Alaskan

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Robert Lawless:
"I'm wondering whether I have actually lost that childhood ability to
hear "foreignness" or whether speech locally has generally become more
homogenized. "
As with so many other things, it's probably a bit of both.
I've been discussing "accents" in both French and English with a
sociolinguistics-aware friend, recently, and I was amazed at how
immune she was to such striking features as a radical shift in most
vowels. Every example of (to me) vernacular-sounding speech, she would
label as close to the broader standard. Even when I could easily
perceive different regional variants in the same conversation.
One example I submitted to her was from Austin, TX. While I was living
in Austin, I had a hard time noticing speech differences. But since I
came back to Montreal, I've become increasingly aware of what are, in
the end, rather marked phonological features of different varieties of
Texas speech.
I emphasize this because we all tend to assume that homogenization of
speech patterns has been very effective in post-industrial societies.
After all, can we really distinguish speech patterns we hear on tv?
Yet I still perceive non-homogenized speech in a variety of registers,
outside of mass-media. Some podcasts help in this respect because
they're informal enough to let "speech regionalisms" shine through.
I keep referring to McGill dialectologist Charles Boberg's work
because he's quite adept at demonstrating phonological variation by
region. Not only does he know a lot about regional varieties but he
can actually produce many variants in such a way that the differences
are readily noticeable.
To be perfectly honest, I was rather impressed by his performance.

As it turns out, Boberg had a fair bit to say about PNW speech. At
least, I still remember his comments that variation between the speech
of people from, say, Victoria and Seattle was almost imperceptible to
outsiders. At the same time, differences in speech patterns from, say,
New Brunswick and neighbouring Maine are readily noticeable, even to
outsiders.



Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/