slang - How do American dialects differ?


I grew up in a very homogenous suburb, and was quite shocked when I moved to Philadelphia for college and started hearing how many different dialects exist even within one city. My untrained ear could not tell you the difference between a New York or Philadelphia accent, but some of my friends swear they can tell the difference between North and South Philadelphians, and spot someone from Jersey in a syllable. Just recently I moved to San Francisco, and I was shocked to hear several people observe that I had an East Coast accent. Throughout your travels around the country, what observations have you made about the different dialects in America? How do different regions differ in terms of syllable emphasis, sentence construction, or even slang?



Answer



You might be interested in The TELSUR Project, which is a high-granularity phonological survey of North American dialects. Note that the information presented on that site is very detailed and highly technical.


In particular, there is an overview of major dialect regions, of which they distinguish five major groups:



  1. West (basically everything west of the Great Plains)

  2. North Central (MN, WI, and the Dakotas)

  3. Midland (most of the Great Plains and the Midwest)

  4. Inland North (MI and inland NY)

  5. South (um, the South)


The Northeast presents special difficulties, as it has the most diversity of any region, and isn't represented in the regions above. Here is a detail map of Northeast dialect regions.


However, there are a multitude of subtle gradations in these divisions, which can be explored by reading through the materials presented on those sites.


You might also like to look through the Harvard dialect survey results, which plot an enormous number of phonological and lexical differences across the country.


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