6/1/2023 0 Comments Pacific northwest accent![]() She applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation to do a study. Wassink wanted to know whether the confusion between words like "cake" and "keg" was widespread. “He thought that he was being invited to a ‘cake’ party, and he was being invited to a ‘keg’ party.” “And when he got there he was shocked to discover that he had brought entirely the wrong thing to the party,” Wassink explained. He baked a cake, which he thought was the party’s theme. She told the story of a student from Rhode Island who, when he arrived on campus, was invited to a party. One piece of evidence? Transplants like herself sometimes misunderstood the locals. Wassink grew up in Philadelphia, and when she arrived here 17 years ago, she suspected that wasn’t quite right. Linguistic textbooks grouped everyone from the Western United States together into one regional dialect. In fact, researchers have recently examined more closely at how people speak throughout the region and are finding that accents can vary between Oregon, western and eastern Washington.įor decades, scholars didn’t pay much attention to how people in the Pacific Northwest spoke. Ours may be subtle, but if you know what to listen for, it’s definitely there. ![]() She laughed in response to Molly’s question, and then said yes, everybody has an accent. Professor Alicia Wassink is director of the school’s sociolinguistics laboratory. Luckily for us, we have one of the world’s foremost experts on Pacific Northwest English right here on the University of Washington campus. But is that really the case? What do the experts say? But many in the Pacific Northwest describe themselves as speaking “standard,” “normal,” or “plain” English. Molly never thought she had an accent until she moved to Virginia and was told she had one. Do Pacific Northwesterners have an accent and what does it sound like? Listener Molly in Tacoma asked that question as part of KUOW's Local Wonder series.
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