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I have heard that in the Midwest region of the United States (Nebraska, etc.), people do not have an accent when speaking compared to people from the south or either coast. Is this true? Why? Please add sources to back up what you say.

Daniel
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Adam Mosheh
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    Everybody has an accent. It is just much harder to detect those whose accents are more like your own. – Schroedingers Cat Jul 06 '12 at 15:07
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    Well, according to other Americans, this is what I have been told. – Adam Mosheh Jul 06 '12 at 15:08
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    They would be well-advised to read up on where accents and dialects come from. – RegDwigнt Jul 06 '12 at 15:16
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    This Midwesterner has heard that West Coast people have the most neutral accent. There are plenty of Midwesterners who have a drawl for some reason. – cornbread ninja 麵包忍者 Jul 06 '12 at 15:20
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    I'm sorry, but none of those "duplicates" were actually duplicates of this question, so I reopened it. They were related, though: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224/in-what-ways-is-appalachian-speech-closer-to-elizabethan-english-than-contempora http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2501/has-the-tangier-island-accent-truly-remained-unchanged-since-the-elizabethan-per – nohat Jul 06 '12 at 17:14
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    Related (but not a duplicate): http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1884/standard-american-english – J.T. Grimes Jul 06 '12 at 17:35
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    Question 1884, Standard American English, asks: "Is there a region in the United States of America that has a pronunciation similar ... to standard American English", and answers say "this means essentially English spoken in the north midlands region, like Iowa" (nohat) and "people will point to the Midwest as the location where Standard American English is spoken" (JoFrhwld) so question has been asked and answered before. – James Waldby - jwpat7 Jul 06 '12 at 17:38
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    I grew up in New York. I never thought of myself as having an accent until I moved to Ohio, where people regularly told me that I had a "New York accent". I think that the way I think, speak, and act is by definition "normal", and the more you differ from me, the more strange you are. By definition. – Jay Jul 06 '12 at 18:10
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    Chicago and Cleveland accents are Midwestern accents, and they sound very regional, the standard SoCal accent is what Hollywood accent coaches teach, and not Chicago/Cleveland/Detroit accents. –  Jul 23 '12 at 14:51
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    @Keira The SoCal drawl sounds very regional, and indeed can grate upon the ear. They suffer from one of the worst versions of the cot–caught merger, and every time I hear them mutilating an /ɔ/ word into an /a/ word, I cringe: witness dahg, gahn, dahn, mahss, cahgh, sahng, fahght, outlah, clah, gnah. Those all stick out super obtrusively, like a sore thumb, to the standard midwestern ear. Broadcasters were not historically permitted to drawl like that: it’s as bad as Southern. – tchrist Jul 23 '12 at 15:12
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    @Keira: Chicago/Cleveland/Detroit have northern cities accents, which are very distinctive, and are generally not considered to be anywhere close to General American. According to Wikipedia, the part of the Midwest that speaks General American is fairly small. I can't tell the difference between Midwestern accents as long as you stay south of Chicago, north of St. Louis, and west of Pittsburgh. – Peter Shor Jul 23 '12 at 18:00

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As a native speaker of Midwestern American English, I don't hear my accent as an "accent", naturally, but I know it's there. Any English speaker will recognize that I'm American as soon as I open my mouth and start talking English (I occasionally do better in other languages), and they'll probably recognize my accent as "Midwestern", if they've ever heard of it.

So it's not true that Midwesterners don't have accents; we do. As Schrödinger's Cat points out, everyone has an accent.

Possibly -- and here's the germ of truth in this myth -- it may be the fact that Midwestern English is the standard dialect for national broadcasting in the United States that people are referring to. Just as RP is standard on the BBC (with special exceptions for Northern dialects), Midwestern is standard in the US (with exceptions, mostly for Southern dialects).

That's all.

Don't believe everything you hear about English. In fact, generally it's a good idea not to believe anything you hear about English; there's an awful lot of nonsense around.

John Lawler
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    Your final sentence would be equally true if you dropped the words "about English". – Jay Jul 06 '12 at 18:07
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    Possibly, though the English part is fairly critical here. – John Lawler Jul 06 '12 at 18:10
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    I don't think one can say RP is standard BBC English any more. – Andrew Leach Jul 06 '12 at 18:59
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    OK. But it used to be, and Americans tend to think all English people talk like that. It comes as a shock to find that they can't understand many English dialects. – John Lawler Jul 06 '12 at 19:14
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    I don't quite believe Midwestern English is the standard broadcasting dialect; I think the standard is Midwestern vowel sounds, but without all the other various quirks that make it specifically Midwestern. – Peter Shor Jul 06 '12 at 22:23
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    OK, believe whatever you like. That's the pronunciation in Kenyon and Knott, though, and that's what the networks used to use as the standard. Now ... ¿Quien sabe? – John Lawler Jul 06 '12 at 22:30
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    I heard it was the Pacific Northwest... The few people that I have talked to from Nebraska had a slight southern twang that I don't hear on CNN or NPR. No argument, just saying what I heard. – BillyNair Jul 07 '12 at 06:34
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    Having lived for quite some time in the midwest, I believe it's pretty much the same between Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois. Ohio is pretty much the same, I would say, but I might be wrong. At first, it might sound strange to someone who is from CA or NY. – Noah Jul 07 '12 at 07:55
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    There are rural differences everywhere -- the Midwest is largely an agricultural area -- and many local variations. I grew up in an area with some peculiar pronunciations (rhotic wash, gosh, and Washington -- /wɔrʃ, ɡarʃ/, and /wɔrʃɪŋtn/), for instance, and an extremely odd syntactic construction that I later wrote a paper about. – John Lawler Jul 07 '12 at 13:20
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    And there's a Wikipedia article on "General American" that gives more precise details. – John Lawler Jul 07 '12 at 13:26
  • And of course, "warsh" is one of those quirks that have to be removed from the Midwestern dialect for it to become General American ... although in this case, "warsh" is marked, and I suspect its usage has died out among young people. A number of the big Midwestern cities also have their own dialectical quirks that you have to remove as well. – Peter Shor Jul 23 '12 at 17:39
  • Talking of accents, my accent is pretty messed up. I have a mix of british and american accents. And I mix the two often, which confuses people around me. – Noah Aug 11 '13 at 10:08
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    Just tell them you're Australian. – John Lawler Aug 11 '13 at 15:00
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Moreso than most any other country of the similar extent (maybe excepting Australia), the great majority of people in the US speak with the same accent. Only a trained language specialist (a student of accents like an actor or voice coach, not necessarily a linguist) would be able to take a random person and tell if they were different from the norm, much less say which variety the accent is from.

That is not to say that there are recognizable regional and cultural accents: multiple different but related varieties of Southern, the New York/New Jersey accents, the Boston/New England accents, the Northern cities accents, AAVE. But those are for the most part not that common or strong.

As far as the differences go, someone who speaks 'Midwestern' and someone who speaks 'General American' English are hardly distinguishable informally, but might be by taking a very specific and not terribly common set of contrasting pairs.

The only thing I have as an easy reference for this is the questionable wikipedia articles which really only give the distinctions rather than any perspective on prevalence: a section on regional differences, and a full article on regional accents. In the latter article there are two paragraphs describing General American English separately from Midwestern/Midland. There may be technical distinctions (cot-caught merger) but I find the distinction very subtle. They draw a distinction between North and South Midland; from my experience of both, their description sounds more like they are really describing the difference between General AmE and a variety of Southern AmE.

In sum, I find that the Midwestern accent, if one can really distinguish it, is very very close to General AmE, moreso than any other named variety. So I'd say that if anything could be called the Midwestern accent, though not identical, it is mostly indistinguishable from GenAmE for most people.

That said, a particularly notable (but arguable) example of the -North- Midland accent to the extreme is Sarah Palin (though from Alaska, she really sounds like she's from rural Illinois/Iowa/Wisconsin/Minnesota/Dakotas).

Mitch
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    This answer kind of surprises me. We aren't as different as the accents in England perhaps, but that's just because it's the language's home country, so the dialects there diverged earlier and drifted further. However, the dialects in the USA that diverged earliest (eg: New England, AAVE) sound different enough to me that I'd be surprised if they aren't noticable to an Englishman or Aussie. – T.E.D. Jul 23 '12 at 16:47
  • @T.E.D. I don't deny that given a person speaking a named variety in AmE, Southern (well, Piedmont, Appalachian, Texas, etc), one can easily corroborate their residence by listening to them. But 9 times out of 10, for a random American, you cannot predict where they come from or even tell that they speak something other than GenAmE. Except maybe AAVE, which I don't know enough about. – Mitch Jul 23 '12 at 18:27
  • @T.E.D. I don't find the 'further geographically from the source, more conservative in language' rule to be a law (viz. "Guns, Germs and Steel") It might work for Polynesian but it certainly doesn't for Romance (that might be a better conversation in chat here or at linguistics). – Mitch Jul 23 '12 at 18:28
  • Yeah, it would be fun to grab a beer and disucss such things sometime. Sans brewski, I would point out that all Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, which was spoken as far afield as France and the Balkans. I think if you expand your idea of Romance's homeland to include the entire Roman empire, the theory may hold up fine. It's certianly more varied there than it is in the New World (which is the closest comparison to what I was saying about English that you could make). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romance-lg-classification-en.png – T.E.D. Jul 24 '12 at 19:04
  • @T.E.D.: That's exactly my point. What's the source of Romance? Latin in central Italy. What are its most conservative derivatives? The central Italian Languages (or less obliquely, Standard Italian based in the Tuscan dialect). The least conservative (those with the most changes with respect to Latin)? (Norman) French, Romanian, which are the furthest removed geographically. Your statement about English was the opposite, that AmE is more conservative than BrE "dialects there diverged earlier and drifted further". I don't know if I agree with that about BrE, but certainly not about Romance. – Mitch Jul 24 '12 at 22:09
  • Yes, but all other branches off of Latin are dead. From living sources (which is what we are talking about), the most recent common root is Vulgar Latin. Vulgar Latin was spoken in a wide area, roughly equivalent with what you'd come up with if you took this theory Mr. Diamond mentioned and the present linguistic maps and no other information. The fact that you can't trace it back further than that (into Italy perhaps) when you have no earlier-branching surviving languages to work with should surprise nobody. – T.E.D. Jul 24 '12 at 23:00
  • No @Mitch, you're arguing something different with your Romance languages example. TED's point about accent diversion in places far from the language's home is about diversion of the dialects within that place from each other. A parallel argument would assert that the various Portuguese accents are not as different from each other as the various Italian accents are from each other; or that the various Roumanian accents are not as diverse as the various Italian accents. Nobody is denying that American and Portuguese accents are very different from the accents of London and Rome respectively. –  Nov 03 '12 at 17:10