Is There a Portland Dialect?

Linguists studying Portlanders’ speech have identified gradual shifts in regional pronunciation over many years. A phonetics expert at Portland State University listens closely to how people say specific words, focusing on vowel sounds rather than word choice. He tests pronunciations of words such as “meow,” “caught,” “dude,” and “no,” looking for patterns that would indicate vowel mutations. The changes are linked to the California Vowel Shift, first observed in the Bay Area and believed by some to be spreading. Other views suggest the future of local speech may involve more complex influences than a single invading pattern.

"Conn, 39, teaches at Portland State University. An expert in phonetics and dialects, he spends a lot of time listening to people-not so much what they say, but how they say it. He runs me through some more words ( sit, set, sat, dude, love, day, Tracy Barry), listening to my vowels. Linguists like Conn stalk vowels the way bird-watchers pursue shrikes-he can detect a raised Canadian diphthong (that's the one that turns about into aboat) from across a room."

"These days, he's paying special attention to the way Portlanders pronounce words like caught, dude, and no. He's monitoring those words for signs of a phantom invasion-he wants to know if your dude sounds like di-ood, if your caught sounds like cot, if your no sounds like ne-ow. If any of those mutations is taking root in your speech, you could be part of a transformation known as the California Vowel Shift."

"First observed in the Bay Area, the phenomenon appears to be spreading. Some linguists believe that CVS is burrowing into Portlanders' speech. Others (like Conn himself) think the future of how we talk is more complicated. At first blush, it's hard to think of anything more trivial than how a given person-or city-says the word egg. But vowels are a sort of linguistic barometer, yielding clues to both the past and future of everyday language."

Read at Portland Monthly