Traveling Dialects

“I’m so New Orleans, when I go out of town people ask me if I’m Canadian.”

A joke, right? No, it seems that, contrary to all expectations, a certain Canadian pronunciation is beginning to emerge in the Big Easy.

This is an excerpt from an interesting Lingua Franca piece by Allan Metcalf. Check out O Canada! in New Orleans to read the rest.

Banging a Left in Boston

Thankfully, I did not have to "bang a left" while visiting Boston this past week; I left all the driving to the expertise of the hacks (that way I didn't have to "pahk" a car either). I have no problem "hanging a left" or parking in Detroit but driving in Boston is a whole different animal. 

Did I mention the dialect?

Here are some examples of phonetic differences between Boston and other American dialects from Boston English:

Word	Boston	Standard American	Northern Cities
pack	[æ]	[æ]	[eæ]
cop			[a]
dawn
load	[o]	[ow]	[o]
food	[u]	[uw]	[u]

	Word	Boston	Standard American
Vowel lengthens, different quality	bar
	burr
/r/ replaced by schwa	bore
	beer
	bear

Here is A Dialect Map of American English

The Boston English site also includes details about phonology and The Wicked Good Guide to Boston English includes information about the Boston lexicon.

It was a wonderful trip, no Boston Coolers to be found though.

All's I Want is to Know

Looking at this photo, I can almost hear Robert Irvine saying, "all's I want is..."

The use of this contraction has never jumped out at me as much as it has while watching Restaurant Impossible. Which got me to wondering what exactly is being elided because the contraction is not found in any dialect with which I am familiar. Initially, I thought Irvine was combining "all" with "is" (even though they are not adjacent) and then repeating "is".

Good thing I looked it up. The New York Times article by Ben Zimmer titled "All's I Know" reminded me that I should have checked the Dictionary of American Regional English for unusual usages. There I would have learned that what is being combined is "all" and "as" with "as" being used as a relative pronoun similar to "that".

All that I wanted was a syntactic clarification. All that I know is I got it. Thank you Ben Zimmer and DARE.

Photo credit

A Not So Trivial /ʌ/

He has been the host of a popular television game show since 1984 and is said to be contemplating retirement in the next two years.

Who is Alex Trebek?

Or should I say...Who is Alex Trebek-Ah?

I have been noticing more and more recently that when it comes to trivia games there seems to be a dialectical affectation exhibited by emcees.

I have been a Jeopardy viewer for as long as I can remember and it is only lately that I noticed Alex Trebek adding what I would call an "ah-suffix" to consonant final words when he is giving a question that was missed by the contestants. And it is not just Alex Trebek that does this (which might explain why I have noticed it more). My husband and I often play trivia at some local restaurants and have experienced several emcees that have the same affectation (e.g., "The correct answer is...game shows-Ah."). I have no idea if they are emulating Trebek or if it is part of their trivia training. Either way, it must be that the phenomenon is-Ah trending-Ah in the trivia world or I just wasn't as attentive prior to the last few months-Ah.

Phonetically, the sound could be transcribed as either /ʌ/ or /ɒ/ depending on the speaker's dialect. 

Image credits.

For the Language Loving Giants and Patriots Fans

As well as all sports fans and/or language enthusiasts, I present to you a compilation of language-related Super Bowl XLVI links.

Macmillan Dictionary the Super Bowl - definition

Wordnik Word Soup-er Bowl

The Wall Street Journal Words With Giants

The Wall Street Journal The NFL Has an 'L' of a Problem

The New York Times Fill-In | Super Bowl Ads (similar to Mad Libs)

Chicago Tribune A winning strategy for Super Bowl ads: Baby Boomers are the target demographic, experts say. So with that in mind, drop 'golden years' language and go with 'the good life.'

Forbes Super Bowl Commercials Are All Bang, No Buck (purchase-focused language)

Web Pro News Listen to the Super Bowl in 10 Languages

The American Association of People with Disabilities AAPD Applauds American Sign Language in Super Bowl

johnwalshcopy What’s In A Name? My “Tebow” Epiphany

22 Words And the winner for Best Super Bowl Commercial is…

And last but not least, from the winner of BostonGlobe.com's Cartoon Caption Contest -

If the Patriots win the Super Bowl, they're going to rename it "Eastah Island."

- Sidra Coleman, Nahant

P.S. If you enjoy sports and language, don't forget to check out Lew and Paul's Linguistics and Sports Page.

Linguistics Links Worth a Look

Why Study Linguistics? - An informative slideshow produced by the Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies.

50 Years of Linguistics at MIT - A link to 11 MIT linguistics lectures.

Dyslexie, A Typeface Designed To Help Dyslexics Read - A video explanation about how dyslexics read and how this typeface created by a dyslexic designer improves the reading experience for those who suffer from dyslexia.

Shapecatcher: Unicode Character Recognition - Draw a character in the "drawbox" and this site will provide a list of the most similar unicode characters. The database has 10,877 characters currently. Great for IPA.

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns - Tons of information, dialect maps and dialect samples.

An Example of Siri's French-Influenced, English Dialect

Dialect and Accent Archive Links

I was recently asked for recommendations on resources for audio speech links.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The Speech Accent Archive

The Audio Archive

American Dialect Links

The above dialect map of the United States is from Dialects of English. The link also has information about British English, Australian English and more.

Additionally, here is a link to a Modern Language Association Language Map.

Alex Trebek Phonetically Verbs a Noun

Is it just me or did Alex Trebek verb a noun on Tuesday evening?

When the contestants were unable to provide the question for the clue, Alex gave the response, "What is incline?"

I can't remember the exact wording of the clue, but it went something like this: "Another name for a slope leading onto or off of an expressway."

The context of the clue made it clear that "incline" was a noun ("a" is a determiner, so "slope" must be a noun; thus, incline is a noun); however, Alex gave primary stress to the second syllable of the word.
noun /ˈinˌklīn/
verb /inˈklīn/

In the above phonetic transcriptions, a raised vertical line indicates primary stress and a lowered vertical line indicates secondary stress. These phonetic markers are called suprasegmentals.

English has many noun-verb homographs. The nouns in these pairs are almost always articulated with primary stress on the first syllable, just as their verbal counterparts are articulated with primary stress on the second syllable.

Here are some additional examples of noun-verb homographs with the noun followed by the verbs.

conflict /ˈkɑn ˌflɪkt/ --- /kən ˈflɪkt/
rebel /ˈrɛ bəl/ --- /rə ˈbɛl/
permit /ˈpɚ ˌmɪt/ --- /pɚ ˈmɪt/
record /ˈrɛ kɚd/ --- /rə ˈkɔrd/

*On the other hand, maybe it is just Alex Trebek's dialect. He was born in Canada and spent much of his early life there.

United States Linguistic Background Map

Ancestry of the U.S. Population from the 2000 census.



Image from www.uta.fi/FAST/US1/REF/langmaps.html

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Nasal Twang

The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes - Do You Call it Soda, Pop, Coke or What?

While doing some research for the class I am teaching, I came across a Cambridge dialect survey that I would like to encourage all of my readers to take.

"What we are interested in is not what other people believe is "correct" English or what you think you and others should say, but what you actually do say."


The questions and multiple-choice answers from the survey are informative and entertaining and it only takes a few minute to answer them.

Plus, as an added bonus (wow, look at that redundancy) once you have completed the survey you can view the results that are tabulated on a daily basis.

Following is one of the questions with the current results to pique your interest:

Question: "What is your generic casual or informal term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? (As in: "We have milk, beer, apple juice, and four kinds of _____: Pepsi, 7Up, root beer, and ginger ale.") Results as of 9/13/2009:

soda (31%)
pop (17%)
soft drink (14%)
coke (8%)
I just call each kind by its individual name (6%)
Other responses (21%)

Shall We Have Carry Out or Take Away Tonight?

On Sunday evenings, when I don't feel like cooking, we often get carry out from our favorite Chinese restaurant. I wonder how many other people are in the habit of getting carry out on Sundays (there is always a line)...though maybe take away is more popular for some. I was just reading a book in which the characters had Chinese take away. This got me to thinking about the difference between the two terms. "Carry out" and "take away" mean basically the same thing - that food is being picked up from a restaurant for consumption at a different location. In my opinion "carry out" is a slightly more descriptive term because it tells how the food is being transported; it is being carried (as opposed to being rolled, pushed or thrown). At any rate, I decided to do a google search to see which term returned more results and here are the results:

57,200,000 for carry out food

130,000,000 for take away food

So apparently my dialectical leanings are not the norm. Of course there is yet another term that is far more common than "carry out" and "take away" and it is "take out". A google search for take out food returned 212,000,000 results.

The Southern Drawl - A Regional Dialect Described

I just came across a wonderful, linguistically descriptive definition for the word "drawl" in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Since I have posted many times about dialects, and a Southern drawl is a regional dialect, I thought I would share:

"to speak slowly esp. as a matter of habit with vowels greatly prolonged so that vowels monophthongal in other styles of speech are often diphthongized (as in bin, web, bad, knob, talk, good)."

If you are unfamiliar with the words "monophthong" and "diphthong," they are defined as follows by thefreedictionary.com:

mon·oph·thong
n.
1. A single vowel articulated without change in quality throughout the course of a syllable, as the vowel of English bed.
2. Two written vowels representing a single sound, as oa in boat.

diph·thong
n.
A complex speech sound or glide that begins with one vowel and gradually changes to another vowel within the same syllable, as (oi) in boil or (1) in fine.

Crimanetly...It's an Idiolect

A common expression of irritation heard in my family has always been the word crimanetly. It is a word that I can remember my grandfather using way back when and a word that I continue to use on a regular basis today. I like it because it does not sound a crass as some of the more commonly used expressions of irritation. I also like it because it is not a widely known word...I have always considered it to be part of my family's idiolect.

According to worldwidewords.org, crimanetly is an elaborated version of criminy (both of which are mild exclamations or cries of astonishment or annoyance) that The Dictionary of American Regional English lists as being found in regional dialects in the northern states of the central and western US, together with California.

Dictionary.com lists the etymology of the word criminy as, "Italian crimine 'crime'; euphemism for 'Christ.'"

How to Understand the Difference Between Accents and Dialects

Most people are familiar with the New York accent, the Boston accent and the Southern accent. However, the term "accent" really refers only to pronunciation. There are different pronunciations, vocabularies, phrases and grammatical rules that have been documented all over the United States. These are what are known as "dialects." Here's how to distinguish between the two terms.



A dialect is generally considered a mutually intelligible variety of a language. What this means is a dialect is different from a language in that different dialects of the same language can be understood by anyone who speaks the language, while different languages can not be understood by people who don't share a language. Just as most everyone speaks a language, everyone also speaks one dialect or another of that language.

The formation of a dialect begins when people from different language backgrounds come together and learn to speak a common language. The influence of the language backgrounds is what creates a variation on the language that is being learned.

Dialects take time to develop and also require that the group of people live close together while at the same time having some form of isolation from other populations. This isolation can be geographical, political, or religious amongst other forms.

Standard American English can be thought of as the median dialect or what the majority of people in the United States perceive to be the dialect from which all other dialects diverge. The reason people develop the idea that there is a standard dialect is that education and mass media propagate it. That is to say, this is the English we are taught is proper in our high school English classes, it is the way we hear newscasters speak on television and it is usually what we read in the newspaper.

When a person speaks differently, this does not mean that that person has poor grammar, is using sloppy, lazy speech or is any less intelligent than those who speak what is considered Standard American English. That person may sound different because he or she is following the rules of the dialect which do not always coincide with the rules of the language.

Michigan - Yoopers, Slang and Dialects

I have posted many times in the past about Yoopers, Michigan Slang and Michigan Dialects so I thought I would share this map that appeared in a recent Detroit Free Press.

Fudgies are people who live anywhere in Michigan other than Mackinac Island and travel to the island to buy fudge.

Yoopers are people who live in the U.P. or Upper Peninsula.

Trolls are people who live in the lower peninsula or "under the bridge," also known as flatlanders.

Citiots are people who live in large cities in the southern part of Michigan.

Wood ticks are people who chop down trees in state forests (some with permission, some without).

Popple is Michigan's name for aspen trees.

The Windsor Ballet is a euphemism for the strip clubs across the Detroit River in Windsor.

CoPa is an abbreviated name for Comerica Park (it is not a cabana).

If Kitty Pidgin then Kitty Creole

Speaking of Pidgins, and I don't mean the birds called pigeons, what is a pidgin and why would one of the names of the lolcat dialect be kitty pidgin?


A pidgin is defined by Merriam-Webster OnLine as, "a simplified speech used for communication between people with different languages."



More precisely explained, a pidgin is a language that develops when groups of people who do not share a common language have to communicate on a regular basis for the purpose of trade. A pidgin is not a native language to either group but is a new second language used between these groups.

Well clearly the so-called "lolcat dialect" is a very simple form of language and obviously humans do not share a common language with cats, I guess this is why some person thought to give it the name kitty pidgin. Let's just hope it does not turn into a kitty creole.

A creole is defined by Merriam-Webster OnLine as, "a language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community."



Pidgins become creoles when those who speak the pidgin teach the language to their children as a first language. Some pidgins never make it to the status of creoles because they die out before being passed on.

What the Heck is a Lolcat and Who Came Up with the Atrocious Dialect?

I saw what is called a "lolcat" for the first time the other day (I guess I really am behind the times). While I have always liked cats and some of the images and sayings are cute, overall I was appalled to find out these lolcats have become such a phenomenon. There is no excuse for using intentionally poor grammar and spelling. At any rate, I decided to learn a bit more about this phenomenon.

According to Wikipedia, a lolcat is "an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak,” ”kitteh,” or “kitty pidgin” and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name "lolcat" is acompound word of the words "LOL" and "cat".

After reading this I was even more appalled to learn that this supposed dialect has been given not only one name, but three different names. I guess nothing should surprise me in this day and age of chatlish.

The Sounds of English - A Speech Accent Archive

I just came across a wonderful resource called the Speech Accent Archive. The archive was established by George Mason University "to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers." There are currently 1050 samples in the archive and it is growing daily. Check it out - it is a great way to learn more about dialects and accents.