American Accents

I wrote my nine posts. I was actually sitting at my desk working on my summary for the blog when I googled how to pronounce Sunn m'Cheaux to make sure I was going to pronounce the name correctly in my final video. From there, that led me to this video about American accents.


I decided I had to share this video as a blog post. I'm not in love with all nine of my current posts. And since I took the time to watch all 20 minutes, I figured I can comment on what I learned and, hopefully, achieve all I was supposed to with this Discovery Journal.

I found this video about American accents incredibly interesting. 

Accent is identity.

This is so true. I love accents - even when I have a hard time understanding them. I had never really thought about how accents, in America, came to be. Singer explained so much of the history of the accents and why they have the features they do. Another very important point he made is that accents don't follow political boundaries. Instead they follow geographical boundaries based on settlement patterns and contact patterns. 

When Sunn m'Cheaux gave his information on the Gullah dialect, in this video, it reinforced so much of what I learned in my U.S. History I class this semester, as well. Colonizers left the enslaved people more "alone" in this area of the county and, as a result, the Gullah dialect was formed out of combined African languages and the English language. I love that two somewhat unrelated classes have taught me things about the history of my country and why language is the way it is across this vast nation.

The other main takeaway I got from this video is how time affects the diversity of accents in a geographical space. There are more accents on the East Coast of the US than there are past the Appalachian Mountains. This is because of how our country was colonized and how long people have been living in the different parts of the United States.

My own accent is what this video refers to as "general American". According to Singer that's a bad description of multiple accents being combined and no distinct regional features being in them. I think my next time suck will be watching part 2 of this series so I can see what Singer has to say about the accents in the Midwest.


Work cited:

Nast, Condé. “Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents.” WIRED, www.wired.com/video/watch/accent-expert-gives-a-tour-of-us-accents. Accessed 22 Nov 2022.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Like, totally, dude. This assignment is, like, awesome.

Image
In an effort to seek out other sources on linguistics, I took a gander on the page Unravel . If English words had jobs , by Christopher Hoyt, was absolutely hilarious. The letter, written by the word LIKE, and the corresponding answers from management (named MERCURY), had me laughing all the way through. Using comedy, the article talks about how language continues to adapt and change as our culture changes.  👉 One of the tongue-in-cheek points I think Hoyt was trying to make is the average English vocabulary is shrinking. LIKE said that they understood management had to make some "tough calls about which words you would keep on staff." I decided I wanted to see if that was true. My husband and I have had conversations about diminished word use and the increase of emojis and gifs to get points across. A quick Google search led me to an article by David Shariatmadari: Why it's time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language . Right away, this article seemed
Read more

RACIOLINGUISTICS

Image
Follow me down the rabbit hole... I had to read a peer-reviewed linguistic research paper for my Introduction to Language Arts class. Oh holy buckets, that was NOT easy reading!  I attempted to read the entire paper. I highlighted things. I tried to make sense of all the data. I read the paper, and re-read the paper, multiple times. And...because I'm extra...I also downloaded the other paper we could read for the same assignment. I only HAD to read one. But I figured I'd read the second one as well in case it was easier...or something. I consider myself a smart enough and well-read person. But the word "raciolinguistic" was all over this paper. It was easy enough to determine that this was a combination of the words "race" and "linguistic". But I wanted to know more. I googled the word. (From the image above) A raciolinguistic perspective  seeks to understand the interplay of language and race within the historical production of nation-state/coloni
Read more

Words matter.

Image
This meme came across my Facebook feed. It's the kind of social justice thinking that sparks my interest and fuels many of my passions. However, the last sentence really struck me.  Words matter. I've always known and understood that words matter. However, now that I'm in Introduction to Language Studies, I find myself thinking about words even more than I did before. This meme led me to do a search within the field of linguistics to learn more about the connections between language and social behavior. The first Google search I did took me to the Linguistic Society of America  (LSA). I continue to be intrigued about linguistics as a profession. I've already explored the use of linguistics in the field of artificial intelligence. Click here to go to that blog post. On the LSA web page, I was able to learn more about the field of sociolinguistics . Walt Wolfram wrote a very interesting article. He says: Language is one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior. In
Read more