• KingJalopy @lemm.ee
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    14 hours ago

    I moved to California last year from Oklahoma. Occasionally I will say something about moving from Oklahoma and people are like, “oh that makes sense, you have a Midwestern accent sometimes”. We all sound normal to ourselves but everyone has an accent. Like the way California people say their O’s.

    • sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Like the way California people say their O’s

      As a Canadian, it’s all I can hear when they speak.

    • sebi@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      I have a hard time understanding the people in a friends village and he lives 50km away

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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      14 hours ago

      Midwesterners are the only people I’ve ever met who don’t think they have an accent. And I’m like “you have a midwest accent.” They’re stunned because to them it’s just a “normal” accent, and they know it must be so because it’s what the TV man talks like. Obviously I know midwesterners who know they have an accent and the TV man is trained to speak that way. But everyone else I meet and know knows their own accent and can recognize variations of it. They’re not so conscious of how they make their accent happen, obviously, since it is their own. But they know they sound different from other people

      • seralth@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Part of that is, out side of a few regions of the Midwest that have a really unique accent.

        Most of the Midwest is “nutural English”. Yes there’s an accent, but there is a huge lack of slang, regional quirks, and is widely one of the most understandable accents across every English speaking country.

        It’s the “universal English accent” in a sense. It’s a large reason why call centers became so popular there. That and low costs.

        Functionally Midwestern accent is in a way the English that’s so boring that the banality of it IS the accent. Lol it’s kinda funny.