Help with this accent

Milton   Mon Apr 20, 2009 11:03 pm GMT
Hi,
can anyone ''trace'' this accent?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_OwwJqoxsI

It's sounds very Chicago-like, for example HARD TAP for ''hard top'' ;)
feati   Wed Apr 22, 2009 3:00 pm GMT
I can't tell you where this accent is spoken but I've found some more remarkable things about it:

- /A@`/ ("car") is raised to [6@`]
- /E@`/ ("air") is raised to [I@`]
- /aU/ ("power" is raised to [6U]
- /oU/ ("roadster") is very fronted
- /u:/ is fronted in "cute" and "distribution" but not in "coupe" or "blue"
- /{/ is raised to [E@] in some words ("standard", "lamp", "cabin", "must-have", "Saturn")
4762   Wed Apr 22, 2009 3:14 pm GMT
I don't think Chicago. Maybe it's an east coast accent. Notice how he said "by"? Otherwise its fairly General American-like, except for his weird Midwestern-sounding r's and pre-rhotic vowels.
Travis   Wed Apr 22, 2009 6:24 pm GMT
That is definitely not Chicago dialect just from what feati has commented about it, and I have not even listened to it yet. (The dialect in Chicago is pretty close to that here in Milwaukee, and most of those features do not sound like anything around here aside from the realization of historical /æ/, which I have often heard of as something more like [i̯æ] in the speech of people from Chicago.)