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Old 09-06-2009, 05:06 PM   #6 (permalink)
Poppinjay
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Location: DC/Coastal VA
Quote:
England has more accents than you do in 50 states
I respectfully disagree. England has as many different accents as some U. S. regions, but some U.S. states have more accents than England as a whole. Going from mountain ranges in southern states to the coast, you can encounter a variety of differences. Getting to the coast of North Carolina for instance, there are the baronial settler's accents, which sound like southern conjunctions mixed with slight English accents. Next door to that person is one with the Gullah lexicon, born of the mixture of slaves, natives, and interlopers.

And that's all in a hundred mile stretch of coastline. Further inland, the Sandhills have disregarded the letter i and substitute a narrow a, as well as the letter R used in the middle of a word. You take a rat tun, speak a wuhd, and delivuh. Then i shows up where it doesn't belong, words like power, are simply shortened to pie. Is yuh pie out? Prubly took out by the stum.

A huge swath of central Kansas is populated by low German and Swedish descendants who speak with an accent unlike anything you'd see in "Fargo". New York alone has as many different accents from borough to borough as the rest of the state.

The idea that the U.S. has southern, mid-western, Minnesotan, and Chicago accents is an extremely dubious extreme simplicity.
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Last edited by Poppinjay; 09-06-2009 at 05:09 PM..
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