California English

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
California English
RegionUnited States of America
(California)
Early forms
Language codes
ISO 639-3–
GlottologNone
IETFen-u-sd-usca
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California English (or Californian English) collectively refers to varieties of

General or Western American accent
.

Overview

A distinctive chain shift of vowel sounds, the California Vowel Shift, was first noted by linguists in the 1980s in southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California.[4] This helped to define an accent emerging primarily among youthful, white, urban, coastal speakers, and popularly associated with the valley girl and surfer dude youth subcultures.[5][3] The possibility that this is, in fact, an age-specific variety of English is one hypothesis;[6] however, certain features of this accent are intensifying and spreading geographically.[7]

Other documented California English includes a "country" accent associated with rural and inland white Californians, which is also (to a lesser extent) affected by the California Vowel Shift; an older accent once spoken by Irish Americans in San Francisco; and distinctly Californian varieties of Chicano English mainly associated with Mexican Americans. Research has shown that Californians themselves perceive a linguistic boundary between northern and southern California,[8] particularly regarding the northern use of hella and southern (but now nationally widespread) use of dude, bro, and like.[9]

Urban coastal California English

Varieties of English most popularly associated with California largely correlate with the major urban areas along the coast. Notable is the absence of a distinct /ɔ/ phoneme (the vowel sound of caught, stalk, clawed, etc.), which has completely merged with /ɑ/ (the vowel sound of cot, stock, clod, etc.), as in most of the Western United States.[10]

Vowels of California English
Front Central Back
unrounded rounded
lax tense lax tense lax tense tense
Close i u
Close-mid ɪ eɪ ə, ʌ
ʊ
 		oʊ
Open ɛ æ ɑ
Diphthongs aɪ   ɔɪ   aʊ

A few phonological processes have been identified as being particular to urban and coastal California English. However, these vowel changes are by no means universal in Californian speech, and any single Californian's speech may only have some or none of the changes identified below. These sounds might also be found in the speech of some people from areas outside of California.[11]

California vowel shift

See also: Low back merger shift
The California vowel shift. The phoneme transcribed with ⟨o⟩ is represented in this article as ⟨oʊ⟩.[12]

One topic that has begun to receive much attention from scholars in recent decades has been the emergence of a vowel-based

phonemic differentiation
.

For convenience, California English will be compared with a "typical"

cot-caught merger
.

Other vowel changes, whose relation with the shift is uncertain, are also emerging: except before /l/, /u/ is moving through [ʉ] towards [y] (rude and true are almost approaching reed and tree, but with rounded lips), and /oʊ/ is moving beyond [əʊ]. /ʊ/ is moving towards [ʌ] (so that, for example, book and could in the California dialect start to sound, to a GA speaker, more like buck and cud), /ʌ/ is moving through [ɜ], sometimes approaching [ɛ] (duck, crust, what, etc. are sounding like how U.S. Southerners pronounce them, or like how other Americans might pronounce deck, crest, wet, etc.).[16]

New vowel characteristics of the California shift are increasingly found among younger speakers. For example, while some characteristics such as the close central rounded vowel [ʉ] or close front rounded vowel [y] for /u/ are widespread in Californian speech, the same high degree of fronting for /oʊ/ is found predominantly among young speakers.[17]

The effects of the California vowel shift have been noted in varieties of

Bay Area.[18]

Rural inland California English

One dialect of English, mostly reported in California's rural interior, inland from the major coastal cities,

full–fool merger.[20]

The

Southern drawl.[23] Overall, among those who orient toward a more town lifestyle, features of the California Vowel Shift are more prominent, but not to the same extent as in urban coastal communities such as San Jose.[19] By contrast, among those who orient toward a more country lifestyle, the Southern features are more prominent, but some aspects of the California Vowel Shift remain present as well.[22][25]

Mission brogue (San Francisco)

The Mission brogue is a disappearing accent spoken within

Irish-American and possibly Jewish residents of the city. From before the 1870s to the 1890s, Irish Americans were the largest share of migrants coming to San Francisco,[29] the majority arriving by way of Northeastern U.S. cities like New York and Boston,[30][31][29] thus bringing those cities' ways of speaking with them.[31] In San Francisco, the Mission District quickly became a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood,[32][31] and its local dialect became associated with all of San Francisco as a way to contrast it with the rest of California.[32] Sounding like a "real San Franciscan" therefore once meant sounding "like a New Yorker",[32] the speakers said to "talk like Brooklynites".[29] Other names included the "south of the Slot" (referring to the cable car track running down Market Street)[32] or "south of Market" accent.[33]

Pronunciation features of this accent included:

  • Th-stopping[29][32]
  • No
    cot–caught merger, with /ɔ/ being raised and accompanied with an inglide, so as to produce a vowel sound approximating [oə][29][32]
  • Non-rhoticity[29][32]
    • The use of [əɪ] for /ɜːr/ before unvoiced consonants such that NURSE would have almost the same vowel sound as "choice"[29][32]
  • Glottal stop, [ʔ], instead of /t/ before syllabic /l/ such as in "bottle";[29] this and all the above features were reminiscent of a New York accent
  • Possible
    TRAP–BATH split, reminiscent of older Boston English[29][32]

Overall, starting in the later half of the 20th century, San Francisco has been undergoing dialect levelling towards the broader regional Western American English,[30][34] for example: younger Mission District speakers now exhibit a full cot–caught merger, show the vowel shift of urban coastal Californians, and front the GOOSE and GOAT vowels.[35]

Other varieties

Certain varieties of

African American Vernacular English.[38]

The coastal urban accent of California traces many of its features back to

Valleyspeak: a social dialect arising in the 1980s among a particular white youthful demographic in the San Fernando Valley, including Los Angeles
.

argot spoken in Boonville, California, with only about 100 speakers today.[39]

Lexical overview

The popular image of a typical southern California speaker often conjures up images of the so-called Valley girls popularized by the 1982 hit song by Frank and Moon Zappa, or "surfer-dude" speech made famous by movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. While many phrases found in these extreme versions of California English from the 1980s may now be considered passé, certain words such as awesome, totally, for sure, harsh, gnarly, and dude have remained popular in California and have spread to a national, even international, level.

A common example of a northern Californian

hella (from "(a) hell of a (lot of)", and the euphemistic alternative hecka) to mean "many", "much", "so" or "very".[41] It can be used with both count and mass nouns. For example: "I haven't seen you in hella long"; "There were hella people there"; or "This guacamole is hella good". The word can be casually used multiple times in multiple ways within a single sentence. Pop culture references to "hella" are common, as in the song "Hella Good" by the band No Doubt, which hails from southern California, and "Hella" by the band Skull Stomp, who come from northern California.[42]

California, like other

Asian Americans from various cultural backgrounds, especially in urban and suburban metropolitan areas in California, has led to the adoption of the word hapa (itself originally a Hawaiian borrowing of English "half"[43]
) to mean someone of mixed European/Islander or Asian/Islander heritage.

In 1958, essayist Clifton Fadiman pointed out that northern California is the only place (besides England and the area surrounding Ontario and the Canadian Prairies) where the word chesterfield is used as a synonym for sofa or couch.[44]

Freeways

In the

The Californians".[45] In contrast, typical northern California usage omits the definite article.[46][47][48] When southern California freeways were built in the 1940s and early 1950s, local common usage was primarily the freeway name preceded by the definite article, such as "the Hollywood Freeway".[49] It took several decades for southern California locals to start to commonly refer to the freeways with the numerical designations, but usage of the definite article persisted. For example, it evolved to "the 605 Freeway" and then shortened to "the 605".[49]

Signage along northbound U.S. Route 101, reflecting the different lexicon usage between Southern and Northern California.
Left: signage at the 110 Freeway interchange in Los Angeles, with the leftmost sign for the 101 freeway north listing both its name, the Hollywood Freeway, as well as its destination, Ventura.
Right: signage at the Interstate 80 interchange in San Francisco, with the leftmost sign for US 101 north listing only its destination, the Golden Gate Bridge.

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ "Do you speak American? - California English". PBS. Retrieved October 28, 2013.
  2. ISBN 978-1-4051-2108-8
    .
  3. ^ a b "California English." Do You Speak American? PBS. Macneil/Lehrer Productions. 2005.
  4. ^ Gordon, Matthew J. (2004). "The West and Midwest: phonology." Kortmann, Bernd, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, Edgar W. Schneider and Clive Upton (eds). A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 347.
  5. ^ Podesva, Robert J., Annette D'Onofrio, Janneke Van Hofwegen, and Seung Kyung Kim (2015). "Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift." Language Variation and Change 48: 28-45. Cambridge University Press.
  6. ^ Ward (2003:41): "fronted features in the young speakers seems to indicate a nascent chain shift in progress, [but] the lack of a true generational age range in the study precludes too strong of a conclusion. Alternatively Hinton et al. also suggest that possibility that the age-specific pattern could also be a function of age-grading, where the faddish speech style of California adolescents is adopted for its prestige value, only to be abandoned as adolescence wanes."
  7. ^ Nycum, Reilly (May 2018). "In Defense of Valley Girl English". The Compass Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 28.
  8. S2CID 64542514.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
    )
  9. ^ Bucholtz et al., 2007, 343.
  10. ^ "The Voices of California Project". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-14.
  11. ^ Conn, Jeff (2002). "An investigation into the western dialect of Portland Oregon." Paper presented at NWAV31. San Diego, CA.
  12. ^ a b Eckert, Penelope. "Vowel Shifts in California and the Detroit Suburbs". Stanford University.
  13. S2CID 35623478
    .
  14. hdl:2066/220874
    .
  15. ^ Stanley, Joseph A. (2022). Regional patterns in prevelar raising. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 97(3), 374-411.
  16. ^ "Professor Penelope Eckert's webpage". Stanford.edu. Retrieved 2011-12-30.
  17. ^ "The Voices of California Project". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-14.
  18. ^ Helms, Annie (22 February 2022). "Bay Area Spanish: regional sound change in contact languages" (PDF). Open Journal of Romance Linguistics. 8 (2). Retrieved 8 September 2023.
  19. ^ a b Podesva, Robert J. (2015). Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift Language Variation and Change. Stanford University.
  20. ^ a b c Ornelas, Cris (2012). "Kern County Accent Studied Archived 2016-06-10 at the Wayback Machine." 23 ABC News. E. W. Scripps Company.
  21. ^ Geenberg, Katherine (2014). "The Other California: Marginalization and Sociolinguistic Variation in Trinity County". Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University. p. iv.
  22. ^ a b c d Podesva, Robert J. (September 2014). The California Vowel Shift and Fractal Recursivity in an Inland, Non-Urban Community. Stanford University.
  23. ^ a b c d Geenberg, Katherine (August 2014). The Other California: Marginalization and Sociolinguistic Variation in Trinity County (PDF). Stanford University.
  24. ^ King, Ed (2012). "Stanford linguists seek to identify the elusive California accent". Stanford Report. Stanford University.
  25. ^ a b c Geenberg, Katherine (2014). What it means to be Norcal Country: Variation and marginalization in rural California. Stanford University.
  26. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:279)
  27. ^ Geenberg, Katherine (2014). "The Other California: Marginalization and Sociolinguistic Variation in Trinity County". Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University. pp. 4, 14.
  28. ^ Geenberg, Katherine (2014). "The Other California: Marginalization and Sociolinguistic Variation in Trinity County". Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University. pp. 182-3.
  29. ^ a b c d e f g h i j DeCamp, David (1953). The Pronunciation of English in San Francisco. University of California, Berkeley. pp. 549–569.
  30. ^ a b Hall-Lew, Lauren (September 2009). Ethnicity and Phonetic Variation in a San Francisco Neighborhood. Stanford University.
  31. ^ a b c Veltman, Chloe. "Why the Myth of the 'San Francisco Accent' Persists". KQED News. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
  32. ^ a b c d e f g h i Hall-Lew, Lauren (2008). "I went to school back East... in Berkeley"1:San Francisco English and San Francisco Identity.
  33. ^ Nolte, Carl (28 February 2012). "How to Talk Like a San Franciscan". SFGATE. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
  34. ^ Graff, Amy (June 7, 2018). "Is there a San Francisco accent? The answer may have changed over the years". SFGATE. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
  35. ^ Hall-Lew, Lauren (August 2015). San Francisco English and the California Vowel Shift (PDF). The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
  36. ^ Take Two (2013). "Map: Do Californians have an accent? Listen to some examples and add your own." Southern California Public Radio.
  37. ^ Guerrero, Armando Jr. (2014). "'You Speak Good English for Being Mexican' East Los Angeles Chicano/a English: Language & Identity". Voices. 2 (1): 56–7.
  38. ^ Guerrero, Armando Jr. (2014). "'You Speak Good English for Being Mexican' East Los Angeles Chicano/a English: Language & Identity". Voices. 2 (1): 4.
  39. ^ Rawles, Myrtle R. (1966); "'Boontling': Esoteric Language of Boonville, California." In Western Folklore, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 93–103. California Folklore Society [Western States Folklore Society].
  40. ^ "However, science isn't all that sets northern California apart from the rest of the world," Sendek wrote. "The area is also notorious for the creation and widespread usage of the English slang 'hella', which typically means 'very', or can refer to a large quantity (e.g. 'there are hella stars out tonight')." [1]
  41. ^ "Jorge Hankamer WebFest". Ling.ucsc.edu. Archived from the original on 2005-10-31. Retrieved 2011-12-30.
  42. ^ "Lyrics | Skull Stomp - Hella". SongMeanings. 2008-11-02. Retrieved 2011-12-30.
  43. ^ Mary Kawena Pukui, Samuel H. Elbert & Esther T. Mookini, The Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983)
  44. ^ Fadiman, Clifton. Any Number Can Play. 1958.
  45. ^ Rose, Joseph (April 16, 2012). "Saturday Night Live's 'The Californians': Traffic's one big soap opera (video)". The Oregonian. Portland, Oregon. Retrieved December 3, 2013.
  46. ^ Simon, Mark (2000-06-30). "'The' Madness Must Stop Right Now". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2012-11-19.
  47. ^ Simon, Mark (2000-07-04). "Local Lingo Keeps 'The' Off Road". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2012-11-19.
  48. ^ Simon, Mark (July 29, 2000). "S.F. Wants Power, Not The Noise / Brown rejects docking floating plant off city". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved June 13, 2017.
  49. ^
    S2CID 144010897
    .

General and cited sources

Further reading

  • Ladefoged, Peter (2003). Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages. Blackwell Publishing.
  • Metcalf, Allan (2000). How We Talk: American Regional English Today. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Romaine, Suzanne (2000). Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press.

External links

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