New Orleans drops mic... I'm from River Ridge in the Jefferson Parish suburbs ( within the city area ) and if I meet a stranger somewhere else in the country they, after one or two sentences, usually think I'm from New York. But slipping into one of the many dialects we have here is never far away, depending on who you are conversing with. Only locals will understand, but my wife used to tell me that after 2 sentences my dad and I would start talking like we were "from Kenner" and she couldn't follow the conversation. To non-locals, Kenner is directly next to River Ridge.

Fred Armisen does a great bit on North American accents

https://youtu.be/G72tZdjnS2A?si=oMaLfGgJAZxaoAHn

Is anyone archiving these accents ?

As much as I’m happy that kids now have access to YouTube, and thus can use the neutral influencer dialect, something about our culture is being erased.

I grew up speaking both a neutral California accent and bits of AAVE. AAVE itself is drastically different depending on the part of the US you’re in. I can barely understand southern AAVE. NYC AAVE is much faster, but I think NYC people think faster in general.

I really do believe YouTube can bring gaps. If your a kid in Albania you can see life though the eyes of someone in Oakland.

And hop on a zoom 30 minutes later to chat. This would be unimaginable 50 years ago.

Reminds me of the awesome (old) New York Times dialect quiz, which was weirdly accurate: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...

This has missed the Atlantic Canadian Cape Breton dialect, which if you listen to some age 70+ people who've lived their whole lives in the Sydney, NS area is significantly distinct from Halifax or other areas in the south/southwest of Nova Scotia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Cape_Breton

These are fun relevant videos:

Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part One) | WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A&t=271s

A recent series of Alone was won by a guy from Goose Bay, Labrador. To my ear, as a Brit, it just sounds Irish, right down to saying 'tree' for 'three'. I can only imagine that's where the initial settlers were from and the isolation meant it never changed much.

I feel that the Maritimes are somewhat simplified here, especially Newfoundland and Labrador which has some of the most distinctive accents on the continent, at least among older people.

At Microsoft TechEd in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft bought out SeaWorld for the attendee party. I wound up getting really wet from the orca that they used to have there splashing people and met 3 other guys on the bench in same state. We went wandering around laughing and drinking. There was an Australian from NSW, New Zealander from Auckland, a French Canadian out of Ontario, and me, a fresh off the boat immigrant from Russia. I couldn't understand half of what was said! Aussie and kiwi were giving each other lots of good natured ribbing. The canuck was having fun and so was I as we got progressively more silly. One of the best parties at an industry conference I've had. Ahh the joy of dialects!

I've seen this before but I object to the treatment of Canada.

Firstly, there's regional dialects of Canadian English, and I don't just mean Newfoundland vs rest of Canada. The Ottawa Valley for example has some strong dialect markers. There's marked differences between central and southern Alberta (often not noticed by people living there, but there). Between coastal BC and Ontario, etc. etc.

Secondly because in fact the upper midwest of the US is contiguous and overlapping with much of various Canadian dialect markers. In fact many of the things people consider to be stereotypical Canadian are even more pronounced in upper midwest US dialects than they are here.

TLDR he could pay more attention to Canada :-) There's 40m of us after all.

My daughter (grew up in California) wondered what the "Kansas accent" was (I grew up in Kansas). I often called it a drawl.

She goes to college in Kansas now and is still confused. Perhaps growing up with me it just sounds "normal".

I'll point her to the band, "The Embarrassment" in various interviews:

[1] https://youtu.be/0gyChDSjrXc

[2] https://youtu.be/kJBDRdDjgWY

Goose language? Or yankee doodels?

I was taught British English. I think America English is in many ways simpler, but my brain is wired to british spelling as well as pronounciation for the most part. Now it depends who has good spoken british english. One of my all-time favourites is Rowan Atkinson, but his english is kind of more theater-trained really; if you compare it to the Monty Python guys for instance. War criminal Tony Blair also has a good spoken english - not that I like the guy or find anything useful he said or did, but british english wins. Or we could go scottish - I don't quite like it as much as british english (Patrick Stewart also has a good intonation, but it's also more theater-trained than "real", per se), but one of the coolest thing ever is Gerard Butler teaching people scottish. What keeps scots apart from English is the language really. (Though, I also have to say, Sean Connery's dialect was nowhere near as funny or entertaining as Gerard's dialect. Guess even in Scotland there are diffferences.)

Irish english sounds more melodic - no wonder they kept on winning Eurovision. Paul David Hewson's voice in his prime is a great example.

I've also found African American english very interesting. One thing that keeps on tripping me up is "asking" versus "axsking". To me only the british pronounciation works, but I hear sooooo many axxing examples on youtube that I concluded that this must be widespread in the USA. I always have to think of an axe when I hear it though.

This page/project itself is another proof of the cultural significance of YT, one of the very few positive things brought by the Internet post-2010.

Glad to see the special mention of the Mat Su Valley in Alaska. Lived there for 10 years, originally from Wisconsin. And yes, the two are VERY similar. Not the exactly the same, I did notice a difference when I moved back to WI, more nasal. But the Mat Su Valley was populated by Midwestern farmers during the Depression, so it makes sense.

The title says "dialects" but most comments here are only about accents.

Can people here give examples of non-standard grammar or vocabulary (that goes beyond some temporary slang or subculture words)?

Really hard-core, old-school Charleston accent missing: https://youtu.be/rxNZrFyl2DA?si=VV7OWi-fY2m3twIA&t=1835

Brit who was raised in Milan (Italy) and speaks Rexieved Pronunciation and lived in New York: status is “throughly confused”.

I think it would take a mighty sensitive ear to tell the difference between someone who is in Charleston, versus Savannah.

No good on mobile.

It's absolutely oversimplified, someone from a small coastal town in Newfoundland does not sound at all like a person from much of the same area labeled "atlantic canadian" in Nova Scotia, or in larger cities like Fredericton or Moncton in NB. Putting basically all of NB, NS and NF as one large pink blob on the map is a drastic oversimplifiaction.

It also seems that whoever created this kind of gave up when figuring out Canadian speech patterns spanning longitude from east to west. Somebody from Kenora or Dryden or Timmins Ontario does not speak like a person from North Vancouver, BC. Vancouver region English is much closer to general west coast as it's spoken in a big city in WA, OR or California.

I'd agree completely but this could just be due to logistical constraints of the ANAE, I took a course with Charles Boberg (one of the authors of the ANAE) and he was definitely aware of that, I vaguely recall learning from him that the Newfoundlander accent traditionally doesn't have t/d flapping which is totally unique in North America. Great class, he definitely has an incredible knack for precisely imitating accents.

And right next door, the Maine accent is lumped in with Boston. The differences aren't worth correcting anybody unless you're talking about a project like this.

I'm not an expert on accents or anything but I think you can hear it in "dinner". Boston is the typical "R's don't exist" thing. Maine is more like "dinnyah" - your jaw kicks back a bit.

"Arksing" is also present in Caribbean English and came to London via there. This and other 'incorrect' pronounciations come from slavery-era creole dialects, I think.

I like people who speak a more modern English from my part of London. Check out TV personality Big Narstie or football pundit Clinton Morrison. You'll love 'em.

One on my favorite podcasters is Mike Hurley (London) from Relay.fm. He is a very eloquent gent, at least compared to me.

He says “whivf” instead of ”with” “teevf” instead of “teeth”, things like that, and some other idiosyncrasies that I can’t exactly remember but it was like adding to or replacing the last letter of the word with an “r”.

Is that a London thing or a person thing?

A fun follow is Scots Word of the Day by Len Pennie.

https://youtube.com/@misspunnypennie

Patrick Stewart is from Yorkshire not Scotland, by the way.

>Now it depends who has good spoken british english.

My favorites are David Attenborough and BBC in general.

Biggest two I can think of are

1) AAVE's use of Copulas. In most English you form present progressive with a copula and the present participle: I am walking, I am driving, I am working. The copula contains no information on its own. In many languages, a low information word is dropped. In Spanish you say "(yo) soy Americano" meaning "(I) am American." There can be no doubt of the subject of the verb "soy" because it is inflected to match the subject, so the pronoun "yo" communicates nothing in a normal sentence and is dropped. In Russian you take the opposite tack: you say "ya Amerikanets" meaning "I (am) American)" so you drop the copula. You either need the pronoun or the verb to communicate who is American, and in this case the pronoun won. Well in AAVE you drop the copula in those present progressive sentences: "I walking," "I driving," "I working." But then there's an opportunity to put a higher information in all of these sentences: you can use "be" as a copula to express the habitual aspect. "I be walking," "I be driving," "I be working" (usually with emphasis on the "be") mean "I am in the habit of X, but don't assume that is what I am doing at this moment." Degrees can be expressed here: you can replace "be" with "stay" to get more habitual and less present. It's a trip! I'm scratching the surface here but that's a big one.

2) Related: "Needs" + past participle vs "needs" + present participle. I was working with a handyman from Colorado and he said "This sink needs sealed" or something like that. I (Northeast) would have said "this sink needs sealing." Colorado has always had over 50% of the population born outside of the state, so I don't know if that's a thing from there or from wherever his parents are from (not sure and didn't ask).

I'm from Indiana. I'm not an expert, but I do travel across the US for work, and here's a few things that are normal to me but weird to others.

"Your car needs washed" instead of "you need to wash your car"

Replying "You're good" after someone apologizes.

Adding an S to the end of brand names, especially grocery stores.

I don't do this one, but my extended family in Ohio just says "please" when they mean "could you repeat that?"

There are lots of minor (and fuzzy usage) of regional vocabulary.

"pop" vs "soda" is a commonly discussed one. (Google to see maps).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English_regional_voca...

'mensch' and 'schmuck' are commonly used words in NYC that are not known to people in the South, unless they have studied German (and yes I had to fight capitalizing them.)

Another example... 'they're all' is shorthand for 'they're all gone' in Pennsylvania.