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Belated Thoughts on Obama’s Accent
Wikimedia This post is four years late. I admit it. The president’s accent has already been scrutinized ad nauseum, and there have been political controversies about this very topic. But after watching...
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Why Vowel Shifts?
[Ed. Note: I'm on vacation till Saturday, July 30th, so I'm publishing some old posts that I drafted but never published for various reasons. Some of these might be a little rough around the edges....
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Just What is General American English?
The American Midwest I’ve spent the last week on vacation with my girlfriend’s extended family. Most of them are from various parts of Pennsylvania, a state noted for its relative diversity of...
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Chicago [shi-KAW-go]
Some of the most intriguing dialect mysteries involve place names. One of the more peculiar of these head-scratchers is the local pronunciation of ‘Chicago.’ The Chicago accent, being affected by the...
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Northeastern PA’s “Un-Northeastern” Accent
While a college freshman, I assumed one of my classmates to be from Minnesota or Wisconsin (my accent-dar was unsophisticated back then). She hailed from Scranton, Pennsylvania, however, a city a mere...
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“Interstate Farty-Far” (St. Louis English)
wikimedia It’s easy to prematurely assume that certain rare American dialect features have become extinct. Such is the case with St. Louis‘ “Interstate Farty-Far” quirk, whereby words like “for” and...
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Midwestern English is Not “Dictionary Standard”
In a recent column, Marilyn Vos Savant (a columnist with an allegedly record-setting IQ) wrote: I’ve retained 99+ percent of my Midwestern ‘accent,’ which sounds like no accent at all because nearly...
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Pre-R Raising in Cleveland
One of my favorite Food Network personalities is Michael Symon, a decorated chef from Cleveland. Celebrity chefs, refreshingly, tend not to alter their accent much (all those fancy French terms belie...
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“Fargo” Redux: Dialect Work in TV’s Renaissance
When Fargo was released in 1996, “Minnesota speech” was largely unknown to the majority of the American populace. With a handful of exceptions, the dialect had little representation in popular culture....
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