I've lived in Portland for 20 years and grew up in North Idaho and Eastern Washington, and yes, I believe there is such a thing as a Pacific Northwest accent. It's not a strongly distinctive accent, and is basically a variation of "General American".
I am "cot-caught" merged, as are most people here. There is more of an accent in the rural areas, especially east of the Cascades, where many people talk with a bit of a drawl, although it's not a Southern-type drawl.
Our vocabulary is changing a little bit. When I was growing up (I'm 45), everybody here called carbonated soft drinks "pop", and we thought it was weird to call it "soda". "Soda" to us meant soda water. Nowadays, more people are calling it "soda", especially in urban areas like Seattle and Portland.
I've noticed creaky voice (a.k.a. vocal fry) in most areas of the U.S., and yes it's mostly found in young women, but I had never heard a creaky voice as creaky as the sample on that website you linked. I think it's supposed to sound sexy or more feminine in some bizarre way. It's weird.
Generally, I think there definitely is a Pacific accent going on. I remember hearing some interviews with Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic (from Nirvana) who are from Washington State and they definitely did not sound Californian. I can't pinpoint what is different about it, I think maybe the intonations are different to the Californian accent. Anyway, I always thought it sounded pleasant to my ears.
I'm going to now read the "creaky voice" website now
yes, that's the accent - quite pleasant
I don't like the creaky voice. I hear it all the time in San Francisco. It often goes hand-in-hand with very fast speech and the California vowel shift. Ugh. Am I becoming a curmedgeon(ess)?
curmedgeon(ess) --> curmudgeon(ess)
That article underlines what I've long believed about Western US dialects--the west is not homogenous--not even close. It may have been more so at one time in US history (say, a few decades ago), but the populations in the west now have sizable amounts of people that have been born and have grown up in their particular regions (as compared to 50 years ago when most people in the west had literally just moved there, with very few multigeneration natives), leading inevitably to the establishment of regional dialects.
Western US dialects are some of the most understudied areas in dialectal research, so I've been glad to see scholarly research come out recently giving some fascinating preliminary evidence on emerging dialects in the west. I found it interesting that the article found several cases where the Pacific Northwest differed from California speech (such as the apparent lack of/u/ fronting as is common here in California). Listening to some of the sound clips off of the site linked from the article I could identify most of those speakers as non-Californians right off the bat--besides all the individual technical things just hearing the normal flow of conversation was proof enough of that. Really interesting article--thanks Elaine.
I live in Seattle myself and while I don't totally discount Tom Paulson's article in the PI, I think it must be taken with a grain of salt.
First of all, I think that the speech of the western United States has been pretty homogeneous much more recently than the 1800's and remains so to this day. People I've met from Delaware, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alaska and even California and Colorado all sound about the same as Seattle.
The boundary markers for difference seem to be in Idaho (more like the Dakotas and Minnesota), Western New Mexico (more like the Texas panhandle & Oklahoma), and West Virginia where they say DOHg and BURR-ee for 'dog' and 'bury' instead of DAHg and BAIR-ee as in Seattle.
Secondly, there is no discernable Scandinavian influence on the speech of people in the Pacific Northwest like there is among many older Minnesota residents. About 10 years ago I read an article called "Eight Myths About Seattle" in which the author listed one of them as "Ballard is Scandinvian." He said there are actually more Scandinavians living in Kent (a city southeast of Seattle) than there are in Ballard. This is true. The Scandinavian era in Ballard was between the 1920's and 1950's after which many of their children and grandchildren moved out to the suburbs and became very much assimilated into the Anglo-American melting pot. But the same is true for Italians who lived in Georgetown during that same period.
I can always tell someone who comes up from California by their use of certain adverbs such as "like" and "way' as in the case of a girl I heard the other day who said "In Africa, it's like, way hot" and their unorthodox use of the word "retarded" as when she said "Oh my God, that's so retarded" and "We visited this town on the Canadian side of the border called Chiliwack and it was, like, so retarded". However, I don't notice any difference in accent between California and Western Washington State.
Deborah,
I would have liked to add taht word to my vocabulary if only I knew what it meant. It's not in the dictionary I have at hand.
curmedgeon(ess) --> curmudgeon(ess)
Thanks a lot.
Jordi, "cantankerous," used in the definition of "curmudgeon," is another word I like.
"People I've met from Delaware, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alaska and even California and Colorado all sound about the same as Seattle."
I don't deny the validity of your opinion on the subject but the truth is that US dialects have been and are diverging overall, even while obviously it goes without saying there are many common features uniting American accents everywhere. However, the linguistic evidence simply doesn't support the notion that western US dialects are homogenous. I can guarantee if you took one person born in raised in each of those states you listed and put them all in a room, some differences would pop up nearly instantly. If not told their geographical backgrounds you might not be able to pinpoint exactly where they were from, but even untrained ears would be able to tell those people didn't share identical speech patterns and that they must've come from different areas.
Also please note that while popular media articles on language like this one should probably be taken with a grain or two of salt (and this one actually wasn't too bad...I've seen some really bad ones), the researchers interviewed for such articles are actually doing scientifically valid research. Since they're experts in their fields, they know exactly what to look for and can notice and accurately document and analyze new trends in language usage, and those all point to new dialects emerging and others continuing to diverge, slowly but surely, from one another.
You may think it's splitting hairs over what appear to be small differences in pronunciation, but really the scope of things is much larger than that. These are differences that represent significant changes from speech of even a generation ago, so they point to possible future forms of dialectal variation which are beginning to be clearly and scientifically observed and reported now. Also, as I said before, besides the technical stuff I may theoretically be familiar with about a certain dialect in how it differs from my own, the situation is surely affirmed for me when, in listening to others speak, I'm instinctively and instantly aware those are not people from around where I live. That's the case with the recordings from the article.
"born in raised" on line 6:
"born and raised," is what I meant. sorry for the typo.