Or as we used to say in Houston:

“Y’all are the wuns talkin lak Yankees…so jest sip yer sody pop and stop thankin that everun else talks funny”

BTW my understanding is that the “Standard American Accent” used to define dictionary pronunciations is that of New England…

I will point out, however, that nowhere in my post did I imply that southerners are stupid. I slow my speech down because we northerners tend to jumble our words together, quickly, and southerners tend not to get some of what we say. The reason I do it is out of courtesy, not insult. I have been told by more than one southerner that I talk too fast.

You want to be an asshole about it, and take insult where none was intended, go right ahead. No one else is going to see your comments.

Oh, yeah. The above was a deliberate insult. Trust me when I tell you that if I’m going to insult someone, they’re going to know it.

I’d be surprised if ‘cawfee’ wasn’t in the dictionary. After all, it’s part of their job to report the major pronunciations of every word. Both pronunciations are in my dictionary, btw (Am. Heritage, Coll. Ed’n. 1982).

I’ve heard East coasters make the claim that PNW’ers have an accent, but they can’t tell me exactly what it is. Maybe you can. I was marked for pronouncing roof with more of a ‘uh’ sound than with an ‘oo’, but that’s something I picked up from my midwestern parents. A German once told me that PNW’ers were the easiest Americans to understand because we lack an accent.

MakeMineRed

The Pacific Northwest has a distinct accent as well. I spent plenty of time in the Seattle area while my cousin lived in Steilacoom and Tacoma.

The way I see it, if you pronounce words the way the dictionary says to pronounce them, you have no accent.

It’s “cawfee” in the dictionary, not “cahfee.”

I stand by my (formerly) accentless dialect. Hey, you can dig up Bruce Hill’s old podcast featuring yours truly and judge for yourself.

Now, you may not be a full-blown Joisey goil, but how can a self-proclaimed dialectician make those claims about New Jersey? If you truly had no accent, you would have grown up in the Pacific Northwest. If this is a fishing expedition, then consider me gaffed, but the idea of somebody from NJ claiming that they have no accent is unbelievable.

MakeMineRed