Ok, just checking as a fellow PNWesterner who feels like we sound bland or sure “neutral” if you wish while all other US accents sound pretty interesting and unique. I can’t think of a single thing genuinely unique to PNW accent, personally. I lived in the South for a while, so I’m very familiar with the wide variety of accents down there, and we just don’t have any real depth of variety of that sort I feel. Maybe I’m wrong, I haven’t hung out everywhere in the PNW.
No, you’re right, we are essentially the… linguistic evolution end point of American English… the type O- blood of American accents, if you will.
Basically everyone can understand us, but we will have trouble accepting meaning transfusions from non type O- speakers.
As far as ‘unique’ things… well basically, my vote for most unique thing would be for the intonation patterns we use, or more accurately, basically the lack of them.
We tend to just stress all words in a sentence very close to the same, monotone.
We tend to have (at least what others call) falling intonation at the end of a sentence, that can make it so people don’t recognize questions… as questions.
Because they’re often expecting a tonal shift at the end of a sentence, or some other tonal pattern, as a cue that indicates a question is being asked.
Which is the opposite from a Californian, who do rising intonation on even non questions, which acts as the easiest giveaway that a transplant is in fact a transplant, beyond them having no clue how to pronounce most local place names, or referring to ‘I5’ as ‘the 5’.
linguistic evolution end point of American English
if the accents start at pacific northwest and end up adapting to whatever regionalised version they end up being, doesn’t that make you the evolutionary source of american english?
PNW accent is basically what happens if a whole bunch of Americans with originally different accents from different regions all try to cross the great divide either by wagon or train, to find either farmland or a ticket to the Alaska gold rush…
And then everybody who isn’t dead after the attempt more or less averages out their accents into a rough middleground.
Some linguistic evolution has been going on since then, beyond that, but thats what I mean by end point; the PNW was the literal geographic last stop on the physical colonization of the contiguous US.
Only thing that might be more ‘final’ than that would maybe I guess be Alaska, but I do not know much about an Alaskan accent.
ah ok, so PNW was basically battle royale and the final form that got all the distinct pieces of accents smeared into their final form. thank you for correcting me
Yeah, I’m with trackball_fetish, that’s not really a PNW thing as much as it is a Midwest thing.
Now, in many ways, the PNW accent is a kind of… less exciting version of the Midwest accent, watered down Midwest.
The only time I can remember PNW people using ‘ya know’, its either because they just actually are from the Midwest, or they are intentionally trying to sound folksy.
A good portion of the PNW was originally settled (cough colonized) by… basically originally Germans and Nordics who moved from the East Coast to approximately Minnesota, but then moved even further east to basically either Portland or Seattle.
… maybe you could say ‘ya know’ is part of the rural/eastern PNW accent, as the sparser areas of the PNW today tend to be more affordable for a Midwesterner to move to, just by way of economics, relative cost of living.
All that being said, I would be interested in other verbal tics you’ve observed PNWers to have.
One tic I know I have is saying ‘like’ far too often when I’m basically exasperated, like, what am I even doing?
But, because I’m not Californian, I intone ‘like’ with much less emphasis, in a monotone way.
‘Like’ is definitely over used out here but not the same as the Cali one, I can usually pick out Californians in Washington… partially because as a southerner they recognize another person who is aggressively talkative to strangers.
I actually do agree with your take that PNW accent a restrained Midwest accent which actually tracks pretty well. And just to be clear I don’t mean “dontcha know” or “don’t ya know” that is Midwestern as hell, what I mean specifically is y’all tend to add “ya know” to the end a lot of sentences”. When I first pointed out to my best friend, who grew up out here, she sent me a text later that night saying, “Fuck you I hear it everywhere now, ya know”
The other big one that comes to mind is “pre-funk” which is apparently just slang for pre-gaming but I’d never heard it in the south or northeast
PNW is kind of notoriously ‘way too online’ and we suck at / hate talking to people we don’t know already, in person.
I think the ‘ya know’ thing that you are talking about, I think that was basically a tiktok thing for a while, basically a meme.
So… that’s my guess there: its essentially a meme that worked its way into the vernacular of the ‘way too online’ zoomers/alphas of the PNW.
‘Pre-funk’… yeah I remember that starting to catch on, and being annoyed by it, lol, because it literally just is ‘pre-game’… I don’t use that phrase, but yeah, a lot PNW people do.
Also, its funny: I’m in the Midwest now… and because I am actually capable of striking up a conversation with people I don’t already know, in person, yeah, people do seem to guess that I’m from Cali, more than they guess Seattle.
So if you’re saying people assume 'talkative = Californian"… I guess that would mean that I actually have something resembling ‘normal’ social skills, at least in comparison to the PNW hikkikomori, hahaha!
I was talking with some older dude recently, with an accent … I think he said Kentucky… but goddamn it, after we got to be a bit friendly, he started rambling off … I literally could not understand a word he was saying, for like 30 seconds of him talking.
Naw it’s something I’ve noticed from many native Washington’s ever since I’ve moved here, there is some bleed from the Midwest in my experience so maybe that’s where it comes from originally
We (I) prefer ‘neutral’, but yes.
Just don’t lump us in with Californians, or we (I) will just start talking to you in the valley girl / infuencer accent, derisively.
Also don’t mind the royal we, its just normal for us to all be this immensely conceited.
Ok, just checking as a fellow PNWesterner who feels like we sound bland or sure “neutral” if you wish while all other US accents sound pretty interesting and unique. I can’t think of a single thing genuinely unique to PNW accent, personally. I lived in the South for a while, so I’m very familiar with the wide variety of accents down there, and we just don’t have any real depth of variety of that sort I feel. Maybe I’m wrong, I haven’t hung out everywhere in the PNW.
No, you’re right, we are essentially the… linguistic evolution end point of American English… the type O- blood of American accents, if you will.
Basically everyone can understand us, but we will have trouble accepting meaning transfusions from non type O- speakers.
As far as ‘unique’ things… well basically, my vote for most unique thing would be for the intonation patterns we use, or more accurately, basically the lack of them.
We tend to just stress all words in a sentence very close to the same, monotone.
We tend to have (at least what others call) falling intonation at the end of a sentence, that can make it so people don’t recognize questions… as questions.
Because they’re often expecting a tonal shift at the end of a sentence, or some other tonal pattern, as a cue that indicates a question is being asked.
Which is the opposite from a Californian, who do rising intonation on even non questions, which acts as the easiest giveaway that a transplant is in fact a transplant, beyond them having no clue how to pronounce most local place names, or referring to ‘I5’ as ‘the 5’.
if the accents start at pacific northwest and end up adapting to whatever regionalised version they end up being, doesn’t that make you the evolutionary source of american english?
No, its the opposite.
PNW accent is basically what happens if a whole bunch of Americans with originally different accents from different regions all try to cross the great divide either by wagon or train, to find either farmland or a ticket to the Alaska gold rush…
And then everybody who isn’t dead after the attempt more or less averages out their accents into a rough middleground.
Some linguistic evolution has been going on since then, beyond that, but thats what I mean by end point; the PNW was the literal geographic last stop on the physical colonization of the contiguous US.
Only thing that might be more ‘final’ than that would maybe I guess be Alaska, but I do not know much about an Alaskan accent.
ah ok, so PNW was basically battle royale and the final form that got all the distinct pieces of accents smeared into their final form. thank you for correcting me
Something like that, hahah.
Yall have a lot of verbal ticks, so many PNWers end a large proportion of sentences with “ya know”
Yeah, I’m with trackball_fetish, that’s not really a PNW thing as much as it is a Midwest thing.
Now, in many ways, the PNW accent is a kind of… less exciting version of the Midwest accent, watered down Midwest.
The only time I can remember PNW people using ‘ya know’, its either because they just actually are from the Midwest, or they are intentionally trying to sound folksy.
A good portion of the PNW was originally settled (cough colonized) by… basically originally Germans and Nordics who moved from the East Coast to approximately Minnesota, but then moved even further east to basically either Portland or Seattle.
… maybe you could say ‘ya know’ is part of the rural/eastern PNW accent, as the sparser areas of the PNW today tend to be more affordable for a Midwesterner to move to, just by way of economics, relative cost of living.
All that being said, I would be interested in other verbal tics you’ve observed PNWers to have.
One tic I know I have is saying ‘like’ far too often when I’m basically exasperated, like, what am I even doing?
But, because I’m not Californian, I intone ‘like’ with much less emphasis, in a monotone way.
‘Like’ is definitely over used out here but not the same as the Cali one, I can usually pick out Californians in Washington… partially because as a southerner they recognize another person who is aggressively talkative to strangers.
I actually do agree with your take that PNW accent a restrained Midwest accent which actually tracks pretty well. And just to be clear I don’t mean “dontcha know” or “don’t ya know” that is Midwestern as hell, what I mean specifically is y’all tend to add “ya know” to the end a lot of sentences”. When I first pointed out to my best friend, who grew up out here, she sent me a text later that night saying, “Fuck you I hear it everywhere now, ya know”
The other big one that comes to mind is “pre-funk” which is apparently just slang for pre-gaming but I’d never heard it in the south or northeast
Huh.
Ok… I think I have an explanation for ‘ya know’.
Its a zoomer/alpha thing, not a millenial thing.
PNW is kind of notoriously ‘way too online’ and we suck at / hate talking to people we don’t know already, in person.
I think the ‘ya know’ thing that you are talking about, I think that was basically a tiktok thing for a while, basically a meme.
So… that’s my guess there: its essentially a meme that worked its way into the vernacular of the ‘way too online’ zoomers/alphas of the PNW.
‘Pre-funk’… yeah I remember that starting to catch on, and being annoyed by it, lol, because it literally just is ‘pre-game’… I don’t use that phrase, but yeah, a lot PNW people do.
Also, its funny: I’m in the Midwest now… and because I am actually capable of striking up a conversation with people I don’t already know, in person, yeah, people do seem to guess that I’m from Cali, more than they guess Seattle.
So if you’re saying people assume 'talkative = Californian"… I guess that would mean that I actually have something resembling ‘normal’ social skills, at least in comparison to the PNW hikkikomori, hahaha!
I was talking with some older dude recently, with an accent … I think he said Kentucky… but goddamn it, after we got to be a bit friendly, he started rambling off … I literally could not understand a word he was saying, for like 30 seconds of him talking.
Accent was waaaay too thick for me to decipher.
Hate to poke hole in your theory, but I don’t even know anyone Gen Z or alphas, these are all millennials and older
Huh? You mean the Midwest?
Naw it’s something I’ve noticed from many native Washington’s ever since I’ve moved here, there is some bleed from the Midwest in my experience so maybe that’s where it comes from originally