the valley girls

rich7   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 07:55 GMT
Oh my gawd I had no idea what you were speaking about but I totally new the feature, like "Summer" in the OC show of warner. The tipical valley girl, ain't she.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 07:57 GMT
Hmm, maybe Valley Girl-speak is more interesting from a linguistic standpoint than I would have originally guessed, but then, I'm sort of heavily biased against it myself, due to my association of it with rather vacuous San Fernando Valley teenagers and like, and the severe overuse of words like "like", "totally", and so on. From what you're saying, it seems like they've readded the English English [j] offglides which have usually been lost in North American English dialects, and that they've also basically got a u-umlaut sound, that is, [y], where most North American English dialects have [u], at least in some cases, which is rather interesting. Furthermore, it seems like you're saying that [eI] has changed in at least some individuals' speech into [{I], which is also interesting, as it's the complete opposite of speech here, where [{] tends to turn into [E], or be rather close to [E], especially when unstressed, and it also means that the [e] in [eI] is being changed, to some degree or another, from tense to lax.
Bill   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 08:14 GMT
>> Being thousands of miles away from Valleyland I'm just wondering this...is there such a thing as a Valley BOY?

They're called Valley DUDES, and they belong to the same genus as "Surfer Dude", separated by a natural barrier called the Santa Monica Mountains. They worship at the feet of Jeff Spicoli (See "Fast Times at Ridgemont High").
Bill   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 08:23 GMT
Happy Car,
I never realized it before, but you're right! Valley-speakers do tend to "Britishize" (Britishise?) their vowel sounds. Strange...
George   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 08:47 GMT
The California Vowel Shift:
http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html
Adam   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 11:10 GMT
In Britain when we talk about "valley girls", we are talking about girls who live in the Welsh valleys.

I thought that's what this thread was about, at first.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 14:12 GMT
Ah, no, Adam, there's a world which exists outside of the UK (and the EU, when you're busy demonizing it), if you haven't noticed.
Gabe   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:18 GMT
Wait.... "new" isn't commonly pronounced "nyu"!?!

I never realized that before. And is the vowel in "mom" in the valley girl accent pronounced how the vowel in "caught" should be? Because try as I might, I can't seem to get "caught" to sound right to my non-merged friend. But I think I do the "mom" thing, so maybe if I just change the 'm's then that'll work.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:21 GMT
At least in most parts of the US I can think of, including around here in Wisconsin, "new" is pronounced as /nu/, not as /nju/ (that is, "nyu"), which is generally the English English way of pronouncing the word.
Joanne   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:32 GMT
/nju/ is generally West Coast, especially California. It's how you can tell the born-and-bred Calis from the transplants.
Deborah   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:40 GMT
Travis, I think that in US accents that were strongly influenced by non-British accents (as in the Italian NY accent and, I think, the Scandinavian/German-influenced Great Lakes area accents), "new" is pronounced as /nu/, but the accents that descended only from the British Isles accents pronounce it as /nju/. In the South, for example, they don't say /nu/.

(This is just my casual observation, as I haven't studied such things.)
Sander   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 20:09 GMT
Just heard the pope has died....
Joanne   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 21:07 GMT
May he rest in peace.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 22:45 GMT
Well, Deborah, my view of English-language norms as a whole is very highly influenced by the dialect here in Wisconsin, and even formal American English with a local accent, to the point that I find voice samples which are supposedly "General American" to sound a bit "off" or "accented", to my ears, and have only found out relatively late (as in, as a teenager) that certain kinds of grammar usage, such as the usage of "by" to mean "at" (which is actually a loan usage from German "bei"), for example as in saying "by <so and so's> house" to mean "at <so and so's> house", are really not "standard" grammar in English as a whole. Hence, I tend to sort of have the basic assumption that the English here is the "default" for American English in general, not intentionally, but just sort of implicitly, and this includes things like assuming that /nu/ for "new" applies to American English in general by default.
Tiffany   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 23:02 GMT
I say 'nu' and 'nyu' interchangeably.