Watch Your Language Blog

How do you tawk?

On our team here at Living Language, even though not everyone is a native speaker of English, we tend to spend a lot of our time discussing (okay, making fun of) regional differences in the speech of those of us who are Americans. I'm the favorite target, frankly, having been raised in that state right across the Hudson River from our offices in Manhattan. But, I like to argue that a variety of English that makes a sharp distinction between talk and tock, hawk and hock, and Dawn and Don is richer and more interesting, right? I can only feel sorry for my phonologically impoverished colleagues.

Just kidding. I know there's no such thing as a good or bad dialect objectively speaking. It's only when all sorts of other factors creep into the equation that one dialect is judged more harshly than another. And America is rich with dialects. Here's a great summary of American English varieties, along with some myths (and their corresponding facts) about regional or other types of dialects.

For fun, see how well you do identifying American dialects by taking this quiz.

Just one editorial comment. When you complete the quiz, submit your answers, and then pull up the explanations, you'll see that one dialect is said to be "considered 'general American'." That strikes me as a bit of a contradiction to an important point raised in another article on the site.

Basically, it's very difficult to pinpoint a "standard" American variety, at least as far as pronunciation is concerned. There's a myth that newscasters learn a variety of English from a particular part of the country because it sounds the most neutral and standard, but it's actually an idealized variety, spoken natively by no one. (CHRIS)

Tags: American English, dialects, regional accents, varieties
June 6, 2008