Even though I've lived in California for nearly 25 years, this quiz immediately nailed my accent as born and bred in Philly, home of the liberty bell, cheese steak and corrupt city politics. Give it a try to see if it targets where you first spoke your vowels.
www.gotoquiz.com/what_american_accent_do_you_have
The Philly accent confuses a lot of folks. Sometimes, they guess New York or Boston, but it is actually quite different. Frankly, many people find the accent plain weird. The word "Coke" is pronounced like you have a wad of snot stuck in your nose. Certain neighborhoods, including the Northeast where I grew up, say the word "street" as schtreet.
My California-raised kids find the accent annoying, not at all charmingly working-class urban like the tones of Brooklyn or the Bronx. I've had students in my juvenile hall writing class ask me where I'm from. When I answer "Pennsylvania," they say, "No, what country?" My mother (Still deep in the heart of Northeast Philly) left a message on a friend's answering machine, only to have it erased because my friend thought it was a crank call with someone speaking gibberish.
My biggest acccent culture shock came when watching a documentary film about Louis Kahn, the controversial architect from Philadelphia. During an interview with one of Kahn's friends, the filmmakers actually resorted to subtitles. Friends from the Midwest watching the film with me agreed they needed translation. To me, it sounded like perfectly good Philadelphia English tinged with Yiddish --the lovely, harsh, nasal tones of my childhood.
Interesting film, by the way: In "My Architect: A Son't Journey," Kahn's son Nathaniel examines the life and career of his father, whose work included the Salk Institute and the Parliament and Capitol Buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The elder Kahn died of a heart attack in a Penn Station bathroom in 1974, unidentified and broke despite having been one of the century's most influential architects.
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