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American English Dialects

From:Ben Poplawski <thebassplayer@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 4, 2004, 21:42
I'd love to see a linguist try to sort my dialect. I'm a military brat, son
of two military brats.

If I were to specify my dialect, it would probably be based on Californian,
though I've never lived there. My parents spent a great deal of the
childhoods in CA, my father near Fairchild AFB and my mother in San Diego.
In fact, my parents met in San Diego.

But then, I spent 9 years living in the Southeast, but then again on
military bases. I did get enough exposure to the Southern dialect to do a
passable imitation of it. ^^

And then there's the foreign borrowings (mostly Spanish -- both of my
parents are or were fluent in it), dialectal borrowings, and deliberate
mispronunciations that forms our family dialect.

How close is Californian to SAE? Are they one in the same? And with the
little background history I have provided, do you think my dialect could be
identified with some certainty by a linguist listening to me?

Ben