Today, a guy from work asked me if my accent was from Oregon. This shocked me for two reasons:
1. I'm from Texas, land of probably the most famous accent ever.
2. Can anyone tell me what an Oregon accent actually sounds like? I wasn't aware that the Oregonians had a recognizable dialect!
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I had a hallmate freshman year from Oregon and do business with a company there now...and it is a distinctive accent (sort of like a softer less nasal Minnesota)...but definitely not confusable with Texas!
oregon accent?????? i'd pay money to hear on of those.
I thought it was just Minneesowta
Someone guessed I was from Vermont one time by my accent. It reminded me of White Christmas.
-Kim Holder
I am from Oregon and I can't tell the difference between my accent and the accent heard on most News shows . . . except when I get into a Canadian mood, but that was a later addition to my accent repertoire.
I'm from Portland & on my trip across the states last year, several people told me & my friends that we spoke too slowly and slurred our words. Maybe that's a Portland, Oregon accent?
Yes, Oregon accents do exist, because I indeed HAVE one. If you're wondering what they sound like, they sound like...nothing. Really. There was a legitimate, scientific study showing that Oregonians have the least accent in the entire world. So, to anyone who HAS an accent, we sound like robots. Or computers.
Glad to help.
I am from Central Oregon (Bend) and lived in Oregon ages 0-22. Then I left and never lived there again.
There is definitely an Oregon accent, which I have mostly lost but my non-Oregon wife says that I fall back into when I meet up with family and friends from back home.
I don't know how to describe it in linguistic terms, but when I hear it after not hearing it for a long time, it sounds kind of "hick-y", sort of a drawl, and also kind of a mumbling accent where all the words and sounds run into each other. (I lived in New York for a couple of years and people asked a lot of the time if I was from the South.) It also sounds kind of funny, as in "ha-ha" funny, in the sense that when you first hear it you think the person is putting you on - it's not so different from standard English (like Texas or New York or Minnesota) that you immediately identify this person as speaking with an accent - it sounds more like someone who knows how to speak standard American English but is f-ing with you in order to crack jokes. But then you understand that's just how they talk.
The emphasis is weird / off too - it's not a singsongy up-and-down tone like some accents (Californians sounded this way to us when I was a kid), but people in Oregon will emphasize and draw out certain words in a sentence in a way that seems like they're trying to make a point but then you realize that the way people in Oregon talk, they just pick a word or two in each sentence and emphasize it - "I went to the STORE, and there they got a deal for two heads of LETTUCE for fifty cents."
When you hear the weird Oregon emphasis on certain words you think that somehow a point is being made that a store is an odd place to go or that lettuce is the last thing you'd expect to find at that price - cabbage maybe, but not lettuce. But no, it means nothing.
all the features of the Oregon accent I mentioned can be heard in a speech by Oregon governor John Kitzhaber, who has a pretty light Oregon accent - it's twangy, with a monotone punctuated by weird emphasis on random words.
http://youtu.be/u2jAW17CcTI
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