All Americans Have Accents

February 2025

Accents Are Like Colors

I'm often asked "how many accents are there?" within American English. Linguists do not agree on a single easy response. It’s important to realize that a language is a dazzling spectrum, much like an artist’s color wheel. We can arbitrarily select some snapshots on the color wheel to label as distinct units like the "color orange" or "color yellow," but the reality is that there is always that murky zone where the certainty of yellow starts to bleed into orange. 

So, just as there are theoretically infinite colors, there are really as many different accents as there are people who use them. Every individual has a way of doing their language that is slightly different from their neighbor. Accent, which strictly speaking is the sound-based element of a dialect, is thus more a socially-perceived category than a strict truth. While there are of course empirical differences between accents, just like between colors, the goal of enforcing strict definitions here remains a swamp of linguistically muddy waters.

Respecting these cautions, the natively-spoken English of the United States is considered to have anywhere from 10 to well over 20 regional accents. The lower number will be employed here with a major city listed for each:

1.Eastern New England accents (like Boston) 

2. Great Lakes accents (like Chicago) 

3. Delaware Valley accents (like Philadelphia) 

4. Midlands accents (referring to a band running through the [mostly-eastern] center of the nation, like Indianapolis) 

5. New York City metropolitan accents 

6. Southern accents (like Charlotte)

7. Upper Midwestern accents (like Fargo) 

8. Western accents (like Los Angeles) 

9. Pittsburgh metropolitan accents

10. New Orleans metropolitan accents 

If you’re in favor of a higher estimate, many other regional or sub-regional accents could be delineated, including Rhode Island, coastal California, rural California, an assortment of Southern sub-types, Miami, and Upper Michigan (or “Yooper”) accents, just to name a further handful. Also, when is an accent regional rather than ethnic?  Are Cajun accents strictly only used by those people descended from historically French-speaking Louisianans? The accents of Latin Americans in the West is not the same as Latin Americans in the South, which is just as true for White or Black Americans. Is there a Jewish American accent or perhaps, specifically, a Jewish New York accent distinct from the accents of other New Yorkers? The question of "how many accents" can be interpreted as complexly as one wishes.

A Map of American English Accents

Over the last few years, I assembled a map of American English accents. Its main input is the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE), a nationwide study of urban areas by the recently-deceased groundbreaking linguist Bill Labov, plus his colleagues Charles Boberg and Sharon Ash. Of course, urban areas do not provide a full picture, and 2006 was a long time ago (not to mention its use of telephone survey data from the 1990s). I have, during the 2020s, attempted to update the ANAE's understanding of the American accent map using additional scholarly sources. My map, pictured above, adds distinctions in Wisconsin (Benson et al.), Maine (Pabst), Oklahoma (Weirich), California's Central Valley (D'Onofrio et al.), the El Paso metropolitan area (Hamilton-Brehm), eastern New York State (Dinkin), the Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina's Outer Banks (Schilling-Estes), central Pennsylvania (Anderson), south-eastern New Mexico (Brumbaugh and Koops), and Alaska's Mat-Su Valley (Purnell et al.), alongside some of my own impressionistic data delineating areas like central Florida, the "West Midland," and "Rural West."

Caveats

Even now, I'm not confident with the map, since younger speakers everywhere (particularly higher-educated, with women in the lead) are abandoning many of their traditional or local features in favor of a "general" or "less regional" American sound. However, this (new) general American accent, itself not a monolith, is tending to evolve in a certain regional (or once-regional) direction, mirroring features first noted in the 1980s as characterizing young, urban, coastal Californians. This is not entirely coincidental, linguists feel, but the mainstream hypothesis is not as clear as one might expect. as a feature

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Vicki Michael (2014). A WORKING DESCRIPTION Of PENNSylvANIA DuTChIfIED ENGlISh AND SOuTh CENTRAl PENNSylvANIA ENGlISh

Benson et al. THE BAG THAT SCOTT BOUGHT: THE LOW VOWELS IN NORTHWEST WISCONSIN

Brumbaugh, Susan; Koops, Christian (2017). "Vowel Variation in Albuquerque, New Mexico". Publication of the American Dialect Society, 102(1), 31-57. p.34

Dinkin. 2009. Phonological Change in Upstate New York.

D'Onofrio et al 2019. Compression in the California Vowel Shift_Central Valley

Hamilton-Brehm. Foundational Sample of El Paso English 2003  

Pabst, Katharina. Putting “the Other Maine” on the Map: Language Variation, Local Affiliation, and Co-occurrence in Aroostook County English. Diss. University of Toronto (Canada), 2022.

Purnell, T. et al (2009). "Defining Dialect, Perceiving Dialect, and New Dialect Formation: Sarah Palin's Speech". Journal of English Linguistics. 37 (4): 331–355 [346, 349].

Schilling-Estes, Natalie (1997). "Accommodation versus Concentration: Dialect Death in Two Post-Insular Island Communities." American Speech, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Spring, 1997). Duke University Press. pp. 16-17.

Weirich, Phillip. "A perceptual dialect map of Oklahoma." IULC Working Papers 18.1 (2018).