I like Olly Richards. He is pretty knowledgeable and a pretty low-key popular linguist. Our library owns a number of his learn-a-foreign-language-through-story books in our ESL / Foreign Language Literature collection. And he's got a pretty good ear for languages and dialects in a variety of languages. Here, he explores the nine basic accents that make up the Texas dialectical soundscape.
Most people tell me that I don't have really much of an accent. What they are hearing from me is the largely unaccented tone of my learned Midwest-Wisconsin accent that I picked up when we moved north from Texas. But my base accent is pure Texan, buried deep but detectable by people who have experience with a variety of Southern and Western accents. They'll ask me where I'm from, and when I say that's difficult because I've lived in eight different states by now -- they'll stop me and ask me where I originally came from and whether it was south of the Mason-Dixon line.
So it gets more complicated than that. I actually have two distinct Texan accents competing for attention under my normally midwestern-sounding Wisconsin cover accent. To my ear, I've elements of the North Central Texan accent (#4) characteristic of Sweetwater and Abilene, and the Texas Triangle accent (#8) characteristic of Austin and San Antonio (but also Dallas and Houston apparently).
It comes out in some words and minimal pairs. Some mergers such as the pen-pin and cot-caught mergers, words like route/root with a tight /oo/ sound, the lazy /z/ sound in greasy, genuine pronounced jen-yoo-aye-n, an insert (v.) / insert (n.) sounding the same as /in-ZERT/. And so on OR und so weiter. More on that later.
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