Yes, California Does Have an Accent You Just Dont Realize It
“Wait, say ‘milk’ again?”
“Melk.”
On a fairly banal weekday evening my husband and I were performing a classic Millennial boredom ritual–the online quiz (Wordle, Connections, and Bandle having been already exhausted). Tonight’s showing: The U.S. Dialect Quiz.
“The way you say milk has an “E” in it–your parents do that too,” I remarked knowingly while clicking on to the next question.
My husband’s accent was a particular brand of twang I had never heard until moving to California. Not quite Southern gentile, not quite Midwestern staccato, but something else entirely. He presumed it was a Dust Bowl carryover. But as I recently learned, the California accent is much more layered and nuanced than that.
For starters, California has several accents depending on population, region, and race, albeit a distinct way of speaking. Whether you’re born and raised here or a transplant like myself and many others, you’ll start to pick up on lil’ California-isms and dialect anomalies.
It goes beyond the standard Valley drawl of L.A.’s hills or the curt quickness of Bay Area speak, oft peppered with a “hella” here and there. It’s a statewide inflection that speakers even adopt within their own dialects. To the untrained ear, it may be difficult to spot–we’ll get into why soon–but the California accent most certainly exists. Here’s a glimpse into its history and why you might not have been able to clock it until now.
What You (Don’t) Hear
“Part of the reason why Californians don’t think that they have an accent is because they turn on the TV and they hear themselves,” says Jake Aziz, PhD student at UCLA’s School of Linguistics.
It’s true, California, particularly Los Angeles, is an epicenter of media and pop culture. But Californian accents are gaining even more traction thanks to the well, influence of “influencer-speak,” likely a derivative of Valley-girl talk. No official data exists for this phenomenon, but it’s easy to put two and two together, especially when you consider the impact of influencer incubators like the Valley-based “Hype House” et. al. Aziz thinks of it as a kind of “linguistic hegemony.”
You can also think about when foreign actors play “American,” they’re likely adopting the accent they hear the most in the states, Californian, which in turn lends foreigners and natives alike to assume that a blanket standard American accent is Californian-esque.
Another reason for this phenom might sheerly be population-based, as Aziz points out. With California being the most populous state, you’re more likely to meet (or hear!) someone from California than not.
But it turns out that there’s a distinct science-based marker that makes up the majority of Californian accents. Aziz specifically studies phonetics and phonology, the inner workings of speech sounds, which is a major part of what creates an accent.
He says to think of your mouth as this three-dimensional space, with your tongue position dictating the way vowels sound. Californians have a particular speech pattern dubbed the “California Vowel Shift.” Here’s an example that will help you mimic and recognize it easily. Try saying the word “bit.” It might initially sound clippy and short, but Californians shift vowels lower and longer, making “bit” sound like “bet” or milk sound like “melk.”
This shift is often exaggerated to depict or tease the California accent–imagine a car full of friends singing along to SoCal favs like No Doubt or Blink-182, “Wheerya areEeeeerr yewwww?”
But it doesn’t just exist in SoCal. NorCal’s majestic (and potentially alien-harboring) Mount Shasta is pronounced “ShASS-Tuh” with a very long “ah” sound. I know this because I was guffawed at upon pronouncing it for the first time. My Jersey-based accent assumed it rhymed with “pasta.” Silly me.
More obvious hallmarks of the Californian accent may include uptalk and the use of certain slang, oft relegated to certain larger metro areas like the Bay and LA, or associated with surfer dudes, Valley Girls, and parodies like SNL’s “The Californians” sketch. But this California Vowel Shift or “CVS” as I’ll refer to it here, exists statewide.
https://facts.net/dust-bowl-facts/, [Public domain]/Wikimedia Commons
A, E, I, O, Who Brought It Here?
California has a long and storied history, obviously before settler colonialism, the purging of Indigenous peoples, and official American statehood, but to understand its modern accent we’ll trace the history of the state circa 1850 and beyond.
When you think about it, most Californians can only trace their ancestry to the state back two or three generations. Those ancestors likely arrived during or between two major waves of immigration to the state, the first being the Gold Rush of the early 1850s, and the second being the influx of farm workers in the 1930s Dust Bowl era.
Carol M. Highsmith [Public domain]/ Wikimedia Commons
Hundreds of thousands of people came to the state at this time from a wide variety of backgrounds that still exist within California today, including a large influx of Mexican and Chinese immigrants, with others from as far as Europe and the eastern U.S. Later came the farm workers of the Midwest, mainly Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas. The effect? What Aziz likes to call a “dialect leveling.” All of these influences converged together to produce the accent, causing their differences to neutralize and produce something entirely new.
And while the signature “CVS” is mainly associated with white California speakers, it’s found throughout California’s diasporas and non-white speakers as well, specifically in African American English and Chicano English which some people think is just Spanish-accented English, but there are Chicano speakers who don’t speak Spanish at all.
How Populations Dictate the Shift of the Accent
Wes Smoot has a jolly country jangle in his voice not unlike actors Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliot. He punctuates his sentences with phrasing like, “by golly” and “real good.” And even though we’re on the phone 490 miles away from each other I feel like I’m gently rocking away on his front porch in Boonville, California.
Boonville is a hyper-rural (population of 1,018 rural) but stunning town in Mendocino County, dotted with tasting rooms and vineyards. But under a century ago, it was one of many California towns that became flooded with immigrants fleeing from Dust Bowl conditions in the American Midwest and Southeast.
Born into the poverty of early 1930s America, Smoot was adopted by aunts and uncles who hailed from, you guessed it, Oklahoma and Kansas. He went on to spend time in the military, and ended up marrying and working in timber back in Boonville. At 92, he sounds bright, sturdy, and joyful through the phone. He’s one of what he believes to be “10 or so” of the last Bootling speakers.
“Right when I first started high school,” he says, “there was a tremendous influx of people here from Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, the Carolinas” who moved here for the timber industry. “Now they had a drawl, and that drawl rubbed off on us,” he giggles.
Bootling, considered to be a jargon, is an archaic but notable way of speaking native to Boonville. Born out of the farming, milling, and timber workers slang of that Dust Bowl migrant era, the jargon (think Cockney English or even Pig Latin) serves as a marker of time and place.
Boonville and its once booming population, and Bootling itself are living history as to how the population, it’s struggles, and its occupations shift and develop to create what Aziz described earlier, that “dialect leveling” and later “CVS.” Its speakers created a kind of secret “in the know” language born likely out of their grapple with acclimating to Californian life.
Transplants during that time flooded certain areas, virtually drying up work, or forcing out Mexican workers and families, who were previously doing their jobs for cheaper–leading to the labor movements within the Mexican communities in California.
Transplants were also seen as virtual weirdos who talked funny, they were isolated and lived in camps and poor living conditions, think of the iconic “Migrant Mother” image by photographer Dorthea Lange.
But their influence via their own accents lives on today, even if the kids at Anderson Valley High have zero interest in speaking it. Smoot and a a friend volunteered, unsuccessfully, to teach a class to the teenagers.
Little do they know the influencer speak that pours out of their cell phones dings and notifications is a not-so-distant cousin to those early Midwestern Boonville immigrants.
And speaking of high school, the changing demographics and desecrating of populations within California create that same kind of inter-language pattern of speech and jargon even today. Aziz refers me to a paper written by UC Berkeley professor Nicole Holliday, who often explores the intersection of race and language. In her study she “talks about high school students throughout California who are primarily Latin American and African American. And their speech is this mutli-ethonolect…a sort of combination of features from African American English, Chicano English, and Anglo English,” Aziz says.
“For example, one of the features of African American English is, the pin-pen merger. So, this is where the vowel I and the vowel E as in pin and pen to be pronounced the same before sounds like N or M. So, both pin and pen are pronounced something like pin,” he continues. This feature is found in Southern-American dialects, but also found is African American speakers nationally, but now it’s also being seen in LatinX high schoolers across California, creating what Holliday refers to as a multi-ethnolect.
The fields of Boonville are now filled with vineyards instead of timber, and the population has shrunken and shifted, but it’s a reflection of California itself. Rural California is oft forgotten when it comes to both economy (it isn’t nicknamed the Bread Basket of America for nothing) and its influence on the broader demographics of the state and the sturdy and joyful people that live and work there.
Smoot understands, though, because he knows Bootling will never die. “’How do you feel about Bootling dying?’ It’s a question I was asked by a lot of people,” Smoot says. “It doesn’t bother me a bit because… So far as I know, there’s enough documentation and stories and books and everything if people want to know about Bootling, people will be able to find it. It’ll never die.”
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