Ain' dat sumpin. It's mostly an East Coast working-class thing, although there are also some Southern dialects that will do it.

Everyday pronunciations I tend to use --

Brudda -- your male sibling.

Wadda -- what comes out of a bubbla.

Anudda -- not dis one, but dat one.

Tagedda -- widdis one annat one.

Wedda -- izzit gonna rain or snow?

Weddaman -- da guy dat predix da wedda.


What always makes my ears grind is when people whose natural dialect drops the trailing "G" hypercorrect it so that it sounds like "Are you goingggggg swimmingggg?" Nothing is more of a dead giveaway to someone trying to code-switch than that.

 

[Hercule]

Ain' dat sumpin. It's mostly an East Coast working-class thing, although there are also some Southern dialects that will do it.

Hmm, I was born and raised in Connecticut and never heard such a thing. At least as far as I can remember. Certainly not from someone as a normal manner of speech. Maybe as an affect, but certainly not in the course of day to day interactions. I truly feel for you if you encounter on a regular basis.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Don' bodda me a bit. I love dialects and the variety they lend to speech. Overly-precise diction makes me think of all those faky, pretentious voices I used to know in radio.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Ain' dat sumpin. It's mostly an East Coast working-class thing, although there are also some Southern dialects that will do it.

Everyday pronunciations I tend to use --

Brudda -- your male sibling.

Wadda -- what comes out of a bubbla.

Anudda -- not dis one, but dat one.

Tagedda -- widdis one annat one.

Wedda -- izzit gonna rain or snow?

Weddaman -- da guy dat predix da wedda.


What always makes my ears grind is when people whose natural dialect drops the trailing "G" hypercorrect it so that it sounds like "Are you goingggggg swimmingggg?" Nothing is more of a dead giveaway to someone trying to code-switch than that.

Still much German in it.

 

[vitanola]

Very little will diminish my opinion of somebody faster than hearing them say "exspecially" and (especially so) "ax," as in "ax a question."

So, you don't care for obsolete words? "Ax" derives from the word "acsian", the root of our modern "ask". If one reads many old blackletter books one will notice that "ax" was the preferred literary variant until well into the seventeenth century. That pronunciation was extremely common throughout the United States until the 1920's, and carried class connotations only in the Northeast. By the twenty-first century it had become primarily a race signifier, and so when this usage becomes controversial, as it does from time to time, it is generally (perhaps never) a purely grammatical objection.

As something of a pedant myself, although I understand the background of this pronunciation, and realise that although currently non-standard it is in no way incorrect, I wince whenever I hear it used, and have to work rather hard not to think ill of its user. Not that my esteem or the lack thereof should matter one whit to anyone at all. of course.

On the other hand, the pronunciation "exspecially" should, I think, be used only by musicians of talent.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Still much German in it.

There were an awful lot of German settlers in the Northeast. A town just down the road from me was founded by Germans in the 19th Century -- a real estate promoter made the rounds of small German villages and recruited people to emigrate, promising them lush farmland. They got here and found out that the farmland grew a good crop of blueberries, but that was about it, but they stuck around anyway and made a good show of it. That town is renowned to this day for its locally-made sauerkraut, made from an original old German recipe, and which surpasses anything you can buy in a supermarket.

One of the things I love most about dialects is trying to figure out their origins -- we had a local Russian-Jewish population that came to the Maine coast in the 1910s, which added a slight tang to the local dialect. It's pretty funny to hear a grizzled old Mainer call somebody a "schmuck." Drive forty minutes inland, though, and the main influence you'll hear is Quebecois, in neighborhoods where French is still spoken as a first language, and everybody sounds like they have bronchitis.

 

[MisterCairo]

Exspresso, anyone?

Single shot or double...

 

[Trenchfriend]

Exspresso, anyone?

Single shot or double...

Nah, gimme triple Mokka.

 

[vitanola]

Don' bodda me a bit. I love dialects and the variety they lend to speech. Overly-precise diction makes me think of all those faky, pretentious voices I used to know in radio.

When I was in kindergarten my teacher inquired as to my background, for even then my speech patterns were not usual for Northeast Ohio. I pronounce all of my terminal consonants carefully, the fricatives are precise, I have always tended toward the long A, though, again, I don't hit it at all hard, and strike my "r's" very lightly except when I roll them. When I was younger I sounded a great deal like Norman Brokenshire. For a time I worked to make my speech more standard. Now, I don't bother.

I tend to blame or credit my grandparents for this. My parent's speech has always been relatively standard Midwestern American English. I spent most of my first five years around the old folks. Their influence was profound. One set of grandparents (and their friends) spoke heavily accented, though quite literary, Czech-American and German-American English. Another spoke a sort of pidgin Ruthenian-English. My third pair (families are complicated) consisted of a Grandmother who was a graduate of Miss Porter's School and Barnard College (and who sounded almost precisely like Eleanor Roosevelt) and a grandfather who was plucked off of a Southern Michigan farm at the age of thirteen and sent to Lawrence Academy and then to Bowdoin College. HIS speech was a really interesting amalgam of non-rhotic Mid-Atlantic English and Midwestern twang. Think of Franklin Roosevelt very occasionally hitting a hard "r" by accident, calling a suitcase a "grip", and letting "chimbley", "wadder" and "crackin' good!" slip out from time to time...

 

[Hercule]

Exspresso, anyone?

Single shot or double...

That one bothers me too, though I can understand given the correlation with the Italian term for express.

So, you don't care for obsolete words? "Ax" derives from the word "acsian", the root of our modern "ask". If one reads many old blackletter books one will notice that "ax" was the preferred literary variant until well into the seventeenth century. That pronunciation was extremely common throughout the United States until the 1920's, and carried class connotations only in the Northeast. By the twenty-first century it had become primarily a race signifier, and so when this usage becomes controversial, as it does from time to time, it is generally (perhaps never) a purely grammatical objection.

If only... prior to posting it, you do realize that YOU were probably the ONLY person to know that?

On the other hand, the pronunciation "exspecially" should, I think, be used only by musicians of talent.

While not my thing, I can appreciate your point.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Pardon me while I exscape.

 

[LizzieMaine]

When I was in kindergarten my teacher inquired as to my background, for even then my speech patterns were not usual for Northeast Ohio. I pronounce all of my terminal consonants carefully, the fricatives are precise, I have always tended toward the long A, though, again, I don't hit it at all hard, and strike my "r's" very lightly except when I roll them. When I was younger I sounded a great deal like Norman Brokenshire. For a time I worked to make my speech more standard. Now, I don't bother.

Brokenshire I can take more than I can take David Ross. I developed a "radio voice" when I worked in that medium, but it was just an acting persona as far as I was concerned, just like any of the other dialects I did in commercials and such, and I could turn it on or off like a switch. The people who bugged me were the ones who used their "radio voice" all the time, on or off the air -- some of them were quite insufferable. We had a guy who called himself "Jack Armstrong," who trailed off every sentence with a downward-inflected Orson Welles baritone, all "How now, brown cowwwwwwwww," and it was ridiculous to hear him say things like "We're out of toilet paperrrrrrr. Why doesn't anyone change the rolllllllll."

My natural dialect is completely non-rhotic, to the point where I can't say the word "February." Even in my "radio voice" it comes out "Febooa'yee." I use a broad New England "a" about half the time -- it's broad in "Half" in a phrase like "half a dollar," but short in a phrase like "halfway there." I also use a short A in "Aunt," which is not at all standard for a Maine native. It's a weird amalgamation of various Northeastern dialects that I've picked up along the way. I can, however, shift into a conventional "Maine Accent" at will, having grown up surrounded by it, and will often do so as part of my soft-shoe routine that I do for the tourists at the theatre.

Because of my years doing dialects on radio, I have an unfortunate tendency to pick up inflections from anyone I spend a lot of time with. A close friend has a strong North Shore Massachusetts accent, and some of her inflections have found their way into my permanent speech, especially the word "Bahhston." I have other friends with strong New York Jewish accents, and I have picked up traits from them, and another friend speaks BBC Received Pronunciation English. I actually substituted for her once on a radio show without anyone ever catching on the difference, and every now and then one of her pronunciations will slip into my everyday speech. And god forbid I ever should spend time around a Southerner or a Minnesotan, because I'll fall right into mimicking them without realizing I'm doing it.

I tend to blame or credit my grandparents for this. My parent's speech has always been relatively standard Midwestern American English. I spent most of my first five years around the old folks. Their influence was profound. One set of grandparents (and their friends) spoke heavily accented, though quite literary, Czech-American and German-American English. Another spoke a sort of pidgin Ruthenian-English. My third pair (families are complicated) consisted of a Grandmother who was a graduate of Miss Porter's School and Barnard College (and who sounded almost precisely like Eleanor Roosevelt) and a grandfather who was plucked off of a Southern Michigan farm at the age of thirteen and sent to Lawrence Academy and then to Bowdoin College. HIS speech was a really interesting amalgam of non-rhotic Mid-Atlantic English and Midwestern twang. Think of Franklin Roosevelt very occasionally hitting a hard "r" by accident, calling a suitcase a "grip", and letting "chimbley", "wadder" and "crackin' good!" slip out from time to time...

Some of the old money folk around here will still use that FDR type of accent, but they're mostly quite elderly now. That accent was much more common among the summapeople when I was growing up, but their kids have gotten away from it. More and more our summer people are the sort of people who have gone to great lengths to erase any trace of regionalism from their speech in order to "fit in" with, I guess, other people who have gone to great lengths to erase any trace of regionalism from their speech.

 

[Edward]

Very little will diminish my opinion of somebody faster than hearing them say "exspecially" and (especially so) "ax," as in "ax a question."

Interestingly, a keen student of linguistics once told me that the original pronunciation in English was 'ax', our modern 'ask' being the slang corruption.

Addendum: I posted this not realising that wasn't the current end of the thread. Smartphones, eh? Brave new world, an aw tha...

 

[MisterCairo]

"I don't have an accent - YOU do!"

We're all guilty of that, no?

I try to tell our daughters that everyone has an accent. My favourite descriptor? My nephew, now 22, saying as a child "Hey, that man speaks Englandish"!

 

[vitanola]

If only... prior to posting it, you do realize that YOU were probably the ONLY person to know that?

I can't imagine that to be the case. Why, I learned of that antique usage in"frosh" English class. On second thought, I suspect that the Freshman English class taught by Fred Turner at Kenyon in those dear dead days may have been a bit idiosyncratic, though.

 

[sheeplady]

I (fortunately) have the relatively easily understood accent of an upstate New Yorker, which is a bit of a mid-west accent crossed with a NYC one. I've been told by people who are not native English speakers that I am so easy to understand compared to a lot of Americans.

I do have a bit of a regional country accent (which sounds a bit... southern, in some of the pronunciation, but is NOT a drawl). And apparently I pronounce milk as "melk" which is a signifier of where I am from. Whereas the country accent only comes out when I've gone back home, "melk" I cannot pronounce as "milk" no matter how I try. A bunch of college friends tried to get me to pronounce "milk" for several hours, they gave up. I honestly can't hear the difference.

 

[LizzieMaine]

. And apparently I pronounce milk as "melk" which is a signifier of where I am from. Whereas the country accent only comes out when I've gone back home, "melk" I cannot pronounce as "milk" no matter how I try. A bunch of college friends tried to get me to pronounce "milk" for several hours, they gave up. I honestly can't hear the difference.

I also say "melk," which was the only way anybody said it around here when I was growing up. I'd hear "milk" on the radio, and I wouldn't know what they were talking about.