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[robot_god]

I gotta New York accent.

[pmcd9]

I love my southern (Houston) accent.

~Paul

[Biz Markizzle]

I wish dialects in the US would not go away. Making fun of my dad for not being able to pronounce "drawers" will never get old, and I want future generations to have this same ability.

Thanks to my mom, I honestly thought "draw" was the word for "drawer" until I was a sophomore in high school. I had no idea what a "drawer" was. I think I managed to shed what few scraps of a Boston accent she had passed on to me by the time I reached adulthood, though.

[Bobby Isosceles]

Your regional colloquialisms are cute, but aren't a major problem. Poor pantsrobot still lapses into Scots now and again..

[Turbo Ninja]

Ohio accents can be pretty neutral but if you're from Ohio and you have an accent IT WILL BE UGLY.  Some people from the Cleveland area turn the letter A into two syllables - "math" becomes "may-ath," "nap" becomes "nay-ap," etc.  It's almost as bad as the stereotypical Long Island accent to mine ears.

Nearer to West Virginia and Pennsylvania are those who say "warsh" and pronounce iron as "eye-run."  Some of them even have a mouth-breather drawl that turns simple words like "no" or "got" into a three-second utterance.  This is the worst accent in the country because it makes people sound stupid, just like a Dixie accent only without all the redeeming charm.  If you saw any of the recent Country Boys series on PBS, you know what I'm talking about.  A guy I know from Youngstown would tell you that "Alvis" lived in Graceland.  What a douchebag.

The worst American accents:
1. Appalachian drawl
2. Minnesota/North Dakota
2a. Chicago/Wisconsin
3. Any variation on Valley Girl/Surfer Dude
4. Cleveland
5. Long Island
6. Bronx
7. New Englanders with their "wicked" this and "pahk the cah in the yahd" that.
8. Philly

Everyone else in the USA speaks perfectly neutral English with pronunciation influenced only by personal speech impediments.

[wombat]

6. Bronx

Watch yourself, buster. The recovering academic in me was proud of managing to stay out of this thread.  But now it's getting personal.

[CortJstr]

On the subject of vaguely frontier-y regionalisms I can't stand:
"maysure."

It was bad enough when my eighth-grade home ec teacher did this, but when I got to ninth grade and my geometry teacher did it, I wanted to cleanse it with fire.

It took me quite a while to realize that "maysure" isn't just a word meaning "more likely than may-haps"

[Roger]

Ohio accents can be pretty neutral but if you're from Ohio and you have an accent IT WILL BE UGLY.  Some people from the Cleveland area turn the letter A into two syllables - "math" becomes "may-ath," "nap" becomes "nay-ap," etc.  It's almost as bad as the stereotypical Long Island accent to mine ears.

Nearer to West Virginia and Pennsylvania are those who say "warsh" and pronounce iron as "eye-run."  Some of them even have a mouth-breather drawl that turns simple words like "no" or "got" into a three-second utterance.  This is the worst accent in the country because it makes people sound stupid, just like a Dixie accent only without all the redeeming charm.  If you saw any of the recent Country Boys series on PBS, you know what I'm talking about.  A guy I know from Youngstown would tell you that "Alvis" lived in Graceland.  What a douchebag.

The worst American accents:
1. Appalachian drawl
2. Minnesota/North Dakota
2a. Chicago/Wisconsin
3. Any variation on Valley Girl/Surfer Dude
4. Cleveland
5. Long Island
6. Bronx
7. New Englanders with their "wicked" this and "pahk the cah in the yahd" that.
8. Philly

Everyone else in the USA speaks perfectly neutral English with pronunciation influenced only by personal speech impediments.
7.

I'm having lots of fun with this topic, even though I can't contribute much to it, not being a native speaker of English and all.

But you got to tell me where to get audio samples of all these accents you've been talking about.

Another question: is there an actual phonetic difference between the regular "-ing" gerund and when people write without the "g", as in Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin'?

[CortJstr]

The g sound is dropped entirely so the word sounds pretty different. Say sing and then say sin and you'll have an idea.

[V-Adore]

Yeah, "lovin'" sounds totally different from "loving." It's pretty freaky.

On the Minnesota/ND accent -- I've never noticed it so much as an accent as mostly a function of word choice (ah, "hotdish!") and the cultural elements that you'd expect from people with a fundamentally mild lifestyle. Of course, I could be blind to it, since my mother's from central Minnesota and I speak more and more like her as time goes by.

[wombat]

To be more precise, there is no 'g' at the end of the standard pronunciation of the gerund  -ing.  It is a sound we don't have a single letter for, a velar nasal.  The 'g-dropped' version substitutes a different nasal consonant, [n].  You can prove to yourself that there is no [g] at the end of the gerung -ing by listening to the difference between the words 'singer' and 'finger'.   "Singer" has only the velar nasal in the middle.  "Finger" has the velar nasal followed by [g].  The cluster of velarnasal-g never ends a word in English, so you will see that -ing sounds like the middle of 'singer', not like the middle of 'finger'.

By the way, I'm not positive if there are dialects where those two words are pronounced identically, but I never came across one in my years of teaching, so I think the examples should work for everyone.

[CortJstr]

Yeah. What wombat said. But regardless, the "velar nasal" is dropped entirely for those words. So runnin' sounds like "run in" said very quickly and not like running that much at all.

[arkabee]

if the best accent isn't the accent of the people you are around,
YOU ARE IN THE WRONG PLACE.

get to your wicked good place ya'll, before the goin' get's gone.

[Golfhaus]

My sister and I were always told we were accent neutral (even by her actor boyfriend who went to COLLEGE for ACCENTS). However, we both have hints of the geographical areas we prefer. Lisa talks with the gruffness of the eastern New York area, and I say "y'all" and drag my long i's (one-two-three-four-fiiiiiive-six-seven-eight-niiiiiine-ten) as done in parts southern.

One thing I've noticed is that I tend to drop my you's for "ya." At work, I greet passengers with "How ya doin'?" a lot, but not the way it would be done by a cab driver that has never left the Empire State. It's... weird.

[Bobby Isosceles]

no.
see, the double C in flaccid is...
god damn. i cannot remember the word at this early in the morning.
there are other words that have the double letter where you have to pronounce them separately. there is a word for it. hm.
I will ask people until I remember.

Diaresis?