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.