• Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    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?

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 hours ago

      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.