So Dan was reading about dialect the other day and we found out what makes our hometown dialects different from one another. Dan has what’s called an Inland North accent, however it seems to be not as heavy as accents farther west. I have basically a Vermont English accent with some Canadian influence.
Some characteristics of our accents/hometown dialect:
Northern Cities Vowel Shift:
Dan has a Northern Cities Vowel Shift which I do not have. This means he uses a diphthong for words like cat, back, and map. (ca-yt, ba-yuck, ma-yup) The parenthetical pronunciations are of course, greatly exaggerated so you can get an idea of the difference. When I say the words cat, back, and map, they have much shorter, single vowel sounds.
Cot-caught merger:
I experience the cot-caught merger which Dan does not. For him words like cot and caught are distinct and pronounced differently. For me they are identical and both sound like the short and simple ‘cot’.
Canadian Raising:
Both of us experience some amount of Canadian Vowel Raising. There are several results of the raising. For us it presents most recognizably as the difference in the words ‘writer’ and ‘rider’. Assuming for now that the t and d are identical in pronunciation (another topic for later) Dan and I still say the two words distinctly, raising the vowel in the word ‘writer’. The most common example of Canadian Raising, which Dan and I do not experience, is the about-> aboat (or about-> aboot) shift.
My Canadian influences:
I do not personally experience the about->aboat shift, however I can detect slight tendencies towards that in my hometown dialect. It is very subtle and results in a slight change in the vowel o. It is especially common in the speech of my French-Canadian relatives. I also can say that I note some loss of the ‘th’ sound in the same relatives, making the word ‘three’ sound like ‘tree’. This seems to be due to an influence of Hiberno-English which crops up in various places around Canada and the Northeastern US.
Other points of interest:
D-T similarites, glottal stops:
This is something Dan and I both experience and have rarely heard not in use. Many words with a ‘t’ in the middle substitute either a ‘d’ sound or a glottal stop. The word mitten has the glottal stop (mi ! en) sounding like someone cut you off in the middle of the word. And since I’m using it quite a bit here, the word ‘glottal’, amusingly, has the shift to a ‘d’ sound (gloddal). Everyone I can think of speaks like this, rarely have I heard a proper ‘t’ in the word mitten.
Rhotic speech:
Dan and I are rhotic speakers. This means we pronounce the ‘r’ in words like, dancer, father, player, and driver (non-rhotic speakers pronounce these words as dansah, fathah, playah, and drivah).
Soda-Pop Line:
Apparently this is an actual term for the divide that splits New York in terms of which name you use for a soft drink. I imagine that if you are drinking a soda east of the line and walk west across it, suddenly the drink in your hand becomes a pop.