North American English Dialects

There are so many unique dialects hyperlocal to New Orleans, it's amazing.

Started work there at the same time as a school classmate who grew up in Jacksonville. Spent a lot of time doing engineering work on offshore drilling rigs. Told my friend I really had trouble understanding people a lot of the time. He said he did as well :-)

https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#AudioFilesOfLocalDialects

This is even more true if you find old recordings.

https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=find&lan...

https://www.youtube.com/@Wikitongues/videos

It was pretty easy to imagine 50 years ago. For example, Star Trek started airing 60 years ago. The Jetsons started airing a few years before that.

That's because AAVE is a really dumb term that only caught on because a black man (McWhorter) introduced it.

It was a convenient way to advertise your inclusiveness while simultaneously dismissing the way black people speak by lumping them all together (a lot of woke has been insisting that all black people, or even all non-white people are fungible, like commodities.) Even better, you could show that you listen to a black linguist who, iirc, is the son of professors who grew up in a university environment, knowing no more about black language variation than any number of white people.

The way black Americans speak is as varied as the way white Americans speak, and is often far more similar to their white neighbors than to the black people in the next state over. Also, black Americans don't call themselves "African-American" unless they were raised in a white environment. Never have.

In previous seasons/series they didn't have the formula down yet, so 2/3rds of the episode were one literally starving person after another, just sighing into a camera about how hungry they are, how cold it is, and how nothing is changing.

Whereas in this one some people did incredibly well, others tapped out after setbacks, illness, or made thinly-veiled excuses about illness (even though they just lost the drive to stay in it). 5/5 would recommend.

"Your car needs washed" instead of "you need to wash your car"

Replying "You're good" after someone apologizes.

Adding an S to the end of brand names, especially grocery stores.

I don't do this one, but my extended family in Ohio just says "please" when they mean "could you repeat that?"

1) AAVE's use of Copulas. In most English you form present progressive with a copula and the present participle: I am walking, I am driving, I am working. The copula contains no information on its own. In many languages, a low information word is dropped. In Spanish you say "(yo) soy Americano" meaning "(I) am American." There can be no doubt of the subject of the verb "soy" because it is inflected to match the subject, so the pronoun "yo" communicates nothing in a normal sentence and is dropped. In Russian you take the opposite tack: you say "ya Amerikanets" meaning "I (am) American)" so you drop the copula. You either need the pronoun or the verb to communicate who is American, and in this case the pronoun won. Well in AAVE you drop the copula in those present progressive sentences: "I walking," "I driving," "I working." But then there's an opportunity to put a higher information in all of these sentences: you can use "be" as a copula to express the habitual aspect. "I be walking," "I be driving," "I be working" (usually with emphasis on the "be") mean "I am in the habit of X, but don't assume that is what I am doing at this moment." Degrees can be expressed here: you can replace "be" with "stay" to get more habitual and less present. It's a trip! I'm scratching the surface here but that's a big one.

2) Related: "Needs" + past participle vs "needs" + present participle. I was working with a handyman from Colorado and he said "This sink needs sealed" or something like that. I (Northeast) would have said "this sink needs sealing." Colorado has always had over 50% of the population born outside of the state, so I don't know if that's a thing from there or from wherever his parents are from (not sure and didn't ask).

"pop" vs "soda" is a commonly discussed one. (Google to see maps).

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

Another example... 'they're all' is shorthand for 'they're all gone' in Pennsylvania.

I'm not an expert on accents or anything but I think you can hear it in "dinner". Boston is the typical "R's don't exist" thing. Maine is more like "dinnyah" - your jaw kicks back a bit.

It also seems that whoever created this kind of gave up when figuring out Canadian speech patterns spanning longitude from east to west. Somebody from Kenora or Dryden or Timmins Ontario does not speak like a person from North Vancouver, BC. Vancouver region English is much closer to general west coast as it's spoken in a big city in WA, OR or California.

I like people who speak a more modern English from my part of London. Check out TV personality Big Narstie or football pundit Clinton Morrison. You'll love 'em.

https://youtube.com/@misspunnypennie

My favorites are David Attenborough and BBC in general.