<<Interesting. I just listened to some samples from California (Los Angeles), and they sounded about the same to me. What parts would you say sound non-Californian?>>
My overall impressions from the beginning were that the speakers were not from California--it doesn't sound like how people talk here (also, you'll notice I made that comment earlier on in this thread before we found out where they were from--I didn't know where they were from but I could tell they weren't from here). I haven't taken a lot of time to analyze the recordings on a technical level (I could tell they weren't Californian just by my intuition based on overall feel without resorting to technical analysis) but listening again I could tell by the "ask her to bring" in the first recording that it wasn't Californian. The vowel in "ask" sounds a bit different than the one we use here. Also, the way the female says "bags" doesn't sound like the vowel we use here either.
<<I'm very surprised. There shouldn't be. The west coast supposedly all sounds the same, except for San Francisco of course. Maybe Kirk is from San Francisco?>>
Nope. I've lived in northern central California and southern California. Also, while the West Coast is as a whole more uniform dialectically than the East Coast, it is not homogenous by any means. Traditionally, it was more the case that everything west of the Mississippi River was classified as the same dialect in US English but now that significant settlement has occurred in the West and been sustained long enough, regional differences have been enabled to emerge and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
<<Kirk is not from SF. But that voice sample didn't sound Californian to me.>>
Yeah, you've lived in California before so you have a pretty good idea of what to listen for.
Also, I'll stress again that while scripted recordings (with "reading voices") can be interesting to listen to, recordings of spontaneous, everyday speech are much more accurate in determing accents, as people read quite differently when they're reading. The phonology is almost guaranteed to be more conservative and formal as compared to the true everyday spoken language. I know this is hard, but if we could get samples of, say, BCers chatting together in a restaurant or, say, Californians hanging out in a cafe, the differences would be much clearer and (I think) more interesting as they would be of natural spontaneous speech.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting recordings, Rom. Just curious--where are you from in BC? I have relatives there :)
My overall impressions from the beginning were that the speakers were not from California--it doesn't sound like how people talk here (also, you'll notice I made that comment earlier on in this thread before we found out where they were from--I didn't know where they were from but I could tell they weren't from here). I haven't taken a lot of time to analyze the recordings on a technical level (I could tell they weren't Californian just by my intuition based on overall feel without resorting to technical analysis) but listening again I could tell by the "ask her to bring" in the first recording that it wasn't Californian. The vowel in "ask" sounds a bit different than the one we use here. Also, the way the female says "bags" doesn't sound like the vowel we use here either.
<<I'm very surprised. There shouldn't be. The west coast supposedly all sounds the same, except for San Francisco of course. Maybe Kirk is from San Francisco?>>
Nope. I've lived in northern central California and southern California. Also, while the West Coast is as a whole more uniform dialectically than the East Coast, it is not homogenous by any means. Traditionally, it was more the case that everything west of the Mississippi River was classified as the same dialect in US English but now that significant settlement has occurred in the West and been sustained long enough, regional differences have been enabled to emerge and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
<<Kirk is not from SF. But that voice sample didn't sound Californian to me.>>
Yeah, you've lived in California before so you have a pretty good idea of what to listen for.
Also, I'll stress again that while scripted recordings (with "reading voices") can be interesting to listen to, recordings of spontaneous, everyday speech are much more accurate in determing accents, as people read quite differently when they're reading. The phonology is almost guaranteed to be more conservative and formal as compared to the true everyday spoken language. I know this is hard, but if we could get samples of, say, BCers chatting together in a restaurant or, say, Californians hanging out in a cafe, the differences would be much clearer and (I think) more interesting as they would be of natural spontaneous speech.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting recordings, Rom. Just curious--where are you from in BC? I have relatives there :)