California English (or Californian English) is the collection of English dialects native to California, traditionally classified under General or Western American English.
History and overview As California became more diverse, English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds began to pick up different linguistic elements from one another and also developed new ones; the result is both divergence and convergence within California English. Overall, linguists who studied English around World War II tended to find few, if any, patterns unique to the state. Studies in the 1950s and 1960s largely only commented on the increasingly common cot–caught merger within the state.
In the 1980s, linguists first noted a distinctive chain shift of vowel sounds, the California Vowel Shift, used by young people in southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California.Gordon, Matthew J. (2004). "The West and Midwest: phonology." Kortmann, Bernd, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, Edgar W. Schneider and Clive Upton (eds). A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 347. This helped to define an accent emerging primarily among youthful, white, urban, coastal speakers, and popularly associated with the valley girl and surfer youth subcultures.Podesva, Robert J., Annette D'Onofrio, Janneke Van Hofwegen, and Seung Kyung Kim (2015). "Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift." Language Variation and Change 48: 28-45. Cambridge University Press."California English." Do You Speak American? PBS. Macneil/Lehrer Productions. 2005. The possibility that this is, in fact, an age-specific variety of English is one hypothesis;: "fronted features in the young speakers seems to indicate a nascent chain shift in progress, [but] the lack of a true generational age range in the study precludes too strong of a conclusion. Alternatively Hinton et al. also suggest that possibility that the age-specific pattern could also be a function of age-grading, where the faddish speech style of California adolescents is adopted for its prestige value, only to be abandoned as adolescence wanes." however, certain features of this accent are intensifying and spreading geographically.Nycum, Reilly (May 2018). "In Defense of Valley Girl English". The Compass Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 28.
Other documented California English includes a "country" accent associated with rural and inland white Californians, which is also (to a lesser extent) affected by the California Vowel Shift; an older accent once spoken by Irish Americans in San Francisco; and distinctly Californian varieties of Chicano English mainly associated with Mexican Americans. Research has shown that Californians themselves perceive a linguistic boundary between northern and southern California, particularly regarding the northern use of hella, and southern (but now nationally widespread) use of dude, bro, and like.Bucholtz et al., 2007, 343.
Urban coastal California English Varieties of English most popularly associated with California largely correlate with the major urban areas along the coast. Notable is the absence of a distinct phoneme (the vowel sound of caught, stalk, clawed, etc.), which has completely merged with (the vowel sound of cot, stock, clod, etc.), as in most of the Western United States. + Vowels of California English Front Central Back Close Close-mid , Open Diphthongs
A few phonological processes have been identified as being particular to urban and coastal California English. However, these vowel changes are by no means universal in Californian speech, and any single Californian's speech may only have some or none of the changes identified below. These sounds might also be found in the speech of some people from areas outside of California.Conn, Jeff (2002). "An investigation into the western dialect of Portland Oregon." Paper presented at NWAV31. San Diego, CA. Front vowels are raised before , so that the traditional "short a" and "short i" sounds are raised to the "long a" and "long ee" sounds, respectively, when before the ng sound . In other contexts, (as in bit, rich, quick, etc.) has a fairly open pronunciation, as indicated in the vowel chart here. Similarly, a word like rang will often have the same vowel as rain in California English, , rather than the same vowel as ran (phonetically articulated as ; see below). In addition, may be pronounced with a raised vowel , or even in a nonfinite verb ending, so that thinking is pronounced ('theenkeen'), rather than or and king is pronounced more like ('keeng'), whereas bullying features two consecutive vowels: bull-ee-eeng or bull-ee-een (cf. GenAm , with followed by ). As all vowels preceding are historically short, this does not lead to a loss of phonemic contrast. Before or (as in ran or ram), is raised and diphthongized to or (a widespread shift throughout most of American English). Elsewhere, is lowered and backed as a result of the California vowel shift (see below). Uptalk, meaning a high-rising intonation in certain declarative sentences, is on the rise, for example in Southern Californian English. One 2014 study found uptalk used equally by Southern Californian men and women in 16% of declarative statements. However, women were twice as likely to use uptalk in order to hold the floor (a linguistic strategy similar to a filler or discourse marker). In Northern California generally, a tense is the pronunciation of before in words such as egg, beg, leg, which can thus be pronounced as /eɪg/ ayg, /beɪg/ bayg, /leɪg/ layg, respectively.Stanley, Joseph A. (2022). Regional patterns in prevelar raising. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 97(3), 374-411.
California vowel shift
One topic that has begun to receive much attention from scholars in recent decades has been the emergence of a vowel-based chain shift in California (with a similar pattern now reported nationwide and known as the low back merger shift). The image in this section illustrates the California vowel shift in Northern California on a vowel chart. The vowel space of the image is a cross-section (as if looking at the interior of a mouth from a side profile perspective); it is a rough approximation of the space in a human mouth where the tongue is located in articulating certain vowel sounds (the left is the front of the mouth closer to the teeth, the right side of the chart being the back of the mouth). As with other vowel shifts, several vowels may be seen moving in a chain shift around the mouth. As one vowel encroaches upon the space of another, the adjacent vowel in turn experiences a movement in order to maximize phonemic differentiation.
For convenience, California English will be compared with a "typical" General American English, abbreviated "GA". is pulled towards (bit and miss are sounding more like how other dialects realize bet and mess), is pulled towards (wreck and kettle are sounding more like rack and cattle), is pulled towards , and and merge (cot and stock are sounding more like caught and stalk): the cot-caught merger.
Other vowel changes, whose relation with the shift is uncertain, are also emerging: except before , is moving through towards (rude and true are almost approaching reed and tree, but with rounded lips), and is moving beyond . is moving towards (so that, for example, book and could in the California dialect start to sound, to a GA speaker, more like buck and cud), is moving through , sometimes approaching (duck, crust, what, etc. are sounding like how U.S. Southerners pronounce them, or like how other Americans might pronounce deck, crest, wet, etc.).
New vowel characteristics of the California shift are increasingly found among younger speakers. For example, while some characteristics such as the close central rounded vowel or close front rounded vowel for are widespread in Californian speech, the same high degree of fronting for is found predominantly among young speakers.
The effects of the California vowel shift have been noted in varieties of Californian Spanish, particularly in the Bay Area.
Rural inland California English One dialect of English, mostly reported in California's rural interior, inland from the major coastal cities, has been popularly described as a "country", "hillbilly", or "twang" variety. This California English variety is reminiscent of and presumably related to Southern or South Midland U.S. accents, mostly correlated with white, outdoors-oriented speakers of the Central Valley. It has been studied even as far north as Trinity County but could possibly extend farther,Ornelas, Cris (2012). "Kern County Accent Studied ." 23 ABC News. E. W. Scripps Company. and as far south as Kern County (metropolitan Bakersfield), possibly extending as far south as eastern San Diego County. Similar to the nonstandard accents of the South Midland and Southern United States, speakers of such towns as Redding and Merced have been found to use the word anymore in a positive sense and the verb was in place of the standard English plural verb were.King, Ed (2012). "Stanford linguists seek to identify the elusive California accent". Stanford Report. Stanford University. Related other features of note include the pin–pen merger, fill–feel merger, and full–fool merger.
The Great Depression's westward Dust Bowl migrations of settlers into California from the Southern United States, namely from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas, is the presumable cause of this rural white accent's presence in California's Central Valley. Rural northern California was also settled by Oklahomans and Arkansans, though perhaps more recently in the 1970s and 1980s, due to the region's timber industry boom. However, even in a single town, any given individual's identification with working and playing outdoors versus indoors appears to be a greater determiner of this accent than the authenticity of the individual's Southern heritage. For example, this correlates with less educated rural men of northern California documented as raising in a style similar to the Southern drawl. Overall, among those who orient toward a more town lifestyle, features of the California Vowel Shift are more prominent, but not to the same extent as in urban coastal communities such as San Jose. By contrast, among those who orient toward a more country lifestyle, the Southern features are more prominent, but some aspects of the California Vowel Shift remain present as well.
Mission brogue (San Francisco)
The Mission brogue is a disappearing accent spoken within San Francisco, mostly during the 20th century in the Mission District. It sounds distinctly like New York and possibly Boston accents, due to a large number of Irish Americans migrating from those two East Coast cities to the Mission District in the late 19th century. It is today spoken only by some of the oldest Irish American and possibly Jewish residents of the city. From before the 1870s to the 1890s, Irish Americans were the largest share of migrants coming to San Francisco, the majority arriving by way of Northeastern U.S. cities like New York and Boston, thus bringing those cities' ways of speaking with them. In San Francisco, the Mission District quickly became a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood, and its local dialect became associated with all of San Francisco as a way to contrast it with the rest of California. Sounding like a "real San Franciscan" therefore once meant sounding "like a New Yorker", the speakers said to "talk like Brooklynites". Other names included the "south of the Slot" (referring to the cable car track running down Market Street) or "south of Market" accent.
Pronunciation features of this accent included: Th-stopping No cot–caught merger, with being raised and accompanied with an inglide, so as to produce a vowel sound approximating Non-rhoticity