Language and Vowels

On the language quiz, I had a few correct answers which I’m happy about. I guessed both of the Southern speakers correctly; the ones in the area of Texas. I also guessed both of the Mid-Atlantic ones correctly. I had only one correct answer for the New England area, and only one correct for the Northern Midwest area. Not surprisingly, I didn’t guess any correctly for the Western states (area of Nevada etc.) or for the South Midwest states. I think the difficulty in guessing those is because of how similar they sounded. Even the Northern Midwest states were difficult and I wasn’t sure I would get any of those right. I think in general, the more alike the accents were to the way I speak, the harder it was for me to guess where they came from. The Southern states and Mid-Atlantic were the easiest to identify because there is a distinct accent, at least to me there was. So the more different the speech was from mine, the easier it was to identify.

I have always thought that here in the Northern-Midwest (Wisconsin specifically) for the most part we speak just like people from California and all the states that basically follow interstate 80 from the west to the Midwest. This would include Nevada, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota. South Dakota, North Dakota, Illinois, and Michigan likewise speak similar to how we do in Wisconsin. I know that the closer you get to the Canadian border the more there is an accent. I believe the accent is associated with the French influences of Canada. Also perhaps the German or Swedish ethnicities that settled this area play a part in the accent heard further north; like what was portrayed in the movie “Fargo”. Outside of these, I had always thought our speech in the Midwest no different than the states I mentioned above and am surprised how subtle the differences can be that distinguish where someone is geographically located in the United States. I always thought that the majority of people with “accents” were in New England or otherwise south of the equator.

For the vowel power quiz I did rather well, better than fifty percent; I had three out of five correct. The last one, “grade” was the most difficult for me to understand. Even after I saw what the word was I listened to it again and again, hoping I could figure out how what was being said could possibly be grade, but I’m still stumped. From my point, it sounded nothing like what I think grade sounds like – I don’t know that I even recognized the “g” in the word much less understood the vowel being used. With “busses” I had put “bosses” so I was close on that one but still no tomato (Toe-Maht-o or should I say Toe-Mate-o?). Other than those words the rest were relatively easy to identify. Hearing the word being said in phrase form helped in clarifying any doubts I had of those words. The thing with grade and busses was that the phrase used to help in understanding was just as hard to understand as the word itself so in those instances; the phrase didn’t help a bit.