Saturday, July 23, 2005

Pacific Northwest accents


An interesting piece on KUOW yesterday morning ( transcript and audio (3 min)) about research at U-W and Portland State on regional accents.

  • To NW speakers, the vowels are the same in "odd" and "ought".

  • Natives often drop the ending -ed, saying "can fruit" instead of "canned fruit"

Quotes from Jennifer Ingle, who did a whole study on accents in Ballard that was written up in the Seattle PI a few months ago, which noted that Northwesterners
  • say "bucket" instead of "pail"

  • emphasize the 's' in words
  • use only 14 out of 15 American English vowel sounds.

Guess I'll have to start watching my kids carefully to keep them from losing their God-given right to all 15 vowels.

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