Penelope Eckert was, like, mad? A now-retired sociolinguist at Stanford University, Eckert studied accents and how they change—particularly the accents of California. This was around 2010, and what was gnawing at her was that a bunch of influential East Coast linguists were insisting that there was in fact no such thing as a “California dialect.” However Californians might fold and squish their vowel sounds was actually—you know, I almost can’t bear to say this—Canadian.
That’s right. The judgment of the East was that if Californians had an accent at all, it was a minor variant of a whole other country. Eckert’s team of linguists wasn’t having it. “We were getting pretty pissed off,” she tells me. Eckert had been researching accents in San Jose and was toh-duhlly sure that she was seeing something unique.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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But they needed proof. The scant research that existed on cities like San Francisco wasn’t enough, and it didn’t really answer whether San Franciscans sounded different from Angelenos—much less people from anywhere else. “We thought, Well, if we don’t do it, no one will,” Eckert says.
That realization turned into a project called Voices of California and nearly a decade of fieldwork. Eckert and a dozen graduate students trooped out to Central California—Merced, to be precise—and, eventually, Redding, Humboldt, Sacramento, Shasta, and so on. They’d ensconce themselves in each city for a couple of weeks, interviewing everyone they could, canvassing the local historical association, the library, and museums for volunteers. “Mostly we would just go downtown, walk into stores, and ask people if they’d be willing to participate,” Eckert says. “We’d go to malls and harass people.”
Nobody else was particularly interested in this level of California dialectology, but at Stanford it became a whole-of-department effort, a “particularly joyful experience,” Eckert says. The interviews covered anything from childhood memories to healthcare. The topic didn’t really matter; the sessions just had to be long enough that people would relax and talk the way they really sounded. That could take hours. And when the interviews were done, the team would hire transcribers and use software programs to label all the vowels, consonants, and pauses and measure how they sounded. It was a massive pain.
But it worked. Voices of California got 800 interviews in the can—more than a thousand hours. The evidence for a California sound was clear.
A little too clear, actually. For most of American history, people studying accents didn’t think the half continent west of the Rockies had much to offer. By the 1980s, linguists were still focusing on the cities of the coast and the thinnest slice of the people who lived there. Eckert’s fieldwork proved they were wrong about that, and more. Her team didn’t find just one California accent. It found several.
LINGUA TIKTOK
I’m a middle-aged, middle-class, white Angeleno. After college in Southern California, I spent about a decade on Amtrak’s Acela corridor—Boston, New York, D.C.—before moving back to the state, to the Bay Area. So my accent’s kind of messed up.
Before I lived back East, I’d have said I didn’t have any accent at all. I know it sounds silly, but when I was growing up, we Californians prided ourselves on our clear-as-glass English. After all, ours was the culture that gave the world movie stars and game show hosts.
When I tell Nicole Holliday that, she lets out a laugh. Holliday’s a sociolinguist at UC Berkeley with a popular accent-related TikTok feed. She sets me straight right off: Everyone thinks they don’t have an accent, she says. But everyone does.
We’re sitting on a bench on campus eating rice and Spam wrapped in seaweed, a lunchtime bustle of college kids surrounding us in the dappled sunshine. California! It’s pretty nice. But it’s not the kind of exception I thought it was, linguistically speaking.
Holliday went viral during the most recent presidential election for her TikToks on then–vice president Kamala Harris’s accent. One of Holliday’s papers compares the way Harris speaks with how the comedian Maya Rudolph imitates her. Even though Harris spent much of her childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, Holliday noticed that her accent was lacking in a major feature of the regional dialect.
It’s this: What do you call a low, collapsible camp bed?
And: What’s the past tense of the word catch?
If your answers to both questions sound the same, you have what’s called the cot-caught merger, and you’re probably from California. When New Englanders and New Yorkers say that second word, they make a very different vowel sound—it’s “cawt,” not “caht.”
So who’s pronouncing the words correctly? Well, no one. Turns out no one region can claim to be the home of American English. “Most places have a prestige standard in terms of region,” Holliday says. “That is not true in the United States.” Usually it’d be the capital city, like the poshest London version of British English. But in the United States, Washington, D.C., was considered too Black and too Southern by linguists and the kind of upper-crust folks who look for class markers in speech. And the great Northeastern metropolises were too full of immigrants—“people that we didn’t consider white yet,” Holliday says. This left the people of the Midwest—white people of northern European descent, mostly farmers, a little bit industrialized—as exemplars of the standard American English of the 19th century.
And then those Midwesterners became a wave of migrants to California—mostly Southern California—in the 20th century, bringing that accent with them.
But they were newbies. California had Spanish speakers long before the formation of the United States, a big influx of Northeasterners who traveled to San Francisco in the 1840s looking for gold and silver, Chinese immigrants soon thereafter, Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese people, Black people making the Great Migration out of the American South… By the middle 1900s, the state encompassed a rapidly forming linguistic mélange entirely unlike the you-betcha monoculture of the Midwest.
The various communities of speakers along the Acela corridor had hundreds of years to develop highly regional accents, back when it took a day to get across Boston, much less down to New York. “There was less time to become regionally differentiated here,” Holliday says. “Further and further west, these historical, regionally marked ways of speaking are less salient.” But, she says, linguistic differences were already baked in. Language in California would reflect its speakers’ points of origin, socioeconomic and racial divisions, and, with the arrival of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, a stark line between the urban enclaves of the coast and the agricultural Central Valley.
EUREKA!
A University of Pennsylvania sociolinguist named William Labov pretty much invented modern dialectology. (He was Eckert’s PhD adviser, as it happens.) Labov’s career capstone was the magisterial Atlas of North American English. Now the field’s go-to text, the book maps roughly half a dozen distinct regional accents, including a couple in New England, a New York, a mid-Atlantic, and a few in the South and the midland. The Northern cities and Canada are in there too, both famously marked by “chain shifts,” in which vowel sounds replace each other in a sort of round-robin chase around the mouth.
In the chain shift of vowels typical of cities in the Northern United States, the “aw” sound in cod—formed by the tongue and a more open mouth—changes pronunciation to something like “cad.” But the chain continues. The “aa” from that word must also change, tumbling around the mouth to produce a sound more like “ked.” And so on.
Between the Mississippi and the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico, however, the map has a big empty space. It’s “the West,” and here there be draggin’. Its most dialectologically relevant characteristic, according to the Atlas, is the cot-caught merger. That’s kind of it. Linguistic flyover country.
That lacuna in the theory was finally filled in the early 1980s—not by a scientific epiphany or chance discovery but with music. Specifically, a song: “Valley Girl,” by Frank Zappa, on which his daughter Moon Unit performs a spoken monologue in the argot of the Sherman Oaks Galleria. At about the same time, Sean Penn was playing a laconic, drawling surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Whoopi Goldberg, a gifted mimic and stand-up performer, was selling out Broadway shows with characters that included an uncanny Surfer Chick. Laik, oh my Ghaaaad.
You know that accent. One technical way to describe it is pre-nasal trap-backing, which is to say, trap sounds more like “trop.” Add the use of like as both a filler word (more formally, a discourse marker) and sometimes a quotative—“She was like, ‘Let’s go!’ ”—and there it was: a California accent at last.
The midcentury linguists hadn’t picked up on this for a very good reason: It wasn’t there. Speakers from 1950s Los Angeles show no trap-backing. But by the 1980s—dude. It’s so there.
That’s unusual. What you and I might call a regional dialect actually has two parts. Specific words—like whether you refer to a sweet, fizzy drink as soda, pop, or coke—are the lexical component; pronunciation, known as the phonology, is the other. Typically, lexical changes happen fast. It’s easy to introduce a new word. But phonological change is supposed to happen over deep time.
Not in California. Here, sound changes fast. Maybe it’s all that verbal admixture. Or as Eckert and other sociolinguists argue, spoken language is social performance; we tend to adopt the sound of the group we’d like to be part of. It’s a cheap shot to say everyone in California is a striver, an arriviste hoping to get discovered by Hollywood, but this would help explain why people in the state might try to sound like they belong.
“Obviously, L.A. is very much not just full of Valley girls and surfers,” says Annette D’Onofrio, a sociolinguist at Northwestern University. “But in California, the personas that were really emblematic, that came up as a particular way of speaking that is tagged as California-sounding, are these young, white, wealthy personas. It brings all of this baggage about what it means to sound Californian.”
Even I, a nonsurfing, non-Valley Angeleno, am carrying some of that baggage. To be honest, Holliday wasn’t the first person to point out that I do indeed have an accent. It happened the first week I got to Boston for grad school, when someone dinged me for putting the direct article the in front of a highway number and then calling it a freeway. Clearly, I have lexical tells, including, like, like. And I front some vowel sounds, too—my cool is more “kewl.” Never picked up the Oaklandish hella, though. A Bay Bridge too far, I guess.
WALLS OF SOUND
So I have a California accent, but it’s not the only accent. “Historically, and even today, when people talk about regional accents in the U.S., they’re often silently but very clearly referring to the language of white people,” says D’Onofrio. Students sent out to conduct the interviews necessary to establish those baselines were told to get what they called NORMS—non-urban, older, rural males. “Those were the exemplifiers of the regional accent,” D’Onofrio says. “That tells you everything about what we see as normative and typical.”
That approach obviously wasn’t going to work to understand ethnically mixed California. A new generation is expanding the search, and they’re seeing more results. There are the various regional versions of African American English, the Portuguese-inflected sounds of the inland Central Coast… Or, take the influence of Spanish. Both Anglo and Latinx speakers lower the vowel sound in trap to something closer to “trop.” But for the word tram—same sound with a slightly different nasal component—Anglo speakers raise it to something like “trehm,” while Latinx speakers lower it to “trohm,” closer to the Spanish vowel sound. Meanwhile, both Anglo and Latinx Californians say the vowel in dress as something like “drass.”
These pronunciations aren’t always unintentional. Linguists used to think that phonological change should take a long time because people don’t have conscious control over their vowels. They’re more like breathing than walking. But Eckert has found that people can adopt pronunciation aspirationally—to signal affiliation with particular groups. Once, in Merced, a longtime resident told her up front that he pronounced pin like pen. “I guess it’s because I’m a rancher,” he said.
“The pin-pen merger came to California via the Dust Bowl migration,” Eckert says. “But he didn’t. His family had been there for generations. But he identifies as an agricultural person, as a rancher, and so he has the pin-pen merger.”
When Eckert was studying speech in San Jose, she went to two elementary schools—one mostly white and one mostly Latinx. “In the school where the dialect was predominately Latinx, the popular crowd, the leaders in cool dialect features, had the lowest tram vowel,” she says. “In the Anglo school, the popular crowd had the highest one.”
So the work to understand that mosaic of California accents continues. Voices of California ended with the pandemic; Eckert’s a professor emerita now, and the program has only one grad student—and plenty of data left to crunch. But that’s not necessarily a catastrophe. New words and sounds moving at new, higher speeds demand new methods.
One of Eckert’s long-ago advisees, Norma Mendoza-Denton, is a professor of anthropology at UCLA. “I teach a 350-person class in the winter. These are like the baby, baby undergraduate anthropologists,” she says. “So what do you do with that kind of group?” The answer: more fieldwork.
Mendoza-Denton and her TAs teach students the old sociolinguistic interview methods, but finding the oldest white guys to talk about their farms just won’t work in Inglewood or Koreatown. So Mendoza-Denton moves on to what she calls multimodal ethnography. “I have them do photo essays. I have them do soundscapes. I have them do linguistic landscape studies. I have them do a lot of archival work and census demographic work,” she says. “We follow people around, at the mall, in their cars. We have some really great footage of people in the Valley talking about what it’s like to be a Valley girl and how the Valley’s becoming more gentrified.”
Part of the goal is to capture not just geographic variability but change over time. In fact, Mendoza-Denton’s graduate research was on Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in California. She found that first-generation Japanese immigrants, the Issei, had a distinctive version of English. The experience of internment during World War II led them to insist that later generations sound unimpeachably “American”; their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have no ethnic accent.
That kind of change is probably familiar to anyone whose grandparents were born somewhere else. My best pal growing up was the first person in his family born in the United States; his Los Angeles English only rarely played a tone from Cantonese. My grandmothers spoke English to me but Yiddish to each other. And, oy—my speaking, that syntax it sometimes has.
Mendoza-Denton is running a new project, Los Angeles Speaks. Her website says the study is looking for volunteers to participate, and over the course of our conversation I hint less and less subtly that I’d like to sign up. But it’s a no. I’ve been gone too long. “You wouldn’t reflect the phonology here,” Mendoza-Denton says, diplomatically.
All languages undergo change, and pretty much every region evolves a local variety. Most likely, some of them get famous only because there’s a linguist there to study them, trees falling in the phonological forest. Now that social media has accelerated people’s contact with new dialects and new communities, the old rules for speed of transmission and geographical relationships can break down. People are way more likely to encounter lexical innovation through digital influencers than via the popular kids in the school cafeteria. Try to figure out where a Gen Zer is from by their accent, and the answer will probably be TikTok.
But one accent seems to have sticking power. It’s the one that nobody thought existed 50 years ago. “The Northern-cities shift, the East Coast accents, the Southern vowel shift—in the last 10 to 20 years, we have documentation that they’re actually receding,” D’Onofrio says. “New Yorkers are sounding less New Yorky. Chicagoans are sounding less Northern-cities. But that’s not the case in California. The California vowel shift continues to advance.” •
Adam Rogers is a journalist and bestselling author. His book Proof: The Science of Booze, about the science of making and consuming alcohol, was a New York Times bestseller; winner of the IACP Best Wine, Spirits, and Beer Book Award; and shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Rogers’s new book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, looks at the long (and rainbow-shaped) arc of color—its physics and chemistry, but also how humans make it, and how our eyes and brains construct it in our minds. A Los Angeles native, Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider who now lives in the Bay Area.
