When I was young, we always honed in on the rare new kids who were from out of state. In those byegone days, midway between the last century and this one, there was no cable TV, there were very few television channels, broadcast stations were local, as was radio. That kept the local accent fairly stable.
So we could acutely hear the regional accent of those who were descendants of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl (often by way of LA). For some reason it was high on our radar. New kids quickly learned to drop their accent and blend in in order to fit in. The playground was a great equalizer of accents.
Ironically, most of us came from immigrant families, and we learned to code switch. Speak like our playmates in the school yard. Maybe we were mimicking our teachers. But Miss Kolanoski was a Hunkie, so that didn't work.
My parents had a distinctive SF Mission Irish accent (by way of Boston)—but I didn't inherit it because I grew up in West Marin and raised by my Irish grandmother—so my accent is neutrally rural, if anything. I represent an older strain of the Northern California accent.
I had to unravel my Irish syntax and create American structured sentences in order to fit in. You'd think I would have done well in English, but no, I was a colossal failure. I made up for it by being an avid reader—when I finally learned to read in the 3rd grade. But words I didn't know how to pronounce were given a new—usually dyslexic—twist.
When I relax, and the Irish musicality creeps back into my voice (but not my sentence structure), most people are positive I'm from the British Isles, not California. I used to be terribly insulted when someone asked if I was from England.
No! Northern California.
Funny, you don't sound Californian.
Really? Because that's where I'm from.
No surfer dude drawl—another influx accent.
We rarely encountered the deep southern drawl, it was anomaly. Pearlie May's mother was from Lousiana, and Mary Ann's dad was from Georgia. But their accents were contained, isolated. Didn't rub off on us.
So, Dear Reader, how do you pronounce insurance? That's an accentual watershed: do you say INNsurance or inSUREance? Interestingly, many Native Americans also carry some of those broad midwestern nuances in their speech patterns. But it makes sense when you realize how many First Nation tribes were driven into the Oklahoma Territories.
Sometimes people affected that Midwest accent to sound rural or trustworthy. An aww shucks twangy down-on-the farm folksy kind of moment. Redneck bonding. Different than the Midwestern broadcast network accent.
Where did we develop our ear? Old black and white movies on TV. Migrant farm workers. Ma and Pa Joad. Used car dealers, TV commercials. What I think of—when I'm in Bakersfield, for example. Accents we avoided. We called it the California Oakie accent.
Then, during the 1970s, a new influx of accents flooded the Northern California accent matrix, the broad urban nasal sounds of NY or LA. We hated the sound. We mimicked it. Made fun of it. The invaders prevailed.
Don't even get me started on the 1980s Valley Girl accent of the San Fernando Valley. Again—that too was media-driven.
Then, massive migrations of Latin American farmworkers brought other accents elements but that took a long time to cross over and meld into the California accent. Then, when California's population doubled—from 15 million to 30 million, overnight—it was a polyglot of languages. Suddenly everybody was moving to California.
Since California has increasingly become a multicultural state, local and regional accents have also taken on the flavor of immigrant population accents as well.
So how do you sort it all out? What is a California accent? Is there one? Several?
I am the Alameda County coordinator for the student Poetry Out Loud project, I successfully coached two Contra Costa County students who placed 2nd and 3rd at the statewide level—and one of the things I've noticed is that I could distinctly 'hear" what regions the kids parents and grandparents were from by the way they pronounced certain key words.
I've seen kids code-switch—one accent is used at home, and another accent at school. I can't imagine coming up with a single definitive accent (or dialect — You, and what army? Sorry, couldn't resist—bad linguist joke).
So how do we define local accent with code switching and speech acts? People putting on their Sunday best voice versus talking to family at home.
One of the key things I learned from UC Berkeley's Alan Dundes, while collecting folklore—is to never "clean up" the interviewee's speech acts. Stet. As a writer, of course, I want to polish my own writing—but it was interesting to collect folklore while maintaining the authenticity of the subject's linguistic background.
I am acutely aware of regional levels of socio-economic strata accents—for example, when the str combo suddenly became slurred (via inner-city, and rap music movement) and now everybody's slurring str words—even broadcasters. Schtraight.
Gangsta speak has become everyday speak. No more code switching. Drives me crazy.
'Sup bro?
Such is the power of media.