HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Some interesting U.S. accents:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6089621A87373FBE

The oddest is Tangier Island, VA:

https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E

Relevant to this submission, a Cajun accent:

https://youtu.be/hV8TQTUSsgw

Relevant to HN, tech talk circa 1985:

https://youtu.be/C4ctm0tElsU

⬐ boruto

I travelled route 66 then went a bit into Arkansas , As someone who was just visiting US, it is very easy to notice the accent.

The southern accent sounds soo nice over phone when I wanted to book motel for the next day. But were no so nice when I actually showed up.

⬐ asveikau

> Relevant to HN, tech talk circa 1985:

> https://youtu.be/C4ctm0tElsU

Since this thread is about accents, I start watching that and immediately hearing the guy say "hard drive" and "automatic" I think: he's from New York.

See also Tangier Island: https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E

⬐ dang

There have been HN threads about Tangier Island English in the past, but I can't find any. Perhaps someone will.

I also remember hearing about an antiquated dialect of English spoken somewhere in Northern California. Anyone know about that?

⬐ hammock

Boonville, CA

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/boontling-language-of-bo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boontling

⬐ dang

Thank you!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not . Similar things have happened and are happening to many other minority languages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization ).

-----

Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1], and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't understand a word.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

the modern English accent would sound completely foreign to the English of the 1700's

The accent on Tangier Island in Virginia[1] is said to be the closest living pronunciation to Elizabethan English, and based on that I think some mutual understanding could be wrangled.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

⬐ tlarkworthy

I heard it was Geordie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geordie

Here is an example:- https://youtu.be/yX8qgW8rGbw

⬐ rhizome

I believe the situation is that Geordie has the pedigree, that there's a continuous line back to the olden times, but it has evolved to a greater degree, and through forks in coal miner culture (see: Pitmatic[1]) and other professions of the area.

Tangiers seems special because, as the story goes, it was essentially a transplantation of the 17th century accent, a hard fork, which evolved to whatever degrees in isolation. I don't know if I should soft-pedal this as much as it is in Wikipedia, but I've had an ear bent for both of these regions for 10-15 years and this is my sense of both.

Naturally the truth is likely somewhere in between.

(IANA Dialectician, just a part-time sound and language aficionado)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitmatic

Tangier cannot go w/o mention - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

(Replying to both you and dylangs1030 here)

The "18th century" thing stuck in my mind from some media piece, and now that you mention it, does sound rather obviously like a myth. But the place exists—I think it was probably Tangier Island [1], and the accent there is indeed archaic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E#t=0m33s

Some of that sounds like a Monty Python sketch! It's definitely an example of one native English speaker (me) finding another (them) hard to understand.

I also second the commenter who brought up the Glaswegian accent. I love how it sounds but damned if I can make out half of what they're saying.

Maybe you're just gifted with dialects :)

[1] http://goo.gl/maps/Brbtr

⬐ dylangs1030

Wow. I can't make out half of that either, and I'm a native English speaker too. Thanks for this, that was fun.

Ooh, reminds me of the accent on Tangier Island, Virginia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... (that's a direct link to an example of the Tangier accent, which the article claims is not an uncorrupted version of Shakespearean English, but it does sound a bit similar to what those Shakespeare scholars have pieced together, what they call Original Pronunciation)

This might be an interesting video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E) - its a video of Tangier, VA where they still speak English from when the town was settled in 1600s.

⬐ cjensen

The notion that some areas still speak the original language was debunked in the linked article.

⬐ droithomme

The original article doesn't debunk it, it states without giving a single citation that "claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia's Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists."

Most likely his source is a single linguist, Dr. Michael Montgomery, who is from Knoxville and has written several articles on "Appalachian English", but which articles actually pertain only to East Tennessee rural english, and not other parts of the Appalachians.

Here are all his articles on the topic:

http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/articles.html

He does a good summary of the language of that region and can be reasonably considered an expert. He makes a convincing argument that much of the novel vocabulary is Scotch-Irish vocabulary from the early settlers of the area. He makes a less convincing argument that since the mountain people of the region are not familiar with idioms of Shakespeare, their speech is not related in any way to Elizabethan English. Elizabethan era people did not speak exactly the way Shakespeare wrote though. Pilgrims so desperate from religious oppression by the Church of England at the time to would not necessarily be experts in Shakespearean idioms.

Dr. Montgomery's articles are certainly worth a read and make many reasonable arguments about the dialects he is familiar with. The notion that the idea that any archaic language dialects have influenced certain dialect pockets that have survived to the present has been debunked, and such an opinion is held by all linguists is not established, cited or proven by the article.

Well, there's Tangier, Virginia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

Which has an accent thought to have remained unchanged since Colonial times.