California English
[7] Other documented California English includes a "country" accent associated with rural and inland white Californians, which is also (to a lesser extent) 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.
[18] One dialect of English, mostly reported in California's rural interior, inland from the major coastal cities,[19] has been popularly described as a "country," "hillbilly," or "twang" variety.
[20][21] This California English variety is reminiscent of and presumably related to Southern or South Midland U.S. accents,[22] mostly correlated with white, outdoors-oriented speakers of the Central Valley.
[25] For example, this correlates with less educated rural men of northern California documented as raising /ɛ/ in a style similar to the Southern drawl.
[23] 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.
[19] 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.
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.
[33] Pronunciation features of this accent included: Overall, starting in the later half of the 20th century, San Francisco has been undergoing dialect levelling towards the broader regional Western American English,[30][34] for example: younger Mission District speakers now exhibit a full cot–caught merger, show the vowel shift of urban coastal Californians, and front the GOOSE and GOAT vowels.
[38] 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.
[42] California, like other Southwestern states, has borrowed many words from Spanish, especially for place names, food, and other cultural items, reflecting the linguistic heritage of the Californios as well as more recent immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
High concentrations of various ethnic groups throughout the state have contributed to general familiarity with words describing (especially cultural) phenomena.
For example, a high concentration of Asian Americans from various cultural backgrounds, especially in urban and suburban metropolitan areas in California, has led to the adoption of the word hapa (itself originally a Hawaiian borrowing of English "half"[43]) to mean someone of mixed European/Islander or Asian/Islander heritage.
In 1958, essayist Clifton Fadiman pointed out that northern California is the only place (besides England and the area surrounding Ontario and the Canadian Prairies) where the word chesterfield is used as a synonym for sofa or couch.
[49] It took several decades for Southern California locals to start to commonly refer to the freeways with the numerical designations, but usage of the definite article persisted.
