LA JOURNAL 

ACCENTUATION 

 As I travel about the country I keep an ear out for how pronunciations change, one regional accent sliding into the next. There is, I’ve observed, a sorta continuum that flows down from Maine across New England then spreads west and south. But I’ve never been able to detect a California accent. At first I thought it might well be because everyone there is from someplace else. That was before Erik, George and Heather came into my life. All are native Californians and all speak that unaffected mid-continent anchor desk media English (essentially a Nebraska accent). Turns out I was listening in the wrong place.  

              Bill, down at the corner on Sunset, spotted two guys washing the windows on the Pharmacia building. Likely motivated by my kvetching about our very dirty, very difficult to reach apartment windows, he asked them to stop by and give us an estimate. It proved to be so reasonable that we and some tenant neighbors hired them on the spot.  

              They did a great job.

Before

After

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

The window washers were very congenial guys. When conversing with us they spoke English; between themselves they kept up a lively banter in Spanish. They were equally facile in both languages. But their English was spoken with a light Latin lilt. 

                “That’s it!” I realized. That’s the California accent. Well, at least the Southern California accent. It’s where that slowly changing flow of spoken English blends into its near neighbor which just happens to be a different language. There’s that flow again. It disregards borders. Anglosphere meets Hispanosphere.  

              While I was drafting this post, Alvaro stopped by. Together we recalled a conversation that took place during his last visit to Buffalo. He engaged two fisherman on Unity Island in Spanish. Later he noted how much their Puerto Rican accented Spanish differed from his Mexican accented Spanish. That prompted me to further inquire about the many different Hispanophones here in LA: Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran, etal. Of course he can, he told me, distinguish one from another by their accent. For instance he told me those window washers were speaking Quechua, a dialect from the highlands of Guatemala.