The 1982 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” introduced the world to surfer dude Jeff Spicoli and his laidback lingo. Every time Spicoli appears, he treats the audience to some aaawesomes and duudes.

For people outside of the state, it might seem as if Californians speak like surfer dudes or valley girls -- like, ohmigod. California girls and guys themselves, on the other hand, insist they have no accent at all. Who's right? As it turns out, linguistic researchers aren't even sure: Most existing large-scale linguistic research projects skip the nation's most populous state, as if no one spoke English west of the Mississippi.

“California is very new. Boston, New York, the Northeastern accents are really set in stone because the population has been speaking English [for a long time].  And in California, it is still in the making,” explains Penny Eckhert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. (Eckhert herself hails from New Jersey, but speaks without the telltale accent.)

Eckert and a team of researchers descended upon the non-costal towns of Redding and Merced in the Central Valley to interview residents and indentify California accents and dialect. After the researchers gathered interviews with as many residents as they can, they apply it to a speech corpus to analyze spoken language.    

Californians may like to brag about having no accent, but Eckert says that isn’t true: “Everybody has an accent. An accent is just a way of pronouncing a language and people notice ones that tend to be associated with a particular place.” (Actually, you can watch Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen prove the existence of the California accent -- by mocking it -- in this "Saturday Night Live" sketch.)

She found that many Californians share common traits with people in the Midwest or the South, showing that Dust Bowl migration influenced dialect.

“A pattern that is well-known in the parts of the Midwest and Pennsylvania and Ohio is called the positive anymore, (such as) 'I shop there anymore,'” she says, explaining most people use anymore in a negative construction, such as “I don’t shop there anymore.” 

“We found that all over California and did not expect it.”

She also learned that many Californians use a nasally "a," found often in the Midwest. Once when she was interviewing a student at a Palo Alto high school, he complained the school was too homogenous, noting there weren’t a lot of “blocks.” After a moment, she realized he said "blacks."

Some Californians share commonalities with Southerners, notably the switch between was and were. Many Southerners say, “We was at the store” instead of, “We were at the store," and Californians also sometimes swapped was and were. She also observed that Californians blended pen/pin, with speakers saying both words the same, much like people in the South.

“The diversity of California is something that does not get seen as a distance,” Eckert says. 

In September, the team gathered data in Bakersfield. While a new location for fieldwork hasn’t been identified yet, Eckert plans on studying as many cities as possible.

You can learn more about the project at Stanford's Voices of California project page. 

Related:

• Talking with your hands is innate
• Are some brains better at learning languages?
• Teen can read any word backward. Aohw.

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Although the United States is an international melting pot and the average American makes a dozen moves in a lifetime, regional accents are alive and well. In fact, regional accents are becoming stronger and more different from each other, says William Labov, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, although it's not entirely clear why.

One possibility, says Labov, is that these original sound differences are being exaggerated, like trains moving in opposite directions on two railroad tracks. "The other is that dialect differences have become associated with political differences, so that the Blue States/Red States division comes close to the boundary between the Northern and Midland dialects," he explains.  

Labov says that our dialects change little after age 18 and we tend to retain the accent we grew up with. Young people first match the dialects of their parents, but then they often change to match their peers. These changes, though, are unconscious, he explains.

Linguists say there are about ten major regional accents in the US, such as New England, mid-Atlantic, Inland North, for the cities surrounding the Great Lakes, and the West, the country's newest dialect. While some people sound more regional than others, everyone has an accent to some degree.

Some people are simply better at repressing some aspects of their local speech. The way they talk -- their pronounciation of words (some "r-less" dialects on the East Coast may say "cah" rather than "car") or choice of words ("pail" in the North versus "bucket" in the Midwest) -- adds a local flavor and diversity to speech. But it can also contribute to misunderstandings and confusion (hearing the word "buses" as "bosses").

While some people keep their regional speech styles because it's the hallmark of who they are and a tie to their communities, certain accents may have negative stereotypes or societal prejudices associated with them, says Amee Shah, director of the Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics & Perception at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Although there's nothing wrong with a regional accent, some people become ashamed or self-conscious of them for either personal or professional reasons and they want to tone them down.

Shah, who has training as a speech-language pathologist and has designed an assessment tool to measure the severity of accented speech, offers "accent modification therapy" to clients. Shah says a strong accent might take six to eight months to modify, a moderate one three or four months, and a light accent a month or two.

"My goal is to help a client modify an accent, not to correct or reduce it," says Shah.

Have you ever misunderstood a regional accent (with humorous results)? Or do you lapse into regional speech patterns when home?

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