lux sit!

At least, that’s what I thought. I had long assumed that people in Seattle and Portland simply didn’t have a regional dialect. Since I’m originally from Tennessee, where people talk with strong accents, that assumption was reinforced when I first moved here. I was not alone in my assumption; linguists have placed the West into the same broad category of dialects for years, as it was considered “too young” to have developed its own.

Researchers at the UW are about to challenge that long-held assumption.

In a pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation, linguists at the UW Phonetics Lab will soon begin a two-year study of the elusive “Northwest accent.” Researchers will be interviewing 24 speakers of American English who have been born and raised in the Pacific Northwest between 1900 and 1985. Volunteers will read a list of words and a short story, answer questions about their family’s demographic history and simply converse with researchers.

“We have families living in the Northwest since the states were territories,” said head researcher Alicia Wassink, as quoted in a University Week story on the study last week.

“We’d love to get a random sample of people from places like Ballard, Queen Anne, the Central Area and Yesler Terrace, as well family members from different generations so we can examine if and how dialects are changing over time,” she said. “We are looking for a temporal snapshot of dialect evolution.”

The project is a continuation of more informal research that’s been conducted over the past several years, as reported in this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (check out their snazzy linguistics map of the U.S.).

Some of the preliminary research into Northwest dialects included “Pacific Northwest Vowels: A Seattle Neighborhood Dialect Study,” a paper written in 2005 by Jennifer Ingle, then a graduate student in linguistics at the UW. Ingle studied the way people in her Ballard neighborhood pronounced their vowels.

Ingle found that native Northwesters use a so-called “creaky voice” (rather similar to former President Bill Clinton’s folksy accent, minus the twang), emphasize the “s” sound in certain words, merge vowels together (the difference between “caught” and “cot,” for instance) and often “front” the vowel” their vowels (pronouncing “move” as “mi-oove”).

The UW researchers will do more than just look at how people say certain words. Their work will focus on vocabulary (similar to the age-old analysis of “coke” vs. “pop”) and subtle grammatical differences.

As a self-confessed word and language nut, I can’t wait to literally hear about their findings.

For more information, check out Do you Speak American?, a 2005 PBS documentary series on American dialects, especially this page on what might distinguish a Northwest dialect. You can also go here to listen to a radio interview with Ingle on KUOW.