>>Closest to the accent known as General American, a vaguely defined conservative Midwestern accent, that people that are trying to lose their regional North American accent tend to strive for in tv and radio. The closest dialects to General American spoken today are those in the Western and Midlands US and Western and Central Canada (according to Labov's ANAE). Newfoundland English itself is not very close to General American, however newscasters from that area use an accent that is close to General American--and thus sound less accent to people from all around North America. If that is true, the reason could be that they undergo more accent reduction than people from say, Chicago, or Toronto, or Seattle who don't think that they have a strong regional accent, and thus undergo little or no accent neutralization.<<
At least here in Milwaukee, there is a drastic difference between how newscasters and like for even local stations and how the general population speak, with newscasters normally speaking in something quite close to conservative General American (where even middle-aged and older middle class here generally have non-negligible non-GA features in their speech even when they overall speak something quite close to GA). It is particularly noticable when one hears newscasters in juxtaposition with local commercials, when very often are not in GA at all but rather are in the dialect here (to the point that I myself can very easily tell local commercials apart from national ones just by hearing the person speak).
Younger local radio personalities, on the other hand, generally do not speak GA but at the same time generally do not speak as, well, "broadly" as people that one may hear in some local commercials. Rather, their speech seems to be pretty typical of more careful speech by many middle class younger people here, which while being more GA-like than the less careful everyday speech by many individuals like myself is still clearly a relatively high register of the dialect here and not a transplanted, artificially imposed national standard. For instance, the local radio talk show personalities Cramp and Adler usually pronounce Adler's (last) name as [ˈɛ̯æɰˡːʁ̩ː] or [ˈɛ̞ːɰˡːʁ̩ː] rather than the GA pronunciation of [ˈæ(ː)dɫɚ(ː)] or [ˈæ(ː)ɾɫɚ(ː)]. In this way younger local radio personalities here normally sound distinctly different from middle-aged and older local radio personalities, who often speak in a more clearly GA-like fashion.
Hence it seems that the perception of GA as being truly standard, proper, correct, and whatnot for people here has died off amongst younger people and has been replaced even in media by a more local prestige variety. I myself have always perceived GA, even before I truly knew what it was, as something in a way foreign to here, as something either brought in by media from other parts of the US or spoken rather artificially in more conservative forms by TV personalities and middle-aged and older radio personalities from here (which generally sound quite different than even more GA-like speech by middle-aged or older middle class people of the same general age from here). The more conservative media-type GA to me feels very artificial, cold, and distant, and just does not seem like anything that anyone in Real Life from here would actually speak regardless of social context, especially anyone under the age of 35 here. Likewise, I tend to perceive the more local prestige variety often spoken by younger local radio personalities as sounding far more familiar, far less artificial, and much more like something I would actually hear someone younger from here speak in Real Life.
>>I don't think that General American would be perceived as the least accented accent all over though. For example, if two people went to say, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one that was trained to speak conservative General American, and one who was from Seattle, I think that the speaker with the Seattle accent would seem less accented than the speaker of conservative General American to the people there.<<
I would definitely agree. While there are a few features of such that would sound generally accented, such as the use of /in/ for "-ing", for the most part most modern northern US dialects, aside from probably the more extreme dialects of the far north of the Upper Midwest and the dialects just along the East Coast, would definitely sound less accented to me than conservative GA, which as mentioned before tends to come off as either being quite artificial or, when not, as sounding more like people from the rural Lower Midwest (who definitely sound quite accented to me even when they speak very close to GA).
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