In pop culture, it's one of a few things: The long, slow drawl of the surfer, or how a valley girl ends her sentences, or the slang of East L. A team of Stanford University researchers is working to find out. They've started recording interviews with native Californians to help determine the state's vernacular. It's for a project called Voices of California. Photos: Penny Eckert and Rob Podesva. With the Voices of California project, Stanford linguistics professors and students aim to discover and document the diversity of California English.
Brandon Conlan of Redding, Calif. A trip to Florida a few years ago confirmed his opinion. Friends there said he had the standard "TV accent," which to them meant that he didn't have a distinguishable way of speaking. Conlan and his friends aren't alone. Because there aren't many stereotypes of California speech compared to the distinctive way of speaking associated with East Coast cities like Boston or New York, a lot of Californians are happy with their lack of accent.
Penelope Eckert , a professor of linguistics at Stanford , was intrigued by the disconnect between California's diverse populations and Californians' views of their own speech as homogenous and indistinguishable. Eckert and her graduate students launched a multi-year research endeavor called "Voices of California" to fully investigate how English is spoken in different parts of the state.
Hundreds of interviews with California residents from Merced and Shasta counties have revealed the influence of the Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma, and have highlighted differences between coastal California and the Central Valley. Despite being the most populous state in the United States, California is largely unrepresented in large studies of American dialects.
Regarding maps from previous dialect studies, Eckert said, "It looked as if nobody spoke English west of the Mississippi. Stanford linguists eventually decided that they had a unique opportunity to document what California English sounds like. California has been the home of all three.
I grew up in the surf world here in L. My dad is still surfing at So I grew up speaking surf-speak. My husband works in television, so for 35 years I have been hearing Hollywood-speak.
It means the craft services person. Generally if names are more than a few syllables, people are going to instinctively shorten them and then sometimes they stick. This Emerald Triangle business long predates the current legal mess. When I was in college in the s, everybody knew about Humboldt. But it came out of Northern California. The Twitter following is huge! Karl the Fog gets very busy in the summertime in San Francisco, where as Mark Twain famously said, it was the coldest winter he ever spent —.
Who are the speakers of California English, then? And because California is no longer a linguistic monolith, California English is really used as the umbrella term for a range of accents throughout the state. Everyone has an accent, however. As with most accents, the vowels are what really set Californians apart.
The news broadcast makes reference to the fact that the Southern accent has had an effect on California because of western migration in the 20th century. A big factor that distinguishes California English is the California vowel shift , which is being led by young people. When vowels shift, it means a person is positioning their tongue in their mouth differently when pronouncing a specific vowel. And when one vowel starts to shift, usually others start to as well. The chain reaction of vowel shifting creates a distinctive Cali sound.
The California vowel shift is part of a larger pattern among the youths in North America.
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