Pacific Northwest Accent (Cascadian)

[Bristel]

Just wondering who describes their accent as PNW or Cascadian?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadian_English

I grew up within the I-5 corridor most of my life, 2 years in Moab UT, but moved to Pittsburgh and have lived in downtown (dawn-tawn ) Pittsburgh for the last 3 years.

Although I haven't "taken apart" my phonetics by recording myself and comparing minimal pairs, etc, I do recognize that I have the strong sibilant "s" and "creaky vowels" that is claimed to be a part of the accent near Seattle.

Anyone else who has this, or does anyone want to debate the reality of the accents of the west?

From reading about accents, I haven't found much on the PNW accent as being separate from the Western accent. But I know it is definitely different from Canadian (no rising) and different from Californian. (except maybe extreme northern California)

[TaylorS]

Here in Minnesota we also have the raising of /{/ to /e:/ before both /g/ and /N/.

[Radius Solis]

I have several features of it, yes.... but the local speech variety here is seriously not distinct enough from GenAm to deserve a name, let alone "Cascadian", which is excessively cutesy. Just look at that list on wikipedia, it looks compiled by somebody desperate to find every last trivial difference they can. Most of the items are not distinct to the PNW and none of the rest are common outside of limited zones. Meanwhile our Chinook Jargon vocabulary is in a pitiful state: there's only maybe two or three words that would be widely recognized, not counting placenames.

[Grey]

Most of my childhood (from about age 6 to age 13) was spent in the Tacoma area, I would have to say I have a PNW accent.
But, I don't have merry/mary/marry merged. Merry has [E] while marry/mary have [{]. But it is true that [ei] is more [e:] with me.
I'm actually not sure how common it is to have [{] as [e:] before anything other than [N] but it holds true with me, I can't say much about the area, I haven't lived there in years.

[cromulent]

I've lived there half my life. Accordingly, I have about half the features on the list.

I have the Mary-merry-marry merger.

I can't tell if I have the cot-caught merger--I think I generally don't distinguish between [A] and [O] much if at all (perhaps they are marginally contrastive), but those two words might be exceptions. I think I have [k_hat] for cot and [k_hOt/k_hAt] for caught. I can't really tell, cot isn't a word I say very often.

I do not have the pin-pen merger.

I think my close-mid vowels approach monophthongality.

yet despite all these features, I just consider my accent "West Coast," basically the same as a Cali accent.

I do recognize that I have the strong sibilant "s" and "creaky vowels" that is claimed to be a part of the accent near Seattle.

When is /s/ not a sibilant?? I do have the creaky vowels tho.

[schwhatever]

I'm not from "extremely" Northern California, but still a more inland NorCal area, and I have an accent that's appreciably different from what's been described here as Cascadian - I have the cot-caught, pen-pin, lenin-lennon and merry-mary-marry mergers, noticeable /u aU/ fronting (to [y]/[}] and [{U]), sporadic /oU/ fronting in some registers (to [2U]), and realization of /eI oU/ as almost monophthongs [e o]. There's also some local weirdness with the future tense: "I'm going to go eat" is on the verge of replacing "I'm going to eat" which has started to hold a more anticipatory meaning (I'm going to eat, now), while the former has implications of being a more distant future decision (I'm going to go eat later).

[Radius Solis]

There's also some local weirdness with the future tense: "I'm going to go eat" is on the verge of replacing "I'm going to eat" which has started to hold a more anticipatory meaning (I'm going to eat, now), while the former has implications of being a more distant future decision (I'm going to go eat later).

Not impossible, but it seems likely to me you might have the more general English use of the second "go", to mark scenal deixis, and be mistaking implicit-"here" for implicit-"now". It's really another item on the Conlangers' List Of "Oh wow I thought this was something exotic, but English does it too!", but English does grammaticalize what scene something happens in, relative to the presently-activated one. Adding an extra pre-verbal "go" just marks that the action happens in some other scene, setting, or location than the speaker is presently speaking about. Consider "let's eat", which you might say if the food were already present, versus "let's go eat", which means you have to move somewhere else to do it. Even if it's just from the living room to the kitchen, this can be a socially significant change of setting. This logic applies in most tenses: I'm going to eat / go eat, I will eat / go eat, I'm running / going running. In the latter case we often get lazy and call it a future marker (even linguists do this), but it isn't: it's marking that locomotion is required to get from 'here' to the intended scene of action. The future-ness is only a logical consequence of that.

It gets sorta weird in the past tense (ran / went running, ate / ??went eating) and I'm not up to analyzing that at the moment. But for presents/futures, consider whether this might be what really is going on when you use preverbal "go".

[Christopher Schröder]

It gets sorta weird in the past tense (ran / went running, ate / ??went eating) and I'm not up to analyzing that at the moment. But for presents/futures, consider whether this might be what really is going on when you use preverbal "go".

I would never say "went eating", except to say that someone went while he was eating at the same time. The past tense of "go eat" would be "went to eat", but would more generally involve a phrase to the effect of "went out to eat", "went [somewhere] to eat", or "went to eat [somewhere]". While not ungrammatical, saying "went to eat" sounds a bit incomplete to me.

[Bristel]

It gets sorta weird in the past tense (ran / went running, ate / ??went eating) and I'm not up to analyzing that at the moment. But for presents/futures, consider whether this might be what really is going on when you use preverbal "go".

I would never say "went eating", except to say that someone went while he was eating at the same time. The past tense of "go eat" would be "went to eat", but would more generally involve a phrase to the effect of "went out to eat", "went [somewhere] to eat", or "went to eat [somewhere]". While not ungrammatical, saying "went to eat" sounds a bit incomplete to me.

For the most part, I haven't realized until now that I say those things, and while grammatically incorrect from a prescriptivist point of view, I grew up learning those forms and ended up using them, unless I try to use a more formal speech.

[Aurora Rossa]

How common is this Canadian raising in actual usage?

Although I haven't "taken apart" my phonetics by recording myself and comparing minimal pairs, etc, I do recognize that I have the strong sibilant "s" and "creaky vowels" that is claimed to be a part of the accent near Seattle.

What do you mean about creaky vowels and strong "s"?

[Nortaneous]

/ɛ/, and, in the northern Pacific Northwest, /æ/, become [eɪ] before the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/: egg and leg are pronounced as ayg and layg, a feature shared by many northern Midwestern dialects and with the Utah accent.

"Egg" and "leg" normally have /E/? What?

[MrKrov]

/ɛ/ is the normal vowel. Shocking.

[Travis B.]

/ɛ/, and, in the northern Pacific Northwest, /æ/, become [eɪ] before the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/: egg and leg are pronounced as ayg and layg, a feature shared by many northern Midwestern dialects and with the Utah accent.

"Egg" and "leg" normally have /E/? What?

My own dialect at least, like typical General American-like varieties, normally reflects historical /ɛ/ for egg and leg, having [ˈɜːɡ̊] and [ˈʟ̞ɜːɡ̊]~[ˈɰɜːɡ̊] therefor respectively, even though there are other dialects in the Upper Midwest that do have [eː] rather than [ɜ(ː)] or [ɛ(ː)] therein.

[schwhatever]

California English just moves almost everything possible towards . We have [eI)g] and [5eI)g] for egg and leg, [k_hI~ndI~m] for condemn, and [spY~n] (thereabouts) for spoon.

[Nortaneous]

I'm starting to think my dialect is a random combination of obscure features from dialects all over the country. I have [dʌdnʔ] for "doesn't", [ɫeg̚] for "leg", [ʁ̟ʷæɪ̯ŋ] for "rang" (IPA really needs a symbol for bunched r), [tʰʏʉ̯] for "two", and so on. The really interesting part is that other people here (a lot of my family, for example) actually sound a lot like me, except without the fucked-up vowel stress pattern that is typical of modern GA. (I have [ˈmʌ̃nˌdɛɪ̯] and [ˌoˈhaɪ̯ˌəʊ̯] (I'm not entirely sure what's going on with my /o/; I thought it was always [ˌəʊ̯], except [ɤ] around labials and after /r/, but [ˌəʊ̯ˈhaɪ̯ˌəʊ̯] sounds wrong to me) where most of my family has [mʌ̃ndi] and [ˌoʊ̯ˈhaɪ̯ə].)

[tezcatlip0ca]

(IPA really needs a symbol for bunched r)

CanIPA uses simple [ɹ] for it. (An alveolar approximant is like a small turned 2.)

[Tropylium]

IPA can naturally do the same; just use /z̞/, or taking a cue from extIPA, /j˭/, for the "normal" approximant. It's a separate question however if setting up a new "/ɧ/" would be a good idea.

(The 2nd should actually be j with superscript equals, but I can't find such a combining diacritic.)

[Nortaneous]

It's a separate question however if setting up a new "/ɧ/" would be a good idea.

There's no good way to write bunched r, and it's realized differently enough across dialects (literally damn near every POA between, and including, labial and uvular) that trying to figure out precisely what it is and writing that is too much effort. Maybe we could revive one of the unused characters here? Or just use <ꝛ>? (edit: I think Zhuang <ƨ> would work better than <ꝛ>; <ꝛ> is way too small, at least in my font. But <ƨ> looks less r-like. Why are there no good characters that look like r rotunda? Maybe abuse Cyrillic and use <ԇ>?) (edit 2: I used to like the idea of using reversed r, but then I realized it's probably not in Unicode. Is there anything close enough? ...No, wait, that might have been for schwa offglide. Whatever.)

[Tropylium]

It's a separate question however if setting up a new "/ɧ/" would be a good idea.

There's no good way to write bunched r, and it's realized differently enough across dialects (literally damn near every POA between, and including, labial and uvular) that trying to figure out precisely what it is and writing that is too much effort.

Then why speak of those as if they were a single sound? (Obviously they're the same phoneme, but that we may call simply /r/.)

[Nortaneous]

It's a separate question however if setting up a new "/ɧ/" would be a good idea.

There's no good way to write bunched r, and it's realized differently enough across dialects (literally damn near every POA between, and including, labial and uvular) that trying to figure out precisely what it is and writing that is too much effort.

Then why speak of those as if they were a single sound? (Obviously they're the same phoneme, but that we may call simply /r/.)

My and the of someone from, say, Canada are completely different, but unless the phonetic details are relevant, we still write for both instead of something like [I1_+_^] and [i:]. So it's good to have the same symbol for this sort of thing. But we still usually write [ɫ] instead of [l] for the /l/s of the people with [ɫ], even though [l] is technically simpler (and we generally write [ɫ] for any (velar|uvular|pharyngeal)ized l, no matter whether it's [lˠ], [ʟ̞], or [ʕ͇ˡ] (yes, that is a horrible hack); similarly, why not write [ԇ] or [ƍ] or [ƨ] or whatever instead of [ɻ] or [ʋ] for the people who have some sort of heavily (velar|uvular|pharyngeal)ized r instead of [ɻ] or [ʋ]?

[schwhatever]

Pro-tip Nortaneous: /phonemes/ [phones] and the difference matters.

/{nd D@ dIf@r@ns m{t@rs/
[{~n DI_- dIfI_-rI_-~ns m{4I_-rz]

[Nortaneous]

i think i was talking about narrow vs. broad phonetic transcriptions

figured that'd be obvious by the bit where i talked about ɫ. who ever writes /ɫ/ for english?

[schwhatever]

I thought you had missed that Tropylium was suggesting use of broader phonemic transcription, and had talked about the need for narrower phonetic transcription. My point is that those are different things, which are not in the least incompatible.

Perhaps I misunderstood you.

[Nortaneous]

...Now I'm confused.

[schwhatever]

Everyone can agree that there's a phoneme /i/ in English, and use that for phonemic transcription when they don't need to be more specific.

But you can say your /i/ is [i1_+_>] and I can say mine is [i_-] and Torco can say his is [i] and bricka can say his is [I_+], if we need to and none of that contradicts the fact that English has /i/.

Basically, you can use shorthands, if you know when to use // and when to use []