California English


California English is the collection of English dialects native to California, traditionally classified under General or Western American English.

History and overview

As California became more diverse, English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds began to pick up different linguistic elements from one another and also developed new ones; the result is both divergence and convergence within California English. Overall, linguists who studied English around World War II tended to find few, if any, patterns unique to the state. Studies in the 1950s and 1960s largely only commented on the increasingly common cot–caught merger within the state.
In the 1980s, linguists first noted a distinctive chain shift of vowel sounds, the California Vowel Shift, used by young people in southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California. This helped to define an accent emerging primarily among youthful, white, urban, coastal speakers, and popularly associated with the valley girl and surfer youth subcultures. The possibility that this is, in fact, an age-specific variety of English is one hypothesis; however, certain features of this accent are intensifying and spreading geographically.
Other documented California English includes a "country" accent associated with rural and inland white Californians, which is also affected by the California Vowel Shift; an older accent once spoken by Irish Americans in San Francisco; and distinctly Californian varieties of Chicano English mainly associated with Mexican Americans. Research has shown that Californians themselves perceive a linguistic boundary between northern and southern California, particularly regarding the northern use of hella, and southern use of dude, bro, and like.

Urban coastal California English

Varieties of English most popularly associated with California largely correlate with the major urban areas along the coast. Notable is the absence of a distinct phoneme, which has completely merged with , as in most of the Western United States.
A few phonological processes have been identified as being particular to urban and coastal California English. However, these vowel changes are by no means universal in Californian speech, and any single Californian's speech may only have some or none of the changes identified below. These sounds might also be found in the speech of some people from areas outside of California.
  • Front vowels are raised before, so that the traditional "short a" and "short i" sounds are raised to the "long a" and "long ee" sounds, respectively, when before the ng sound. In other contexts, has a fairly open pronunciation, as indicated in the vowel chart here. Similarly, a word like rang will often have the same vowel as rain in California English,, rather than the same vowel as ran . In addition, may be pronounced with a raised vowel, or even in a nonfinite verb ending, so that thinking is pronounced , rather than or and king is pronounced more like , whereas bullying features two consecutive vowels: bull-ee-eeng or bull-ee-een. As all vowels preceding are historically short, this does not lead to a loss of phonemic contrast.
  • Before or , is raised and diphthongized to or . Elsewhere, is lowered and backed as a result of the California vowel shift.
  • Uptalk, meaning a high-rising intonation in certain declarative sentences, is on the rise, for example in Southern Californian English. One 2014 study found uptalk used equally by Southern Californian men and women in 16% of declarative statements. However, women were twice as likely to use uptalk in order to hold the floor.
  • In Northern California generally, a tense is the pronunciation of before in words such as egg, beg, leg, which can thus be pronounced as /eɪg/ ayg, /beɪg/ bayg, /leɪg/ layg, respectively.

    California vowel shift

One topic that has begun to receive much attention from scholars in recent decades has been the emergence of a vowel-based chain shift in California. The image in this section illustrates the California vowel shift on a vowel chart. The vowel space of the image is a cross-section ; it is a rough approximation of the space in a human mouth where the tongue is located in articulating certain vowel sounds. As with other vowel shifts, several vowels may be seen moving in a chain shift around the mouth. As one vowel encroaches upon the space of another, the adjacent vowel in turn experiences a movement in order to maximize phonemic differentiation.
For convenience, California English will be compared with a "typical" General American English, abbreviated "GA". is pulled towards , is pulled towards , is pulled towards, and and merge : the cot-caught merger.
Other vowel changes, whose relation with the shift is uncertain, are also emerging: except before, is moving through towards , and is moving beyond. is moving towards , is moving through, sometimes approaching .
New vowel characteristics of the California shift are increasingly found among younger speakers. For example, while some characteristics such as the close central rounded vowel or close front rounded vowel for are widespread in Californian speech, the same high degree of fronting for is found predominantly among young speakers.
The effects of the California vowel shift have been noted in varieties of Californian Spanish, particularly in the Bay Area.

Rural inland California English

One dialect of English, mostly reported in California's rural interior, inland from the major coastal cities, has been popularly described as a "country," "hillbilly," or "twang" variety. This California English variety is reminiscent of and presumably related to Southern or South Midland U.S. accents, mostly correlated with white, outdoors-oriented speakers of the Central Valley. It has been studied even as far north as Trinity County but could possibly extend farther, and as far south as Kern County, possibly extending as far south as eastern San Diego County. Similar to the nonstandard accents of the South Midland and Southern United States, speakers of such towns as Redding and Merced have been found to use the word anymore in a positive sense and the verb was in place of the standard English plural verb were. Related other features of note include the pin–pen merger, fill–feel merger, and full–fool merger.
The Great Depression's westward Dust Bowl migrations of settlers into California from the Southern United States, namely from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas, is the presumable cause of this rural white accent's presence in California's Central Valley. Rural northern California was also settled by Oklahomans and Arkansans, though perhaps more recently in the 1970s and 1980s, due to the region's timber industry boom. However, even in a single town, any given individual's identification with working and playing outdoors versus indoors appears to be a greater determiner of this accent than the authenticity of the individual's Southern heritage. For example, this correlates with less educated rural men of northern California documented as raising in a style similar to the Southern drawl. Overall, among those who orient toward a more town lifestyle, features of the California Vowel Shift are more prominent, but not to the same extent as in urban coastal communities such as San Jose. By contrast, among those who orient toward a more country lifestyle, the Southern features are more prominent, but some aspects of the California Vowel Shift remain present as well.

Mission brogue (San Francisco)

The Mission brogue is a disappearing accent spoken within San Francisco, mostly during the 20th century in the Mission District. It sounds distinctly like New York and possibly Boston accents, due to a large number of Irish Americans migrating from those two East Coast cities to the Mission District in the late 19th century. It is today spoken only by some of the oldest Irish American and possibly Jewish residents of the city. From before the 1870s to the 1890s, Irish Americans were the largest share of migrants coming to San Francisco, the majority arriving by way of Northeastern U.S. cities like New York and Boston, thus bringing those cities' ways of speaking with them. In San Francisco, the Mission District quickly became a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood, and its local dialect became associated with all of San Francisco as a way to contrast it with the rest of California. Sounding like a "real San Franciscan" therefore once meant sounding "like a New Yorker", the speakers said to "talk like Brooklynites". Other names included the "south of the Slot" or "south of Market" accent.
Pronunciation features of this accent included:
  • Th-stopping
  • No cot–caught merger, with being raised and accompanied with an inglide, so as to produce a vowel sound approximating
  • Non-rhoticity
  • * The use of for before unvoiced consonants such that would have almost the same vowel sound as "choice"
  • Glottal stop,, instead of before syllabic such as in "bottle"; this and all the above features were reminiscent of a New York accent
  • Possible split, reminiscent of older Boston English
Overall, starting in the latter half of the 20th century, San Francisco has been undergoing dialect levelling towards the broader regional Western American English, for example: younger Mission District speakers now exhibit a full cot–caught merger, show the vowel shift of urban coastal Californians, and front the and vowels.

Other varieties

Certain varieties of Chicano English are also native to California, sometimes even being spoken by non-Latino Californians. One example is East Los Angeles Chicano English, which has been influenced by both Californian and African American Vernacular English.
The coastal urban accent of California traces many of its features back to Valleyspeak: a social dialect arising in the 1980s among a particular white youthful demographic in the San Fernando Valley, including Los Angeles.
Boontling is a jargon or argot spoken in Boonville, California, with only about 100 speakers today.