07:00 I wake up early but I stay in bed, looking at my smartphone under the bedclothes, so I don't disturb Lois. It gives me a chance to check on regional American accents to see if any have slipped position since yesterday, or moved round a bit in relation to each other, much as Lois and I tend to do during the night.
It's worth checking these accents on a daily basis, because we know, for instance, that accents around the Great Lakes, can "shift around", much like the "flotsam and jetsam" that can be seen there on occasion:
And I'm in luck, because Toronto-based TESL graduate and "compliance officer" Steve Haddock has been weighing in on this very subject just a few hours ago, right there on the quora forum website, and this is his little map, presumably bang up to date, which is nice!
Haddock confirms that the standard US accent is still the "midwest" one, much as the Standard Southern British accent, as used by Prince Harry, is now regarded as the standard in the UK.
I have a slight worry about what Haddock's grades were on his TESL course (Teaching English as a Second Language), because of his misspelling of the word "its" in his first sentence and his misuse of the word "annunciation" (which is more usually specific to the Angel Gabriel's words to the Virgin Mary), but I'm going to let all that slide, because Haddock admits, disarmingly, that he's an "insufferable know-it-all, mostly law, science, politics and Canadian football", so fair enough!
Haddock writes: "Midwest American English is known for it's [sic] careful annunciation [sic] of letters, so there’s no dropping of the /r/ sound as in many forms of British English, there’s no dropping of /ng/ that you hear in Southern American English, vowels are always pronounced and tend not to shift over time as they do in the Northern Cities (Great Lakes) accent. It’s not a particularly distinct accent, and that’s what makes it so good for broadcasting.
"However, as you can see, [only] a minority of Americans naturally speak with such an accent. The population centres of New York City and southern California each have their own distinct accent, as does Chicago.
"For example, [US actor] Chris Evans is from Boston and naturally speaks with a Bostonian accent - light on the /r/ sounds [hence people sometimes think he's English]. However, when he is acting in films, his accent leans heavily towards Midwestern."
07:30 Lois is still asleep, so I carry on browsing and I've got time, for once, to enjoy some of the many comments on Haddock's mini-thesis:
Quora afficionado Charles Crin writes: "Here’s the fun part! The person generally identified as having most influenced the acceptance of the Midwest accent as the “American Received Pronunciation” is Iowa born, University of Nebraska educated, Johnny Carson! (We moved from Omaha to North Jersey circa 1961, and my first grade teacher wanted to refer me for speech therapy, as I didn’t talk fast enough!)"
And another quora pundit, who wishes to remain anonymous writes: "Fact Check: The “Canadian accent” is not accurate in this description. The region of Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin are heavily influenced by the mass immigration of the Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German speaking immigrants from the 1800s.
... "this Germanic accent has influenced spoken English as a distinguished [sic] [Stop being so hoity-toity, Colin, with your sickening number of "sics"! - Ed] accent of North Midwest USA, and is known regionally as the Minnesota Accent, since Minnesota is the centre of the region. It spreads into Southern Midwest Canada as well, which generally has a smaller population."
And another anonymous pundit, "C" writes, "The only time that I hear Americans from places like Minnesota get confused for Canadians due to their accent is by other Americans. To Canadians it still sounds quite midwestern and we can usually tell the difference between somebody from Canada and northern parts of the USA."
Fascinating stuff though isn't it! But I'm determined to get to the bottom of it all eventually, and that's a promise! [A promise or a threat, perhaps?! - Ed]
08:00 And as Lois and I start to wriggle ourselves to life, here in our bed in Malvern at 8 o'clock this wet morning, we have the vague feeling that something's wrong - till we remember that, weirdly, our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins haven't been sleeping here in our house overnight. They normally come to us on Friday evenings after Sarah finishes work at her accountancy job in Evesham, and they usually stay till Sunday morning, before going back to the family's rental home in Alcester.
Later, I check our calendar on our kitchen wall - you can't be too careful at our age: we tend to forget the most unlikely things, you would not BELIEVE!!!
So yes, nothing going on this weekend, it'll just be Lois and me, rattling around this house like two peas in a drum - we'll miss the company of Sarah and the twins, but it does give us a chance to have a really self-indulgent afternoon in bed today. We're one nap down on our quota this week, because yesterday we spent the afternoon having our first experience with Traci, our new dental hygienist, Traci.
And the weather's going to stay pretty damp, to put it mildly, so why not be in bed? What could be nicer? That's what we think anyway!
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