Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part One) | WIRED
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an enjoyable overview of American accents and what accent signals socially.
What it is
Dialect coach Erik Singer and several linguists tour distinct accents across English-speaking North America. It is the first part of a WIRED series on US accents.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends AbsoluteDestiny · 2021-05 · on “The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)”
Really good article. For those interested in this sort of thing, wired did a pretty good series on accents in the US recently on youtube: [this video] [LINK] [LINK]
Recommends tstrimple · 2025-03 · on “The US island that speaks Elizabethan English”
If folks find accents interesting, I loved this video which does a tour of US accents. Part 1: [this video] (Okracoke Island is at 13:40) Part 2: [LINK]
Cites kkielhofner · 2022-08 · on “Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans”
While there isn’t a formal definition of “sounding white” anecdotally I have plenty of friends of color that routinely joke about pulling out their “white voice” in certain settings (professional, addressing “authority”, etc). This YouTube series covers it quite a bit: [this video] Myself I have a very vanilla non-regional American accent (think Walter Cronkite) and they often point out just how “white” I sound. I also have family with more regional American accents (Upper Midwest, Southern) and as a child they’d often make fun of my “accent”. My response was always “turn on your TV, they sound like I do everywhere”: [LINK] This can be seen in a somewhat-humorous old YouTube clip: [LINK]