American accents? Depends on whose ears they fall on
Regional accents or dialects in the United States have charmed, annoyed and puzzled Americans for a long time.
While the argument has been made for some time that the accents eventually will disappear due to the ubiquity of television and the internet, they’re still around. TV newscasters are known for having no accents (think Iowa).
A lifestyle site called Big 7 Travel — which sees its 1.5 million readers as a “mobile-first, millennial audience” — recently put out a list of the “sexiest accents” in the US.
And the winner? The Texan.
“Who can resist a slow, Texan drawl? Not us, and not our community, clearly. The typical Texan accent is a ‘Southern accent with a twist’, with strong ‘r’s and plenty of ‘Howdy’s’. The sexiest accent in the US? We’d have to agree.”
The 1980 movie Urban Cowboy starring John Travolta comes to mind when I think of a Texas twang. (It also was the movie that brought mechanical bulls to bars across the US.)
But Travolta, who I believe pulled off a decent Texas accent, is from New Jersey, which ranked 49th out of 50 in the survey. Only Long Island, also dismissively pronounced as “Lawnguyland”, was seen as more distasteful linguistically.
No 2 was Boston, or “Bahs-ton”. In the comments section of the website where I read about the survey, many were flummoxed as to why the harsh patois of the Massachusetts capital ranked so high.
Maybe it’s because the region’s pro sports teams, the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox, have been so successful the past couple of decades, or it’s the onslaught of glorifying Boston-themed movies.
I happen to like the Boston accent, and I do recall once when I was at Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, a parking lot attendant really did say: “Faw dawlers to pahk the cah” (four dollars to park the car).
If you want a good example of a distinguished “Boston Brahmin” accent, listen to the Kennedys. JFK after all did go to Hah-vid (Harvard).
Getting back to the New York area, here is where the survey seems out of whack: New York City was picked as the third most-sexiest accent.
“NYC speakers have loooong vowels and short ‘a’s. Fast and hypernasal, yet quite charming at times,” writes Big 7.
There was a time not long ago that people who were on radio and television would take diction lessons to lose that NOO YAWK accent.
One way to determine if someone is a New Yorker is to ask for a pronunciation of the word “water”. If they say “waw-da”, good chance they’re from the city. If the answer is “wah-ter”, probably not.
That Big Apple accent was shaped by many immigrant groups, with the Irish having a big say. “Toity-toid and Toid” is one example, which translates to Thirty-Third Street and Third Avenue.
When I think of great New York accents, singer Frank Sinatra and comedian Jackie Gleason, a Brooklyn native, come to mind. The noted writer Pete Hamill, another Brooklyn native who sports a great New York accent, once wrote of Sinatra that his voice was “formed by the canyons of Manhattan”.
Maybe so, but Sinatra grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
That is one of my quibbles with the survey: There isn’t much difference (if any) between the New York, New Jersey and Long Island accents.
Maybe New York got the high ranking because of its outsize influence and power as America’s greatest city. You got a problem with that?
Hawaii, the second-closest state to Asia and home to a large Asian population, turned up at No 7: “Hawaiian is a Polynesian language … its slow vowels and elongated words … together sound so relaxing, you’ll never want to stop listening.”
As for those Midwestern newscasters, there is an accent for them. It’s called General American, but it ranked only 32nd on the sexy list.
“This standard American accent is what you’re most likely to hear on the radio or TV, where it’s near impossible to tell where the newscasters are from. It’s slightly boring, but nicely inoffensive to the ears,” the survey said.