WIRED
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2025
21:33 · 9.6M views · Jan 21, 2021
Dialect coach Erik Singer and several linguists tour distinct accents across English-speaking North America. It is the first part of a WIRED series on US accents.
HN recommends it as an enjoyable overview of American accents and what accent signals socially.
3 comments from Hacker News
Really good article. For those interested in this sort of thing, wired did a pretty good series on accents in the US recently on youtube: this video [LINK] [LINK]
If folks find accents interesting, I loved this video which does a tour of US accents. Part 1: this video (Okracoke Island is at 13:40) Part 2: [LINK]
While there isn’t a formal definition of “sounding white” anecdotally I have plenty of friends of color that routinely joke about pulling out their “white voice” in certain settings (professional, addressing “authority”, etc). This YouTube series covers it quite a bit: this video Myself I have a very vanilla non-regional American accent (think Walter Cronkite) and they often point out just how “white” I sound. I also have family with more regional American accents (Upper Midwest, Southern) and as a child they’d often make fun of my “accent”. My response was always “turn on your TV, they sound like I do everywhere”: [LINK] This can be seen in a somewhat-humorous old YouTube clip: [LINK]