4/17/2023 0 Comments Pacific northwest accentThus, Pacific Northwest English is being formed naturally, and it’s slowly spreading throughout the whole region. Who’s leading the change? Accents tend to develop around cities with large populations of young people, meaning places like Seattle and Portland are heading up the linguistic change. So while it’s not eminently recognizable, the Pacific Northwest has started developing its own speaking patterns. The most famous accent in the West is likely Californian, and now even that’s split into northern and southern, which means the West is no longer the homogenous mass it once was. Over the past few decades, however, that’s changed. So the West didn’t have time to develop a complex arrangement of accents. Generally, the longer a region is settled, the more accents it will contain (though some linguists argue that local accents are dying out because of geographic mobility). Sure, Washington and Oregon were settled by Americans over a hundred years ago, but that’s a very small amount of time compared to the earliest colonies. The West is just the newest part of the country. There is a historical reason for why the West would actually have fewer accents than the East. While the east, especially the northeast, was subdivided into several small sections, everything west of Kansas was put under the same accent name: “The West.” When linguists first did a study of accent groups around the country in the mid-20th century, the western states were all grouped together. So let’s explore how the accent has developed, and what it sounds like today. Even Pacific Northwesterners have trouble accepting that they have an accent (even though yes, everyone has an accent).ĭespite all this, people in the northwestern United States really do have an accent, and it’s starting to become more distinct. If someone asked you to do a Seattle accent, you might struggle. The Pacific Northwest doesn’t really have a stereotypical accent that everyone knows. Are you struggling? You wouldn’t be alone in that.
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