I’ve always wondered about this — is there such a thing as a San Francisco accent, just like there’s a Boston accent, or Southern accent? The answer is yes! The Speech Accent Archive is a super cool site. You can browse the world, click on a region, and hear how a person from that area pronounces a given English paragraph.
(Hat tip: Zoli Erdos)
I’d love to have your SF accent instead of my Hungarian with heavy German/Asian/ whoknowshwat influence. My life would be so much easier, I could actually use dictation software.
I wonder if it will track global accents. People like me have such an amalgam that it may be interesting to know what a well travelled person sounds like today.
That something I’ve wondered about a lot too. I remember first moving to the Bay Area and having my Hawai’ian accent stick out like crazy, though all my new found friends insisted they did NOT have Californian accents. The California accent is such a neutral one though it’s hard to pick up on unless you’re really foreign, don’tcha think?
my roommate and I agree: the Washington guy sounds a lot like John Malkovitch.
People sometimes pick up my midwest accent out here (WA), but not *too* often. The “nasal A” usually pops out after a glass of Reisling.
I agree, Bekka. It’s also quite pleasant to listen to. And any American who has lived in a lot of states (or even countries) kind of winds up sounding Californian.
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Hi, I just came across your blog post. I have a curiosity with local dialects in the US, and as a native San Franciscan I always heard about the “South of the Slot” accent, which had a New York/Boston flavor to it. I always heard it had virtually disappeared, since most San Franciscans, including myself, speak with a homogenized California accent. But I recently came across some video of Angela Alioto speaking. You can’t get much more San Francisco than the Alioto family, and she clearly holds the South of the Slot accent. If you want to hear it, here’s a video clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXwwMYvnCcw