There are plenty of things that make Portlanders unique (like riding bicycles in the nude) but what is our signature sound? We’re not talking musically — apologies to The Decemberists, Pink Martini, and other amazing bands who started here — but moreso, do we have an accent?
Like Mt. Hood on a foggy January morning, it’s there, but it’s hard to pick out. When linguists first studied American speech patterns in the mid-20th century, everything beyond Kansas was lumped into one category — The West. But since then, enough time has passed for certain differences to develop.
All accents in our country exist relative to the most “neutral” characteristics represented by General American, which no one, except for some newscasters, actually speaks. Interestingly, our dialect — Pacific Northwest English — doesn’t deviate much from that standard.
During an episode of “Conan” in 2019, Fred Armisen described a Portland accent as “emphatic, but quiet,” to which the host responded, “like an angry NPR host.” Maybe they were on to something?
One noteworthy trait is how we pronounce similarly sounding words that are spelled differently, otherwise known as the cot-caught merger. For us “dawn” and “don,” and “bowl” and “bull,” are said the same. Another feature is that we often drop the final “g” of words that end in “-ing.”
For example, “I’ve been thinkin’ about losin’ my clothes and goin’ on a ride.”
It’s the freedom we crave, isn’t it? | Gif via Digg
Obviously, Portland is a city filled with transplants + people of diverse backgrounds and languages, so trying to fit how we talk into a single pink Voodoo Doughnut box may be a tall task. At least we’ll always have our special slang, colloquialisms + pronunciations that are sure to trip up out-of-towners.
Pro tip: Back in 2013, the New York Times published a 25-question quiz that could paint a pretty accurate picture of your personal dialect map. You can give it a try here.
