Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents | WIRED | Irish Girl Reacts 

So many accents, my brain is spinning Today’s video was fun and I did lots of learn’n This was only part 1, so it’s just the beginning If you do a part 2, I will be return’n

Not only did Irish accents have a great affect on the folks' language in Appalachia, Irish music also is the basis for BlueGrass music. Can't wait for parts two & three, this guy is very talented.

Idk if anyone else noticed, but in his segment about NYC, he used a different accent every sentence or every other sentence. Hats off to him for being able to switch so seamlessly!

Oh yes! Now we're cooking. Erik Singer is _the_ Accent GOAT! He's done lots of others, but this 3-part series is fantastic. I loved the representation that they brought too!

The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned spoken English accent. It was in fashion among the late 19th-century and early 20th-century American upper class, and by performers in the entertainment industry.

Fascinating. And another link between Ireland and Appalachia is the music. American bluegrass music is largely Irish music with a different accent. Very similar tonalities, harmonic structure and especially instrumentation.

His skills are amazing. I feel like I get tonguetied a lot and he can talk smoothly in every voice imaginable.

NYC has so many accents. Traditionally people whose backgrounds are mostly Italian, Jewish, Black, Latino, or Irish have different accents. There is a posh Manhattan one but most people dont use it anymore. "Blackcents" exist and they can vary a lot. There are so many cool ones, esp if u love accents. My faves are the geechie, baltimore, st louis, new orleans, washington DC, and mississippi accents. Hawaiian accents are also gold.

Wow salute to ED for editing this 25 min video. She’s a superstar!

I've watched him before. He's amazing. He can transition so fluidly between accents. On my side of the Appalachia were heavily influenced by Scottish and Irish language. There's another recent theory that says we retain some of the closest accent to the original English spoken before the revolution.

This was one of the most fascinating videos I've seen in a while. I'm American, well educated and in my head I would think there were only maybe like 6-12 accents in the U.S. but the city of New York has about that many alone. Very interesting video. This guy himself and how hes able to switch on the fly. Insightful.

My sense growing up in an African-American community until I was 9 (1969) is that those whose families migrated North from different segregated communities in the South came with slightly different accents. For example, families that migrated from South Carolina, had slightly different accents than from Mississippi and Louisiana. Today, with much more isolation because of illness, I think that black families that came here before the Chicago fire, probably are different still. Being more impacted by Chicago white accents. However, Chicago has been very segregated for most of that time, so that could have diminished the impact. But I’d be very interested in hearing the opinions of actual dialecticians working here.

I love all of Eric Singer's dialect videos, not only these, but also the ones where he reviews accents in films. Glad you're getting into these.

American accents reached their peak in the 1920s. Starting in the 1930s people were exposed to radio, movies, and the later TV. This did not eliminate accents, but it softened the differences. In 1910 someone in Alabama might have had a difficult time understanding someone from New England. Not so much today.

I encountered his first two videos some time ago; glad to hear this again, and now I've got a third one to look up. I'm glad you enjoyed it too!

Diane, you have to do part 2 and part 3. It’s really comprehensive.

Part 2 please. I grew up in the Chicago area and there were many different ways of speech in that area alone. And Chewie said yes for the treats. He would also like a walk if you're up to it. 😃

I really enjoy watching people from different countries watch these kinds of videos and add comparisons to their native experience abroad. It makes the videos their reacting to even more valuable and educational.

Diane, the way you say "house" and "out" and "about" is 100% IDENTICAL to the way older generations from DC, Virginia and Maryland said it decades ago. It sounds like "Hayse" instead of house and "ayt" instead of out and "abayte" instead of about. That accent is almost gone now but everyonce in a while I run into folks in their 80's who still have it.

The role of immigration on accents is wildly interesting. I've had someone pinpoint that I was from New York and that my parents/background was Caribbean/Jamaican. I love that this series really connects the immigration and contact aspect. I enjoy hearing Irish, English, Scottish youtubers react to this series and highlight what they recognize/notice. Looking forward to the future segment on parts of Canada! Thanks for the reaction!

This is now one of my favorite videos of yours. Thank you for doing this, Diane!

This was fun! I’d love to see you react to the rest

This series is fascinating...you'd enjoy the other videos in the collection. The accent on Ocracoke Island here in North Carolina is very distinct. It definitely throws you off when you hear it in person.

Do part 2! Do part 2! Do part 2! Genuinely enjoyed watching this with someone else, love how he breaks down the mechanics of accents.

I find it interesting that the example of piney woods southern accent was being done by Vivian Leigh, actress who grew up in Europe.

This was absolutely fascinating! I've always loved learning about languages, but to hear of all the distinct varieties within one language is uniquely interesting, especially when hosted by someone with her own distinctive Irish accent! Love it!

You need to do all three parts. Eric Singer is amazing, and this series is his best!

Greetings, my friend🥰 Love to see these videos and now your priceless reactions as well!🥰 You had asked about "warsh" which is just how some folks pronounce "wash" making words like Washington into Warshi'ton. I'm from an area of the US that has that speech affectation which I worked hard to loose!🤣 Adventure ever on, Phat🎸🎶

WOW!! This is a fantastic video! Very informative. I loved it!! Thanks for sharing! 😀

Being from the Northeast and living in the British isles for a few years I found that Scottish people were VERY hard to understand but many Irish people almost sounded like they had no accent to me, or a very minimal one. Not to say we sounded the same, or that all of them sounded the same as the others, but so many Irish folks sounded so understandable and "normal" to me that at times it really felt like there wasn't a foreign (to me) variety of English being spoken.

I had an English professor who was from one of the extremely isolated communities in Appalachia. He mentioned that he was the first person from his community to ever go to college. His accent was basically 18th century Scots-Irish mixed with the Appalachian accent, and he was nearly impossible to understand.

I come from a county southwest of Philly, Delaware County PA. We have a lot of accents just in this county. My dad, who coached baseball and basketball for decades claimed that when he met a new kid, he could tell what high school the kid went to just by how he talked.

I'm just now watching this. Fascinating. Especially how it fits into Irish dialect. Keep up the great vids!👍🏼

Love this series, glad you're checking it out!

Interesting video. I hear some people in California ending sentences like they’re a question by raising the tone at the end. I hear a lot of younger people leaving out the t in mountain. Drives me crazy. Thanks for sharing. Have a nice evening! ❤️U☘️🇮🇪🇺🇸

Ey Dere, I love my Upper Midwest accent don't ya know. I live in Wisconsin so our accent is almost Canadian but we're still US American to be different now don't ya know.

This was fascinating, albeit brief compared to the amount of information out there. He glossed over a lot of the nuances of the mid-Atlantic states' accents. (I also studied this in college.) In the outlying (non-Manhattan) boroughs of NYC, there are accents that vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. They're less distinctive than they were a generation ago, but they're real. For example, there's a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Canarsie that has its own accent; the biggest distinguisher is the way they say "toity-toid-and-toid" for "thirty-third and third." Cyndi Lauper speaks Canarsie. Different other neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens have their own accents as well. If you watch "All in the Family" (US sitcom from the 1970s), Archie Bunker's accent is spot-on to within a two block area of Queens. Edith's accent is generic for the area, Michael Stivik's (Meathead's) accent is classic generic Brooklyn, and Gloria comes from somewhere in northern to mid-New Jersey. Rhoda Morgenstern ("Mary Tyler Moore" show and "Rhoda") couldn't have been from anywhere in the five boroughs; her accent sounds ike someone from Minneapolis trying to sound like they're from Brooklyn. Valerie Harper, who played Rhoda, was from the Minneapolis area and was trying to sound like a Brooklyn Jew and it showed. Parts of Long Island, to the east of NYC, have their own accents as well. The Boston accent is better described by a story a friend of mine told about driving in that city. He was asking for directions, and the cops kept telling him to turn left at "Pack Street." It turns out they meant PARK Street! My immediate family and first cousins are from southern New Jersey (near Philadelphia), and indeed they have the forward "o" like Erik demonstrated. Some of them also drop the "h" in "th," saying "wit" instead of "with." "Fur" and "for" are pronounced the same (like the former), and they tend to run words together, such as "Fluff-ya Iggles" instead of "Philadelphia Eagles" or "Flahrz" for "Flyers." The slang plural of "you" varies from region to region too. In NYC and Philadelphia, it's "Youse" (rhymes with "juice"). In the south, it's "y'all (pronounced "yawl"). I could go on for hours and hours about this.

Eric Singer is so incredibly knowledgeable. I love all the videos he has been a part of! Fascinating stuff!

Please, please, please Do part 2 and part 3. I love how interested you are in this and wold like to see your reaction and hear your thoughts on the rest of our accent diversity!

Diane, that was so interesting! I love learning about accents and dialects. Linguistics was one of my favorite college classes. Thank you! Looking forward to part 2. :)

Thanks Diane, very interesting video. I’ve always loved meeting different people and getting their accents down.👍🥰😉

FABULOUS topic Diane! I love watching his videos about dialects and the am amazed at the way he transitions seamlessly from one to the next. This one actually caught my son's ear and drew him in to watch with me (he says you're awful cute, btw) Absolutely try to do a follow-up of Part 2. I've lived just outside Baltimore, MD, for 20+ years now and there are still people from 15-20 minutes away that I honestly can't understand (I'm originally from Buffalo/Niagara Falls area in NY) Cheers, have a lovely week! boop! 💚

I actually loved this one, very accurate. I was raised all over the south and in Europe but mostly in the southern USA. I currently live in Raleigh NC, have a hoi toider uncle through marriage, and I also used to live on an island in SC where some people spoke Gullah.

A lot of people don't realize how much Puerto Rican Spanish has influenced NYC, and it's a pretty idiosyncratic form of Spanish. For instance, little shops in NYC are called bodegas, which actually refers to something more like a warehouse in most of the hispanic world, but in Puerto Rico it applies to shops as well.

There’s a large Irish influence in Jamaica, for example and cities like Boston, NYC and my hometown-Chicago. When this guy does the Pine belt-which as an American, I’ve not heard of-he sounds just like Matthew McConnehey! If you wonder what Creole is, it’s part French. Along with English, we have a large French influence in the Great Lakes region, as well as some Indigenous tribal language influences that influenced names like Illinois and Chicago, for example. Great video-I want to see part 2.

Erik makes his video very entertaining by using the next dialect himself as he changes from one to another. Your reaction was very good! I hope you consider his follow-up videos. ❤

I thoroughly enjoyed the video. Looking forward to part two.

DJ really enjoyed seeing your reaction. I have to admit I have seen this video before. I hope you react to part 2. Also I have recently seen some of your videos from a couple of years ago and you had a much thicker accent. You do sound more American English now, but with enough Irish to sound great. Maybe it is because of RU-vid or your time away from Ireland. Ironically ED has not changed as much. ;-). Regardless just keep smiling and making videos and we will watch our favorite Irish RU-vidr!

I've run into some accents in NC that are hard to figure out. My bil is lumbee and some of the older ones are harder. Some of the coastal ones are hard because they spoke pretty fast. I've gotten a lot better

I love Erik Singer! I’m a translator and linguist and I admire him so much!

My maternal grandmother grew up in south Alabama, and was one of those persons who would truly say "Newnited States." She would also send me under the house to get her "some ice potatoes"; not until I was 15 did I learn she meant "Irish potatoes". As a military brat, I had some kind of English accent until I was six, then thereafter acquired a generalized American accent. My maternal grandparents in Florida were sometimes hard to understand. At our 40th reunion, my high school class there said that my accent had changed from when I lived there. Austin is "San Francisco on the Colorado", and the rest of the state considers it weird. In rural Texas, I noticed that those living in the county seat had a much thicker accent than those living in the ranching communities.

Another awesome vid Diane! Keep up the great work and please stay safe! Excelsior! Heff

I’ve watched him before because I have an interest in linguistics and language. Growing up my Mother taught me to change my accent depending on the situation at hand. For instance at work I have more of a trans Atlantic accent but when I’m tired or just on my own my North Texas /Mississippi accents will bleed through. I’m always intrigued by his work.

Not surprising. My Appalachian granny grew up in the early 20th Century in the hills of Kentucky, but she used words and phrases I never heard anywhere else until I visited Ireland.

I love this guy. I’ve seen all of his videos. Really interesting. My husband is from Virginia and I’m Texan. Our accents are really different even though they are both southern.

Think how boring the world would be without all the different accents. I like your accent impressions, Diane. What's your favorite accent impression? Chewie raising his head up when talk of treats awesome. Chewie's such a good boy. Happy Monday.

Singer's videos for Wired have been incredibly interesting. I studied linguistics at uni and I finally saw real examples. His analysis of movie accents has his characteristic wry wit.

He's got some impressive skills. His Rhode Island and Boston seem somewhat confused but with all those accents floating around in his head I'm not surprised. :-)

Really interesting! Looking forward to part 2.

His series is fascinating! I love his explanations. I would love to find something as in depth for the different Irish accents.

Fun fact: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gullah. He asks fewer questions than other Justices, famously not asking a single question during oral arguments for ten years. So it was good to hear spoken Gullah in this episode. Thanks, Diane, for finding new things of interest on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the folks participating.

I liked you Southern accent! I’d seen this before and forgot it was two parts! I hope you do the second part soon. Chicago with 9M or so in the region and 6M in the city itself and a great deal of job migration in and out has many more accents than the North Side stereotypical Da Bears accent. Just with English I can think of 8 or 9 that vary largely based on ethnic origin Irish Catholics tend to speak slightly differently on the North and South sides. Polish (mostly Catholic) have a different accent. Germans are more spread through the community, and they are hard to find. There’s an old Chicago accent that can be found largely East of Western in the community around North Avenue. Most of the Hispanic population is Mexican but there are some residents from Puerto Rico. There is a North Side community of Russian immigrants and another a little south of them from Appalachia. Then there are the two Chinese American communities one near 22nd Street and another near Argyle. That doesn’t include some of the accents directly from Africa, especially South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. There is a small Jewish community in Hyde Park and another around the Northern suburb of Skokie. But the European sources of those accents vary but all are impacted at least a little by the study of Hebrew. As you can tell, I’m fascinated by dialects. They seem to have several components: the mouth/ placement or phonics, the word choice and phrase choice, and finally the music or tones that distinguish different dialects which includes differences in speed or pacing. I would Love for “someone” to do zoom calls with people in all the countries of Ireland and Northern Ireland so we could hear some of the differences. That would be difficult to do comprehensively, because I know Dublin has at least 6. We were taught two different ones by a dialectician when I played the Older Kearny in Hugh Leonard’s “A Life” a sort of sequel to “Da”. Desmond Drum was given a North impacted more polished Irish and Kearns had a less polished country Dublin dialect. My first professional production, Irish dialects have fascinated me ever since. Hi Chewie! “

This guys also does a great video on UK/English Accents! 👍🏾 Good reaction

My Dad grew up just south of Boston and my Mom grew up west of Boston, and their accents are very different. Less than 30 miles from each other but they sound like they were from different states.

I am looking forward to seeing your reactions to the other two videos in this series.

I’m reading a book on gardening, plot is amazing

Parts two and three are musts. This is the best survey of accents in North America that I've heard to date.

Ya gotta watch this whole series. It's fascinating

Lol...I had to do a lot of different accents when I worked as a stockbroker for the Wolf of Wall Street. It was a technique called "match and mirror", and it was to make myself sound more like the client or potential client to whom I was giving my pitch. It also included my matching of their energy levels, speech patterns, and a bunch of other psychological shenanigans. And it worked well. But, like you said, D, it was definitely a "perishable skill", or a "use it or lose it" thing, so it's long gone now.

That was so much more interesting than I thought it would be. The US can be a confusing place. I was born and raised in California, lived in Florida, Virginia, and now Charleston South Carolina. I have family from Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina. There are so many accents just in my own family.

This guy is great. Wish he kept making videos. I'd recommend doing the rest of them.

My mom's great-grandparents were Protestant Scots Irish on her grandmother's side, and Catholic Irish on her grandfather's side. This was the late 1800s. I guess it wasn't that big a deal when Mom's Grandma became Catholic and married Grandpa. Mom's great-grandpa was a local bigwig and set his new son-in-law up in a career with the local civil service so he wouldn't be "just a farmer." He was still a farmer and animal husbandryman, with his own land, but he did the civil service job to assure his in-laws that he would always provide for their daughter. From the memories collected for the family record, all the neighbors thought they were all very kind people who were always there to assist anyone in need.

That was completely awesome!!! I've seen the video before awhile back. New England Coastal English (& especially Boston) has an interesting history. The narrator (Eric???) was right about socioeconomic & migration patterns (East coast is a couple hundred years older settlement than West). Boston was all protestant & the mass-migration of Irish to duck the Famine came over as tge first large emigration of Catholics & were treated terribly by the English over here all the way up to the 20s as second class citizens in many ways. It was not only religion, but economics. I met a girl in rehab that could tell what surrounding towns someone was from within Boston (everytime she nailed it), where they all sound the same to me. I'm from Pioneer Valley in MA we speak Standard American English more or less and no one ever pegs me for a New Englander. That being said, we do use a glottal stop & colloquially clip Gs off word's endings. Awesome video, you are interesting & always cool!!! Loved it!!!!!!

Can't wait for him to get to my area's dirty south deep speech. Where words like "Talledega" get all kinds of extra sounds and become "Tall-er-day-GEE" and R's are added to all kinds of words that don't have them. Such fun!

I really enjoyed that! Thank you! I wish I could just hit the like button over and over again.

[edit - I did not do the channel justice for the added personnel content] * Love the attention to your experience and you training against the reviewed vid. Erik's work is tight, right, and sharp. Fantastic. Love the reaction. Love his work and love your reminding me of it and the add on reaction commetnts and... WTF how many GDLoves can I cram into one comment? Fidiot, I am. Irish girls Rule. Dammit. Truth.

0:41 don't be too hard on yourself, you're Irish accent is spot on.

Great video, waiting to see part 2 ! BTW, watched one of your vampire movies, your a great actress !

I want to thank you for this video Diane. I found it to be very interesting and had me rethinking my own American accent.

I used to live in Pittsburgh PA. There used to be a fairly large Gaeltacht there. It is still active.. But the area has been anglicized after a lot of the industry disappeared.

This reminds me of a linguistics class I took in college, it's so cool! I remember that California's(myself) use a "d" sound for the "t" in water so it's said kinda like wahder.

I was in Ireland and one night at the pub (when in Rome...) and kept having to say "huh?" "I still have no idea what you said..." I am from Boston/New England. I am 65% Irish, had a grandpa from Ireland. I have NO idea how the Irish came to Boston and somehow created the Boston Accent. They are so different!

One of the biggest college essays I wrote (wrote it for two classes, Women's Lit and History of the English Language, around 60 pages not including bibliography or metatext) was on a fascinating aspect of English acquisition of a black slave in a pseudo-autobiographic novel titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : written by Harriet Jacobs. The paper focused on the interesting trend Jacobs experienced in learning to speak, read, and write English. Cultural inclusivity and recognition accompanied the degree with which she mastered the language. The better she spoke, the better she wrote, the more accepted she became. In a sense her acquisition of the language in turn allowed her to acquire access through cultural appropriation, or perhaps transplantation. In much the same sense, the tonality, the formality, of her writing, the depiction of her speech overtime throughout her autobiography, reflects her proximity to societal norms, and the distinct colloquialisms, accentuation, slang, and speech she used early on the book slowly disappeared reflecting her linguistic proximity to "white" English speakers. The book showcases a unique linguistic transition and properties of at least one African-English creole development which entails a fascinating southern African English Accent which still exists today.

I had a teacher who grew up in Appalachian Pennsylvania and went to college in Canada. His accent would shift between Appalachian, French Canadian, and New York depending on his mood.

This is a really interesting video. I’m from South Jersey so I have more of a Philadelphia accent, and what he said about us elongating our o’s in words like hoagie, goat, and go are so true! We also pronounce water like wooder and strawberry like shtrawberry. I noticed that we also pronounce words such as Florida and forest as Flarda and farest. When I hear people from the south say Florida, they never pronounce it with an ar sound. I recently read that Philadelphia accent is also the most studied dialect in the world!

The Irish were a great influencing force for America. I know that the Blue Grass music is heavily inspired by Irish music. Probably the Whiskey and Tobacco industries find some inspiration from them, as well; as the Irish are stereotyped as stout drinkers and users of pipe tobacco. Our Prohibition Era gangster have a lot of Irish hooligans in their ranks. There was a time that in Dallas Texas, one in four people claimed to have some Irish blood in their veins. My favorite movie from overseas is an Irish production called, The Secret of Roan Inish.

Yes! Please watch part 2!

Amazing, really amazing. I live in Philadelphia and I really have noticed how New York and northern New Jersey speak different from Trenton, Philly and south of it. Never knew why. Philadelphia's sound almost British in a way.

as someone who is born and lived most of my 50+ years in New England, I found this very interesting and I have experienced a lot of this because I have lived for years in Georgia, Kentucky, Thailand, Germany, Korea, Argentina, North Carolina and other places for a few months at a time.

I'm from Pittsburgh, PA (with out OWN little weird accent!) But I have always LOVED the various NYC accents.

Thanks for reacting to it Diane!

As a resident of Raleigh, NC I agree with the assessment of the language spoken in this area. I have met folks who were born and raised here that have no discernable southern accent and many others that have a huge southern accent. I was born in northeastern Pennsylvania and brought up in Brooklyn, NY and then upstate NY. I had a very big NYC accent when I moved upstate, but learned how to speak without the accent as the kids upstate were relentless in making fun of my accent! I have lived in NC for almost 30 years and every once in a while a word will slip out with a southern twang if you will. But otherwise maintain my "northern" accent. Great video!

Southern appachichen will also do some odd vowel changes at the end of words. For example Loretta Lynn's husband would call her Loret-tee

Erik Singer is great. Very entertaining and informative. Part 2 gets into my accent - Midwest, Southern, and Californian in which we pronounce pen/pin both as pin as in "I need a pin to write a note."

I am from the mid-Atlantic but went to college in the south. A southern friend had the last name Carpenter, which he pronounced Carp-pen-ter A professor from New England would pronounce his name Cap-n-ta. My friend didn’t recognize his name when the professor called on him.

This is a fascinating topic that I've always been obsessed with. Eric's voice is very familiar; I've heard it before. As a New Yorker from the border of Long Island (Great Neck to be exact), and the city (Little Neck, Queens), Eric is absolutely correct when he says there is no difference between "the boroughs" and surrounding areas: "New York accents" can be heard all the way out to the farthest reaches of Suffolk County (Eastern Long Island); however, there are certain areas where they speak some sort of older dialect where the locals say ethyl instead of gas or gasoline. One of the major influencing factors on "New York English" is the influence of the original Dutch colonists when they started speaking English. The English "th" sound does not exist in Dutch, and is pronounced like a "d", so you often hear the "dem dat dhe're " kind of pronunciation. The influx of Yiddish speaking Ashkenazi Jews also had a major influence on the New York dialect.

I've seen a video where someone demonstrated that sped up southern USA English sounds a lot like Irish, it was amazing.

I grew up in first the suburbs outside Detroit and then Miami, so I encountered lots of different accents, especially in Miami. Old world southern, New Yorkers down for the winter, New Jersey, Quebecoi, Cuban, Haitian, Dominican Republican, Honduran, Chilean, Spanish, Brazilian... just so many accents! I love them all.

His Appalachian accent is pretty spot on and a good explanation

Texas has at least 8 accents/dialects. Northwest (Panhandle), Northcentral (Dallas), Northeast (Texarkana), East (Tyler). Central (Austin), Southeast (Beaumont), etc.