lux sit!

I recently wrote about the Pacific Northwest English Project, a two-year study of the Northwest accent by linguists at the UW Phonetics Lab and Portland State University’s Department of Applied Linguistics.

Jeffrey Conn, a Portland State linguist working on the study, e-mailed me with some further observations on what his team is attempting to do in their study, which started in September. I asked Conn several questions in regards to their work, including the following two:

Is the idea of an “accent” for the Northwest region new among linguists?

“Linguists believe that everyone has an accent. The term just means how a person speaks (linguistic features involving pronunciation). However, the question is whether there is a homogeneous way of talking (maybe a single accent) that Northwesterners share. This is what we are beginning to investigate with our study. The fields that investigate accent/dialect (sociolinguistics and dialectology) have not really investigated the Pacific Northwest in the past.

“One possible explanation for this lack of data could be that there has been a constant influx of variation from speakers of many different dialects since the first English-speaking settlements in the Northwest, which is a very different situation than an older, more established city like New York City, Boston, or even Chicago. So the situation (this constant and continuous variable input from other dialects) makes investigating a possible single emerging homogeneous variety a very different, and difficult, project.”

Conn said that his team is looking specifically at the linguistic features of the language of people born and raised in Seattle. The project will be examining a previously poorly-understood phenomenon: the results of continual dialect and language contact, brought on by the constant influx of new immigrants over the past two centuries. Being a comparatively “new” area of the country, in terms of European settlement, the Northwest offers linguists a chance to chart the development of a unique accent.

What do you hope the public will learn from studies like this?

“One aspect of dialect development is a possible link to community identity. When you hear a New Yorker talk, you can usually tell that he/she is a New Yorker. There is a connection we make with place and identity. As it is now, that connection does not exist for many Northwesterners because (and this is my opinion based on what I’ve heard from people) we do not believe we have any sort of accent at all. If there are certain things in language that connect us and that we share with each other (even though they may also be shared with other dialects/varieties of English in the world), it is still an important aspect of our growing pride of being from Seattle, or Washington, or the Pacific Northwest, or even just the West Coast.”

Another aspect of English in the Northwest is its diversity, said Conn. Different newcomers have brought with them a wide variety of accents from throughout the rest of the country. This “language diversity” brought by recent arrivals, combined with a perceived lack of an accent for natives, results in a linguistic reflection of the Northwest frontier ethos of tolerance and get-along practicality.

“A sense of pride and an even stronger sense of community is what we hope the public will learn from a study like this,” Conn said. “Also, that we all have accents, whether we realize it or not!”