Regional American Accents

There was one website on the list that made me ridiculously happy. It was a glossary of all the Massachusetts towns, their out-of-state pronunciations and their real pronunciations. Here's the link: http://www.worcestermass.com/pronounce/index.shtml. The feeling I got while reading it was one of intense, almost delirious regional pride. I wanted to turn to someone and high-five them shouting: "BAHSTIN IS WICKED PISSAH!" Here's an example of how discrepant the real pronunciation and the perceived one can be:
"Worcester is a town in central Massachusetts."

Say that out loud. How did you pronounce the first word?

Wor-sess-ter? Hah.
War-chest-tah? To be fair, at least you're trying to sound like a Massachusetts native. Partial credit.
Wis-tah. Bingo. I would have also accepted Woo-stah.

Other good examples are Gloss-tah (aka Gloucester) and Hayv-ril (aka Haverhill). We're pretty much second to London in how terribly we butcher our town names. (But as the website says, "We're from Massachusetts, so I know we're right!")

But this really isn't a good example of regional accents. I think that place names and their pronunciations are separate from the accents of their people. For example, I say Wis-tah but I never drop my r's in regular speech if I can help it. I don't think it's coincidence (or the result of a faulty quiz) that almost all of our class, even though we're from all corners of the US, placed into the Midland accent. I think that, generation by generation, regional accents are starting to blend together and become less distinct. I don't really hear much of a difference between the accents of my American (and to a certain extent, Canadian) friends here, whereas my international friends usually have distinct accents. I don't know why - maybe it's because we're exposed to more (and more various) media, maybe it's a product of general globalization, whatever. But I definitely think that while we keep our wacky regional vocabularies and specific wacky regional pronunciations, our general accents are not as noticable as they would have been in say, our grandparent's time.