Alaskan?

[Linda Lanz]

Hello all,

As a linguist and a native of Alaska (born and raised in Anchorage),  
I felt I might have something to offer. I am certainly no expert on  
dialectology, but these are my insights. For those who are curious, I  
was born in Anchorage in 1977 and raised there all my life until I  
left at the age of 18 for college. My father moved to Alaska from the  
Lower 48 (California but he has a characteristic Iowa accent via his  
parents) but my mother moved to Alaska as an infant and is a native  
speaker of Alaskan English like myself.

First and foremost, every Alaskan I know thinks Sarah Palin has an  
atypical (and even non-Alaskan) accent. I've seen a log of blogs  
commenting on her dialect and generalizing about Alaskan English  
because of it, but she is not a representative speaker. Furthermore,  
Alaskans do not have a stereotypical Canadian accent (no Canadian  
raising, for example), nor do we have a Midwestern/Fargo/Minnesota  
accent.

Second, the dialects of English in Alaska have been only minimally  
investigated. Harold Schiffman's observations are correct for general  
Alaskan (not so-called "village English", another dialect(s)  
entirely). We have cot-caught merger and other characteristics you'd  
expect of a general Western dialect. Usually when I travel, people  
either think I'm from California (or somewhere else on the west  
coast) or can't quite place my accent. Alaskan English does have  
unique slang but no unique phonological features come to mind. I do  
think this is a dialect area that needs a lot more study, however.  
You would need to be careful to choose speakers who are native  
speakers of Alaska dialect(s), though, and not transplants.

The few studies that exist are older and don't take into account the  
rapid population growth (the population of Alaska has more than  
doubled in the last 30 years). Language is never static, of course,  
but given the large, steady stream of new arrivals (both native and  
non-native speakers of English) coming to an area that didn't have an  
established dialect in the first place, there hasn't been much chance  
for distinctive features to develop. Because we have large groups of  
immigrants from places like Korea, American Samoa, and the  
Philippines, emerging dialects of non-native English speakers should  
be a fruitful source of inquiry as well, particularly with the rapid  
semantic shift I would expect when immigrants from tropical  
environments (like Samoa and the Philippines) move to Alaska.

Regards,
Linda Lanz
Dept. of Linguistics
Rice University


On Sep 7, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Harold Schiffman wrote:

> The most noticeable  thing about PNW English that I  can attest is  
> that
> certain vowel
> contrasts that are found in east coast American English are  
> missing, or
> rare.
>
> 1. There is no contrast between the low back vowel in "caller" as  
> contrasted
> with the /a/ in 'collar,
> and  that applies across the board.  "Otto" is pronounced the same as
> "auto", 'caught' the same as
> 'cot', etc.
>
> 2. The high-lax back vowel in "should, put, good" etc. is often more
> unrounded, more
> like the final /u/  in Japanese, or Russian "jeri".  In some c ases  
> it may
> even approach
> the quality of barred-i.
> .
> 3. There is no contrast between the vowel of 'bed' and the vowel of  
> 'bad'
> (sorry I can't
> represent them well from this email system) when they occur before / 
> r/, i.e.
> 'perish' and
> 'parish' are identical, as are the names Aaron and Erin, Barry and  
> berry,
> 'merry' and 'marry',
> and so on.
>
> These are the most salient features I have noticed in the phonology  
> of the
> PNW dialect. There
> may be others, but I never noticed whether people said "eye-rack"   
> instead
> of "ear-rack".
>
> One thing I should report--whenever I did surveys in my ling  
> classes to see
> whether people had
> the contrasts I've mentioned above, if anybody did have those  
> contrasts,
> they were surely not
> from the local area.  Once, after doing this, a student asked me if  
> I was
> "from this country."  I was
> rather outraged by this question, since the student was assuming  
> that his
> English was "normal" and
> mine was therefore "foreign".  Or maybe it was meant as a joke,  
> since I
> would assume students
> watched TV and heard other accents from the media.
>
> Hal Schiffman