Do You Hear What I Hear?

They might take away my membership card to the Keith Olbermann Fan Club for this, but I really haven’t been paying attention to his accent. But what all y’all have mentioned will turn me into a better listener. Thanks!

On Accent-uate the Positive:

Merriam notes: Re: KO’s accent. One thing that I notice about KO specifically is his pronunciation of ‘won’t’ as ‘wooont.’ That’s definitely a NYCism; you won’t find that elsewhere. Which fits him among Westchester-ians. Natives have neutral accents, but it’s a bedroom community of NYC, and newer-comers will sport the accents they had before they moved in, usually one of the various NYC accents.

I’ve been listening for the “wooont” in old Big Show podcasts; no luck so far. “Wooont” sounds Canadian, like something Bob and Doug McKenzie might say, eh. Good point re accents immigrating into Westchester.

KO doesn’t sound like a quintessential New Yorker, like Robert DeNiro or Jerry Orbach. Then again Vin Scully is from New York, but he doesn’t sound like a New Yorker. To me he’s the voice of the Dodgers. The Los Angeles Dodgers. (Does Brooklyn still hate Walter O’Malley?)

orinenglish adds: Another Keith acceent giveaway: when pronouncing “horror,” he says “hah-rahr.” But it shows most commonly in his pronunciation of “correspondent,” which he pronounces “cah-ri-spon-dint.”

And about Ohio. There is no one single “Ohio accent.” Ohio is roughly divided in half by the National Road. People north of the road tend to have the Great Lakes accent; people south of it tend to have the Kentucky/West Virginia accent, which is a faster form of Southern drawl. In other words, they have Southern accents, but they speak much more quickly than Deep Southerners, who seem to Northerners to take forever to say anything at all. It’s this accent you hear sometimes in Dan Patrick; it is more Dayton, Cincinnati and Columbus than it is Cleveland or Toledo.

Now that you mention it, DP’s accent does sound rather “southerny.” A friend from Georgia often reminds me to “put spaces between the words” asItendtotalklikethismostofthetime.

rrgirl passes the Golden Bear vs. Arnie Test: the video is with Jack (?), and he sounds like a pretty typical central Ohioan with suburban/rural roots. I hear it in the way he contracts “Ohio” into barely 2 syllables, and puts the strong single accent on the fourth syllable in “congratulations”, except it almost sounds like the third syllable when he says it. his consonants are distinct, but the soft vowels, especially at the beginning of words almost disappear.
checking my homework, I didn’t need to confirm his bio – Dublin and Muirfield are very familiar, but when I realized the video was mis-labeled, I looked for another video of Arnie for comparison. listen to him say “do know something about” at 12-15 seconds. pure PA. Arnold Palmer – Cadillac ad from YouTube

thanks for the exercise.

Oops. My bad. I forgot you weren’t a sports fan and assumed you’d recognize Jack in the video. Arnie’s voice is in a link in the line under the embedded YouTube player, what I think you thought was a caption. You found a great video of Arnie.

rrgirl provides more: I had edited out some comments about Ohio regionalism brought up by orinenglish. listening to MTP this morning, I heard Tim Russert say “career” with a typical nasal lake shore inflection and it reminded me of his migration from Buffalo to Cleveland as a young man. you can travel the entire south lake shore and hear very little change in speech. Move 75-100 miles inland; the changes are stunning and they vary from east to west. Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Columbus, and Dayton are all distinctly different.

I, too, watched Meet the Press but was listening more to what John Edwards was saying. Nice touch by Russert at the end, giving props to Thurman Thomas for his election into the football Hall of Fame.

There’s some pretty funny stuff here: Slanguage.