Sarah Palin's accent

Rod: "How about a thread on regional accents -- which ones we like, and which ones we don't like?"

I like them all.

I'm out West and happened to move into a neighborhood that had three New York City transplants. Very fun to hear that accent, especially way out in (and I say this with love) white bread land.

What accent you like is interesting. What I find really interesting in people is that some folks are very happy around people with accents from their home region (i.e. a Southerner listening to a Southern accent), while some people love any accent BUT the one they grew up with.

"I confess that I find the accents of the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes regions hard on my ears, but I particularly love the accent of upper class old-line New Orleanians, and people from the Carolinas."

Not taking it personally--just amused; my husband grew up in NC and has a bit of that accent while I'm originally from the Midwest (but I don't do the long "A" long "O" thing like my Wisconsin relatives).

I like many accents, but some Southern ones grate on my ears. Actually, it's not so much the accents as the regional ways of saying things, like "fixin' to" do something, or the ubiquitous and grammatically dubious "waiting on" for "waiting for," which has now become so much a part of our nation's speech that it's regularly used in advertisements (e.g., "Tired of waiting on Company A to get things done? Try Company B!" etc.). Don't know why that annoys me so much, but it does.

Rod may have shared this one before--in fact, I think he did--but it's fun, and I found it accurate, since it pegged me as coming from the Chicago/Midwest area:

gotoquiz.com/what_american_accent_do_you_have

I am from the Midwest and Minnesota to be exact and yes some people do have the accent,although I think it is more common in the Northern part of the state.

As for other accents,Southern accents don't bother me,except some people from Louisiana can be hard to understand and some Appalachian accents can be hard to understand. The only accents I don't like are Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Boston,those bother me.

There is a variety of Manhattan accent that I actually like - it's not as hard on the ears as the one most of us are familiar with, but it still has elements of New England embedded in it. I met an old New York lawyer once who had that accent. The accent telegraphed "Old School Gentleman" without sounding snooty, as did his dress and bearing.

He could share conversation with an entire tableful of Southerners, and they loved listening to him talk.

There's also a variation of Boston Brahmin that I like - I've met a few people who have it. It doesn't have the high-falutin' flavor many might think of as "Harvard Yard." It's almost a soft, Southern accent.

As a Southwesterner I'm partial to the dialects of my own region, but I've always felt like Texans lay it on a little thick.

There's a variety of accent I call "North Texas-German rumble" that I find very appealing. You'll find it in some areas of North Texas, where German and Polish Catholic farmers settled. Old farmers around there still speak with clipped cadences of Germanic speech, almost Amish in its sound, hybridized with Southwestern twang.

North of the Red River, a Southwestern accent doesn't sound quite as twangy and has a softer element to it.

Ironically, I find myself inserting more "y'alls" into a conversation if I know it gets on someone's nerve.

There are some Southern accents I don't enjoy - Paula Dean comes to mind. But I love the more classic Southern rhythms of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and Eudora Welty variety that have produced some of the best of American literature.

I've never enjoyed listening to "Fargo" type accents, but I always enjoyed the humor of "Lake Wobegon." Another accent that grates on my nerves is the peculiar tones of residents of New Orleans. I don't know why, but it has always sounded harsh to me.

Accent? What accents? None around here.

"y'all" is a very useful word and I take advantage of it even here in the Midwest.

Well, according to the quiz, I have the 'Midland' accent. Which is apparently pretty generic.

Not too surprising, given I'm a Navy brat and moved around a lot.

I remember one English prof who could identify accents. He was able to nail some people to a particular county or city. Me.. well, he said I had a 'wandering accent'.

As for which I like and don't like, I can handle most of them. I've pretty much had to.

I also love them all, including that Fargo accent. A number of my extended relatives speak with that one.

I do find the Texas twang along with Appalachian accents to be small dose only (am I allowed to say that here about Texas?).

But the most sonorous accent on earth may be that genteel South Carolina accent that sounds like Foghorn Leghorn from the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

Delightful. Vive la difference.

My mother is from East Carolina, and they have a Tidewater accent. But she's from the fairly remote Albemarle Settlements, so her accent seems much more 'old country' to my ears. (They've spent 350 years now in splendid isolation.) It's the oddest thing -- a Tidewater accent with what I swear sound like cockney or Australian vowels.

My aunt calls our people "flat billies", 'cause there ain't no hills on the Sound.

Yeah, there is a slight touch of twang to military brat accent. And I can vouch for the Tidewater thing. My mother was raised in Key West, but spent most of her adulthood in Va. Beach.

There's some unique sounds in that local speech that aren't Virginia at all. She even said 'hoose' for house. Very Canadian. I don't know if that's due to all the tourists, or what.

I'm a native Tulsan. Tulsa was for many years the Oil Capital of the world due to the Glenpool strike in the early 20th century. At that time, the Glenpool was the largest producing oilfield in the world, and most of the world's oil companies moved from Pennsylvania to Tulsa, the nearest city of any size. (Until the early 60's, nearly every oil company was HQ'd in Tulsa.)

As a result of this historical anomaly, older Tulsans often have a distinctive accent. It is broader and flatter, and more crisply enunciated -- no dropped "g's", for example -- than the usual Oklahoma accent. Also as a result of this same history, Tulsa's Roman Catholic population as a percentage of the populace is more than double that of the rest of the state.

over the last 30 years the distinction has dwindled toward extinction, but I still hear it very occasionally. Especially at Mass.

Hmmm - in the Pacific Northwest, people say "warshington" instead of wahhshington.

My favorite North Louisiana expression: "I'm fixin to". . . as in "I'm fixin to go to the Piggly Wiggly to buy me some beer."

My favorite South Louisiana expression: "Dis (or dat) side a da bayou.". . . "What part of town you from?" "Dat side a da bayou."

Doesn't it bug you in movies when the Southerners talk like Scarlet O'Hara - especially if the character is living in a trailer park or is from the wrong side of the tracks? Ah do declare. . .

Favorite Minnesotan: probably something like "oh for Pete's sake." I love Margie. . .

Favorite Palinism: Doggone it!

Ahh, finally someone mentioned the Pacific Northwest. I'm from Seattle (5th generation) and I hardly ever hear anything about our accent.

My husband has a Mighigander accent heavily influenced by Kentucky twang. I fell in love with this unique combination and still make him say things twice just for my enjoyment (bagel, hollow, etc.)

I am a transplant to Nebraska, and I often get teased about my Chicago accent, which gets worse if I've been on the phone with family members or, oddly, anybody from the upper East Coast.

Nebraskans have their own accent, and it does drive me up a wall sometimes. They pronounce the names "Don" and "Dawn" identically to my ear. Same goes for "pin" and "pen" but not "bin" and "Ben," remarkably.

My six-year-old is desperately trying to learn to read and spell, and she's constantly getting tripped up. "Leg" was on her spelling list this week. Here's how she painstakingly sounded it out and spelled it:

"Leg...lllll (writes down an L) ...ayyyy (writes down an A) ....gh (writes down a G), L-A-G, leg."

"Sorry, honey, but that's lag, llll-aaaa-gh. You want leg, llll-eh-gh."

At that point, she threw her pencil down and informed me if I was going to keep switching the way words were pronounced, there was no way she'd ever learn how to spell or read.

PS/ FYI: To those here referring to a 'Texas accent': Texas is an enormous state... with up to 600 mile stretches between cities. There are huge regions in Texas, each with it's own region-within-a-region dialect accents. There is, for instance, zero similarity to a West Texas accent and an East Texas accent. El Paso vs. Amarillo.

George W. Bush has an accent indicative of his central west Texas home town Midland, Texas. But then an east Texas accent is akin to a southern lilt or a country twang, depending how close you are to Louisianna and/or down more south toward the gulf .

In my lifetime I have been watching the regional accents in general wane or die. People I know who were born around Dallas and grew up after the large northern migrations of the late 70s through the 80s into the early 90s speak as if they came from anywhere but here. But in rural Texas they are generationally alive.

Sarah Palin sounds just like my sister-in-law from da U.P. (that's Michigan's upper penisula).

NOT commenting about the intelligence of certain groups, but I have often wondered if the South has lower literacy rates (they do, you can look it up) because the phonics of what they read don't match what they speak and hear.

I live in Wisconsin now, and am bemused by the way locals use the preposition "by" to mean "to," not "past," for example, "I went by my mom's house last night." I always think, "Why didn't you stop and say hi?"

I have a question: as a Californian, I of course think I have no accent. But, do people from other parts of the country think there is a 'California accent'? Just wondering. (And I'm not talking about media creations like Valley Girl slang, etc). Thanks.

I've lived in the Pacific NW (Oregon) all my life, and I have rarely heard anybody call Washington "Warshington." Those few who pronounce it that way tend to come from small timbering and mining towns that had a lot of migration from Appalachia.
They brought moonshine, too. ;)

Hmmm - in the Pacific Northwest, people say "warshington" instead of wahhshington.

A few do; most don't. In fact I've lived in the Seattle area for most of my life, and I can only think of one person who says "warshington."

I love most accents, especially the soft southern accents from the Carolinas and Georgia. I also liked the way Tommy Lee Jones talked in "No Country for Old Men." Was that a genuine Texan accent?

Anybody know why my mother-in-law (from Peoria) says "Warshington" for "Washington" and "Gawd" instead of "God"? I've heard that downstate Illinois is more like the south than the midwest, but those pronunciations are unfamiliar to me. My husband calls them "midlands".

I just hate the idea of Americans losing these great regional accents!

Hmmm - back on the Pacific Northwest 'controversy' - as I think about it, I do have to concede it's more of an old-timer, rural thing. I certainly don't hear anyone my own age saying it nor do I hear it in Portland. BUT - in the small Oregon town where my dad is from, all the old-time farmers talk about "warshing" the car, doing the "warsh." I heard the 'r' alot when I lived in the town of Longview, WA.

Which brings up an interesting point - is the "younger" generation, with all their fancy TV's & radios & things - are they starting to loose some of their regionalisms? What about accents in large towns in the south (Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Charlotte)? Haven't you met younger people born and raised in the south who have a more midwestern accent (aside from the occasional 'ya'll'). . .

What about how people refer to soft drinks? In the south, everything is a coke ('Would you like a coke' 'Sure, I'll take a diet Pepsi). Up north, don't they say 'pop' more often? Elsewhere it's a 'Soda'. . .

And, I'll just randomly throw out there that people in Gulfport & Biloxi put french dressing on their pizza. . .

I always thought the Virginia accent was the classiest-sounding American accent. Tom Wolfe and John Warner are good examples of well-known people who have the accent. Pat Robertson has it as well but his version sounds (to my ears) a bit less upper-class, whereas Wolfe and Warner sound like natural aristocrats. It would be cool to know that Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Lee spoke that way, but accents change so much over the centuries that they (except maybe for Lee, being a couple generations younger) probably didn't. I also like the similar Charleston accent (think Fritz Hollings). I am less enamored of the more generic Southern accent, but I like those two varieties of it.

When I was younger I disliked the working-class New England accent that many around me, especially older people, had (my own accent is much less distinctive), but now I find it has a nice "authentic" sound to it - unless overdone by an actor. In The Departed, DiCaprio and Damon over did it. (Damon is from the area, of course, but is really middle class and probably not a natural speaker that way.) Wahlberg's was probably authentic and therefore much less grating. Alec Baldwin, although not from the area, also did not overdo it and sounded pretty good.

I'm from NE Ohio, and I once worked in a pizza shop in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio where the green peppers were called "mangoes". It's the first and last time I've ever heard that.

I'm from "pop" country, myself. I force myself to say it, just to preserve my cultural identity as a Midwesterner. ;-)

I used to live in Philadelphia, too, where of course the big sandwiches are "hoagies". (Philadelphia is in "soda" country. Some friends and I once decided that the dividing line is somewhere around Pittsburgh.)

One thing I noticed in moving to Texas from Ohio. is that not only is there a "pop vs. soda" regional shibboleth, there's also "bag vs. sack". I remember the first time I stopped in a store in Texas, and the check-out clerk asked me whether I wanted a "sack". (I was used to being asked whether I wanted a "bag".) I had to ask the clerk to repeat what she said, because at first I didn't understand it. Anyway, I said yes, and she proceeded to put my things in a standard-issue plastic bag, which I would never have dreamed of calling a "sack". But then I started to listen, and I hear it all the time here, and other places in the South.

Another thing I've noticed is the regional difference between what one means by "tea", without qualification. If you ask for "tea", what do you expect to receive? In Ohio, if you ask for "tea", you will receive a cup with a teabag and hot water. In Texas, and in Kentucky where my father grew up (and I presume elsewhere in the South), if you ask for "tea" you will receive a tall glass with ice and cold tea. (Of course, first you will probably be asked whether you want it sweet or unsweet -- or they may just assume you want sweet unless you specify otherwise.)

In Ohio, if you want iced tea, you have to ask for "iced tea". I always wondered, growing up, why my father always made a point of ordering "hot tea" in restaurants -- I thought, "What, does he expect think that otherwise they will bring him *cold* tea?" Well, yes; where he grew up, "tea" without a qualifier means what I call "iced tea".

My father told me a story about a relative of his who took a trip up North. He was talking about the trip afterwards, and about a dinner he had in a restaurant, and he said, with some indignation, "I asked for tea, and they brought me a cup of hot water with a *bag* in it!"

Do you live in an area where, in residential neighborhoods, there are sidewalks in front of the houses, and a strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street? If so, what do you call that strip of lawn? In Akron, Ohio, it is called a "devilstrip". In Cleveland, 30 miles away, it is called a "tree lawn". I have never heard either term anywhere else. A friend who grew up in Minnesota tells me that there it is known as a "boulevard".

In Seattle, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street is called either the planting strip or the parking strip. Of course we argue about which is actually "right." I always argue for planting strip. I guess we could write the Answer Man in the newspaper to get the real scoop (I'm sure the city calls it something official). But then we'd have to argue about something else, like politics or religion.

Oh, and we're all "pop," all the time.

I'm from Minnesota where we drink pop and have boulevards between our house and the street. For the life of me I cannot see how Sarah Palin sounds Minnesotan! Perhaps if your exposure to a Minnesota accent is the movie "Fargo", then she sounds Minnesotan. But the accents in that movie don't sound anything like the everyday people - they are extremely exaggerated and, in my opinion, ridiculous.

Devil's strips are in northern Indiana, too.

It just occurred to me that Sarah Palin sounds a whole lot like friends of mine who live in Vancouver. Doesn't she talk like the Mackenzie brothers? think that's what they were called--the guys who were always drinking beer and saying "what a hoser").

I can usually pick out state and part of state for most of the Appalachian states as well as parts of Ohio and Indiana. What's interesting if you compare the Depression generation with the generation born after WW II, the old, sterotypical plantation-style Southern accent (think Jimmy Carter) is moving towards a more Appalachian accent (think Robert Byrd, or for that matter Larry Hagman playing J. R. Ewing--the East Texas accent is almost identical to the Kentucky-West Virginia-Tennessee accent, since that part of Texas was mostly settled from these areas). Meanwhile, Appalachia is very gradually becoming more like the lower Midwest (but I think some differences will be around for awhile).

I have a friend in South Carolina who is in his early 50's; his mother is around 80 or so. She sounds like she just walked out of Gone With the Wind; he sounds about like a western North Carolinian, that is, about like a West Virginian, except that his "o's" share that funny diphthong quality that Tarheels tend to display.

For some odd reason I do have an affection for the Brooklyn accent. The heavier, older-fashioned, thick Appalachian speech (as displayed in the "Drunken Redneck Patriots" clip) is like chalk on a blackboard; but the upper Midwestern speech, especially Minnesotan, is about a tie with it for me.

Of course by me, you just can't beat the semi-artificial Mid-Atlantic which was the standard in movies and media before WW II (think Orson Welles)!

Would someone please call Stella?

I listened to every dang one of the accents on the George Mason site, and have memorized the text. Sweet dreams, I guess...

I love accents! I'm a native of Connecticut, where we don't have much in the way of regional color (although people from upstate could be distinguished by the way they said "elts" rather than "else." We lived close to the NY border, but NY accents were (to our way of thinking) rather lower class. I think the only really distinctive thing about Fairfield County was the preppy mumble; that's where you sort of keep your jaw clenched when you talk. I, alas, was not rich enough to have that sort of accent.

Now, I am what linguists call a "mimic," meaning that I pick up accents quickly and pretty much unconsciously. If I'm talking to a Southerner, I'll be drawling away before long; if I'm talking to an Irishman, I will develop a touch of a brogue; even when I talk with my Czech friends, I don't pick up their accent per se but I will start to follow their syntax (they don't use "the" or "a," and our verbs confuse them so they will say things like "I think maybe I sell car, I don't like fix it." The opposite of a mimic is a rock, those are the people who will never, ever, ever lose the accent they grew up with. Most people fall into the continuum between these two extremes.

My New York friends from Westchester County sounded much the same as people in Connecticut, but with a faint touch of Noo Yawk; but the Long Islanders (or, as they said it, "Lawn Gyland") had really strong accents. My NYC private-school friends didn't sound like Noo Yawkers, but they did have an odd habit of pronouncing the "h" in words like "white" and "when."

I spent my 20's living in South Carolina and discovered that there were a wide variety of accents there. There's a classic Old South, Gone With the Wind kind of accent that the rich people from the Charleston peninsula have, it's very beautiful and refined sounding; further out it from the city it gets faster and more twangy and people call it "country" if they are being polite, or "redneck" if they are not. The black people from the islands south of Charleston have a distinctive, almost Caribbean dialect, which is called Gullah. Gullah is also called Geechee sometimes, but I often heard "Geechee" used to describe white people who lived on the islands (presumably in a style similar to the Gullahs).

Now I live in Massachusetts, on the Nahth Shoah, wheah people have wicked bad accents. It's definitely a different accent than Southie or Dorchester or the Boston Brahmins, but they are all kind of harsh sounding to my ears. I've been in the Boston area for ten years and it probably took me eight to get used to the accents.

When we first moved here, we lived in Somerville (a Wicked Bad Accent place for sure) and I wanted to check my tire pressure at the gas station. The attendant asked if I wanted an eggage. It took me quite a while to realize he meant "air gauge."

Rhode Island accents are really weird, they sound kind of similar to Boston but with some New Yorkish features as well.

I love Maine and New Hampshire accents; they are slower and broader than a Boston accent.

I do believe that Boston accents are probably the hardest to fake. I mean, I am good with accents. When I lived in Charleston, most people had a hard time believing I wasn't born there; I picked up enough of a drawl and could do it convincingly enough. But I cannot for the life of me do anything beyond a laughable parody of a Boston accent. I notice that most actors cannot seem to do one either; the only actor who can truly sound like he's from Boston is Donnie Wahlberg who grew up in Southie. Even Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who are both Cambridge boys, cannot seem to do a working class Boston accent convincingly.

My dad was from Kentucky and while he had toned down his hillbilly accent considerably, it was still pretty obvious he was not from Connecticut. When I was a kid, I must have picked up a lot of his speech patterns, for I remember being referred to the Special Ed department and getting speech therapy due to my penchant for saying things like "Hand me that thar pin so Ah can rat." They were very concerned about my seeming inability to tell the difference between "pin" and "pen" which are both pronounced "pin" in the South (usually you will say "ink pen" to refer to the writing implement, vs. a pig pen.)

Other Southernisms that have stayed with me from my time in Charleston are a habit of referring to all soda as "Cokes" regardless of brand; saying "thirty minutes" instead of "half an hour," fixin' to do things; saying "I need to get with you" instead of "I need to talk to you;" and an occasional "y'all" has been known to slip out. I used to make fun of "fixin'" and "y'all," but they are really handy words that I eventually picked up.

I haven't picked up too much of a Mass. accent despite ten years here, but I do get a drink of water from the bubbler rather than the fountain, and I got such a kick out of saying "wicked" in an ironic way that it became a habit and now I find it slipping out in a non-ironic way. My eldest seems to have escaped the accent, but my middle daughter is developing a wicked bad one.

These days I have a weird melange of an accent; mostly generic New England with a few (very few) Bostonisms and a faint hint of a drawl that gets stronger if I'm talking to a Southerner or talking about the South. I think I will sound Southern to my dying day on words like "hound," "down," "around," and "brown." They all come out with almost two syllables "day-own," "hay-ound" "aray-ound" etc.. and I have to really concentrate to not do that. People generally cannot entirely place my accent and settle for "You're not from around here, are you?"

I kind of like her accent. Also the Minnesotan one. The more "aristocratic" Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina accents also sound pleasing to me. Most of the Plains sounds relatively flat to my ears, and as I've lived here since age 5 I sound flat to myself, but it seems like the few Iowans I knew had a bit of an accent. I've known few Californians, but the ones I did know I think had a distinctive way of talking. It's not an accent so much as how they expressed themselves. I'm not sure how to explain that though. The few Canadians I knew had an accent I liked.

From what I've read the "oldest states" often have more accents. I read somewhere that Massachusetts has more accents per-capita than any state. The Kennedy's Hyannis Port accent kind of bugs me, but the others I've heard are okay I guess. The only other accent I can think of that irritated me was Bonnie Blair's, but I don't know what her accent was.

I went to college in New Hampshire. I think the locals referred to a soda as "tonic"! Has anyone ever heard of that? I always thought it was weird! Or,when something was spilled or "turned over", they said it"tumped over". I guess this is a combination of turned over and dumped. I dunno! Now, college was quite a few years ago for me. So, my thinking is fuzzy. Do I have this right? Can anyone from New Hampshire verify this?

sue w., tonic is a very local usage. My Dad grew up in Dorchester (Mass.) and he and his brothers used it to refer to soda. I didn't realize it was used in NH - I've always thought it was something said only in Boston and it's immediate surroundings.

I have a very "harsh" (I've been told) Boston accent, which has caused me much difficulty in traveling! Back when such things were in stores, I asked a clerk where the "records" were in a store down south. The reply: "Rackets? You mean like tennis rackets? Back there, honey!" At a convenience store in Texas, once, my request for a "carton of Marlboros" (which comes out of me like "caahtin ah mahbros" had to be repeated about 8 times before I realized that it wasn't that the clerk was hard of hearing, but he couldn't understand me with my dropped r's, so I sloooowly enunciated every 'r' for him!

My husband, who is from the midwest (but travelled around in this childhood, so has no real accent to speak of) often tries to imitate the Boston accent, but it always comes out silly-sounding. It's a difficult accent for actors to do well. The only time I've seen it done well in a movie is by Boston natives like Affleck and Damon.

I love the New Orleans accents; the northwest, when I lived there, didn't seem to have an accent to me. Nor did Califonia. I have to say that I can't stand that midwest, Fargo-ish accent that Palin has. When I was in Michigan for a couple of years, it drove me nuts. As did the constant requests from people to hear me say "Pahk the cahhh, etc." It gets old!

I haven't heard a real Brahmin accent in many years around here. I think it has pretty much died out.

my girlfriend's daughter took a telephone catalog sales job to supplement her income while she was in college. At first they assigned her to calls from the Upper Midwest. She was making tons of money (at least tons to her). Then they reassigned her to Southern states. After three weeks, she was beside herself. "Mom, they talk so SLOW i'll NEVER make any money."

What i notice about her speech pattern, is not just how she sounds vowels, drops parts of words, but that she speaks VERY VERY rapidly.

Most Minnesotans in fact speak the way national broadcasters speak since so many of them originated from there. And i don't hear any of them speaking the way she does .....

My mother (Texan) also used the word "divan" for sofa/couch. Texas is definitely a "coke" State. Back before the "paper vs plastic" questions, groceries were put in paper "sacks". Now they're put in plastic "bags". I also say "tumped over", which my Indianan father-in-law thinks is hilarious. But then he says "warshed". He also says "unelse" when he means "unless", but that may just be a personal thing.

Thomas R.: Bonnie Blair is from Wisconsin.

Like Salamander, I am also a mimic. And since I attend an Orthodox parish with people from around the country and around the world, I get to hear many difference accents. I also have a Canadian friend (from British Columbia), and I easily fall into ending questions with "eh?" Canadians. Why do Canadian (and Brits, too) flatten their "a"s? They will always pronounce, i.e., "Mike Modano" as "Mike Modanno"

My grandfather, who was born and raised in Akron, Ohio but grew up in a German-speaking family with immigrant parents, always called a couch a "davenport". I don't I've heard that anywhere else.

A couple of other things I used to hear people of his generation say in my home town, perhaps influenced by their German-speaking background:

-- the use of "boughten" as an adjective (meaning bought, or purchased), as in, "I didn't have time to bake a cake for the party, so I served a boughten cake."

-- the use of the definite article before the names of companies. Instead of saying that they worked at Goodrich (Akron was once the headquarters of all the major rubber companies), they would say that they worked at *the* Goodrich.

***

One thing I noticed when I lived in Philadelphia -- and I would be interested in whether the experience of other Philadelphians, such as Franklin Evans, bears this out: In parts of Philadelphia, a clear distinction is make between "you" singular and "you" plural; "youse" is singular, and "yiz" is plural, and they are very consistent about it.

Of course, now I live in the land of "y'all". But I have noticed that there is a creeping tendency for people to use "y'all" for the singular as well, so that to indicate a plural "you" clearly they say "all y'all".

In the part of Ohio where I grew up, there seemed to be an unconscious yet deliberate effort to avoid using "y'all", perhaps out of the recognition that it was regarded by many people as a regionalism and, unfortunately and unfairly, as a sign of parochialism and lack of education. So to indicate a plural "you" we would say things like "you guys" "everybody" or even "all of you", going to almost any lengths to keep the dreaded "y'all" from crossing our lips.

Interesting. We all say "couch" for sofa up here, except for my Irish grandmother, who used to say "divan" (she pronounced it "di-vaahhn"). We also use "hassock" and not ottoman. Sofa and ottoman, to my ear, sound like someone is trying to be a bit posh. ;)

My husband and inlaws also find it funny that we call the living room the "parlor" ("pah-lah"), and that I call my purse a pocketbook. They're also amused when I say something is "down cellar", rather than "it's in the basement".

Other regionalisms that I've been called on - "jimmies" for candy sprinkles, "bubbler" ("bubblah") for water fountain, and being shocked as a kid when I first found out that candlepin bowling is pretty much confined to the northeast (I'm awful at ten pin!).

One I've always liked hearing is "fixing to" do something, which I heard in Texas a lot. And "all y'all" is quite useful. Up here it's "youse" or "you guys" (which never sounds right when there's a female in the group!).

My husband and I recently took one of those online accent test things, and I laughed when it had us pronounce the words merry, marry and Mary. To me, they're all pronounced quite differently; my husband pronounces them all the same (like how I would say "Mary")!

Stuart Buck, I suspect that the use of "divan" for a sofa is a corruption of "davenport", rather than the Persian word. My parents (Kansas--born pre WWI) used "davenport" rather than couch or sofa. I believe that davenport was a company name, which became common in the mid-west to Texas region to refer to the item (much like Coke is used to reference pretty much all soft drinks in some regions).

BTW, my mother was from "hillbilly" country in southern MO (remember, she was born pre-WWI.). Almost all her family spoke with some sort of southern Missouri to Arkansas accent. She, however, was almost fanatical in her insistence on proper pronunciation and grammar (no detectable accent unless she was around the home-folks.)

My grandmother, born to German immigrants in South Dakota, always said Davenport too.

I've enjoyed the discussing on "warsh." It reminded me that many of the people in those small farming towns emigrated to Oregon from Kansas during the Depression. I had always assumed it was a Pacific NW thing.

Sadly, I guess the only linguistic bonding people in the NW can engage in is knowing how to pronounce "Willamette". And cringing when people say "ore-ee-gone" instead of "ore-i-gun."

Frappe! Forgot that one! My husband made me laugh, first time he saw one on a menu here he called it a "frapp-ay" when ordering, and I cringed! :)

It will be a terrible shame if we ever lose our varied regional accents. I don't think it's too likely anytime soon--in Ireland (much smaller) there is still a dramatic difference in accent from Cork to Donegal.

Anne, please tell me the difference between how you pronounce merry, marry, and Mary phonetically. They're all the same to me (Kansas).

Oh, and not all Kansans say "warsh" for wash. It seems to be a southern (and maybe southeastern) KS thing. I grew up close to Nebraska, and we all said "wash". We also say ty-ur, rather than taahr for tire, while many of the southern KS folk use the latter pronunciation.

This may be the most truly fun thread you've ever posted, Rod.

(I am trying to post this again--doesn't seem to have made it through the first time. Apologies in advance if this is a duplicate.)

Natives of Montana pronounce "creek" as the first syllable of "cricket" is pronounced. I don't know why, and neither do they. If you say "creek" as in "speak", they giggle.

Baltimore natives tell me that "Baltimore" is pronounced "Bawlmur" and that the first syllable gets the emphasis in "police" and "July": "Ah had to cawl the Balmur POH-leece last JOO-lie.".

I love regional accents.

I'm a former Minnesotan who lived in both the northern and southern part of the state. I hear inflections in Palin's voice that I hear in Minnesota, but it's not typical, anymore than the Fargo accents are typical.

What we saw in her "debate speak" Thursday was exaggerated ultra perky folksiness. Listen to the difference between how she sounded in the debate and how she sounded in an Alaska governor round table debate in 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1-B-OyQ-KI