Re: Californian vowels [was Re: Liking German]

Pavel Iosad wrote:
 >>In fact, it feels a bit like what you do to
 >>pronounce the unrounded back vowel in Russian, only not as far away
 >>from English /u/.
 >In fact, the Northern Welsh _u_, eh?

Possibly; I don't know Welsh.  When I say it, I do round it a bit more
at the end, if that makes a difference.  (I also say [ts] for /t/ sometimes,
though I'd never noticed it before someone here mentioned the
phenomenon.)

This discussion of California dialects is all very interesting.  A few
comments:

Northern Californians under 23 definitely say "like" (and "y'know"
and "whatever") in serious conversation.  I'm nineteen; in my
own speech, "like" is most often found marking a number that
I'm not certain of, or is only meant as an estimate.  "He must have
been like, two years old during the Gulf War," I said today of a
young teenager whose exact age I didn't know.  I'm sure it didn't
strike the person I was talking to as "valley".

Also, I often hear "y'all" in the speech of black teenagers in or
from Oakland, spoken as one syllable as it apparently is in the South.
I've noticed that other Bay Area speakers tend to pronounce it with the
glide, more "you-all".  And I've always heard it used as a plural, with
"all of y'all" only used as an emphatic construction.

Joey Morlan

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