I just spent a week riding my bike across Iowa.  Yeah, that’s a little crazy, but then I was joined by over 10,000 other crazy people.  Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to ride across Iowa on my bike because it seemed like a huge adventure to me.  I don’t know the exact year I was bitten, but it may very well have been 1973, the very first year of RAGBRAI.

RAGBRAI is the (Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.  Each year they plan a ride that starts at the western edge of the state and ends in the Mississippi River on the eastern edge.  This year, RAGBRAI #40, the route started in the far northwestern town of Sioux Center and ended at the river in Clinton.

It’s supposed to be a little over 470 miles, but I actually put on about 550.  I did an optional extension one day that made the day a “century” – over 100 miles.  I’d done it a couple of times before, so it’s not as groundbreaking as it sounds, except for the fact that it was into the worst wind of the ride, and the hills were a near-death experience for me, especially since my gears were acting up and I couldn’t shift down to my two lowest gears.

About 40 years ago, my mother had heard this crazy bike ride was coming near our home – actually right by the home of a cousin of mine.  Ryan and I set up a card table and made lemonade and ice tea to sell to the riders as they went by the farmhouse.  When I say “Ryan and I” I actually mean our mothers.  They were kind enough to allow us to think we were working and earning money, though I’m sure they spent more than we made.

These days, there are vendors all along the route – at least one every mile – selling water, Gatorade, and bananas, or the ever-present Iowa pork products.  But when I was a kid, it was all new.  I think we charged a nickel for each glass, letting them fill their entire bottle for a dime.  Bikers kept saying we were the cheapest thing they’d seen all day, but I think our real draw was Ryan yelling “Lemolade and ice tea!” as they approached.

Since then, I’ve wanted to ride across Iowa, a big adventure.

Finally Riding RAGBRAI

Riding Through Vinton, Iowa

It took me years to work it out in my schedule, but I finally made it.  I had no way to get to the start, but on a last-minute impulse I rode my bike to the edge of my small town, held up a piece of cardboard with RAGBRAI scrawled on it, and put out my thumb.

That’s how I was introduced to one version of RAGBRAI: the drink-in-every-town riders.  Though I hadn’t planned it, I had a six-pack in me and had hit two bars before the rented RV pulled into Sioux Center – more than I drank on the rest of the ride combined.  The weather was deadly hot, up near 100, so I was hitting the road by 5am after getting an hour or two of sleep in my sweltering tent so that I could pull into the next destination town around noon.  The first half of the week was rather miserable except for the wonderful riding conditions we had until about 10 each morning – the miles on the bike were the best thing.

By the end of the week, a huge storm rolled in and cooled it down considerably.  My tent wasn’t swamped like some others were, so I was grateful for the storm.  I also got to spend a night sleeping on a bed and having a real shower at my nieces’ house.  One of my nieces even joined me for the last two days of riding – her first long bike ride, but not her last, though the pain she felt the week after may cause her to reconsider that pledge to ride again next year.  The last day’s ride of 70 miles was the best of the trip.  The rolling hills and green crops were lit by the best sunrise of the ride, and the air actually had a chill in it as we started the day.  It’s enough to almost make me forget the pain in my right knee and the numbness in my left hand.  Almost.

Iowa Accents Town by Town

I stopped in almost every town along the way and talked with the locals.  I have to admit that I missed one because I actually rode through it before I realized that I was through it – there was one table with water and about six houses.  As I rode, I was able to hear some variation in accents from town to town, but it wasn’t so much that each town was different; it was more that each town had some of the same three elements.

One of the elements that was present in all of the accents was the midwest flatness.  It’s probably most obvious in the vowel sound in words like pass and ask.  This is that distinctly midwestern sound that I discuss in the AccentHelp download for the Central Plains Midwest accent.  It’s an overall quality that I heard in the other two accents I tended to hear.  It’s as though it’s the neutral version, which is what I grew up speaking.  I still made adjustments to it when I began training in acting, but it’s about as close to a standard American accent as we have.

Arriving at the Mississippi River on RAGBRAI 2012

The other two accents I heard from the locals were about elements from the north and south creeping into the local speech.  In a single town, I would hear that Central Plains accent, something that sounded much more like a slightly mild version of the Upper Midwest accent, and something that had just a coloring of American Southern accents.

It wasn’t about a geographic difference.  Iowa is in that place in between the sounds of Minnesota and Missouri.  It’s not as if accents understand legal boundaries.  They tend to fade from one place to another and cross over each other.  Accents can also be affected by the way people think of themselves, too.  I tended to hear the hint of Southern in more farmers, for example, than from the people who lived in town.

It was hot, and it was glorious, and it was a chance for me to really take my time to see and hear the geography shift ever so slowly across the state.  It’s been on my bucket list for 40 years.  I’m not sure that I’ll do it again – perhaps join in for a day ride or something like that – but I’m grateful that I finally got to check it off and experience the hills of Iowa under my own power.  I’m also grateful to be back in my own bed with air conditioning and wifi so that I can write this. It was a great ride – to have finished.

Every time I cross a state border, for example, it tends to take me an hour.  Driving from Illinois into Indiana, I’ll cross the border and stop at the state’s welcome center to try to record the people who work there.  Then I drive on to the next exit, and head back toward Illinois, hitting that state’s welcome center.  Then I have to go on to the next exit and finally head off towards where I was going originally.

There are a number of challenges with getting good dialect recordings.

One major issue is technical: I have to find a fairly quiet place to do the recording.  If there is background noise, I have to hold the mic closer to the interviewee, which also makes it all the more intimidating…

I also have to find a willing soul, who is a good example of the accent (haven’t moved a lot, for example), and they have to have the time to chat!  Thus, welcome centers are often a perfect place to stop.  It’s their job to be nice to me!  (Though I occasionally get the grumpy people… I’m looking at you, woman at the north-bound rest stop just south of Bowling Green, Ohio!  But most are wonderful!)

Sometimes I get truly grand receptions, such as what I got at the Ozark Folk Center or just this past week at the D:Hive in Detroit.  People who do this really make me want to move to these places!

Similarly, I find that some cities that have a not-so-good reputation are often filled with people who really want to talk about where they’re from, like my great experience last year in Pittsburgh, or this recent Detroit jaunt.  People have such bad attitudes about both of these cities, but the open, friendly people there make me think, “I could hang out here!”

One thing that I have had to do is to get over my fear of approaching people and asking the stupid question: Can I record your accent?

I sat on Venice Beach in May 2012 with this sign - "Can I record your accent?" - and it worked! This Turkish woman stopped to talk to the weird guy with the sign.

Last year, I began to make a goal when I was out on my heavy duty recording trips: I need at least five no’s, and then I can take a break.  But I kept finding it hard to get five no’s in a row!  I think my odds are better than the kids in white shirts and ties, riding their bikes around as a part of their Mormon missionary service.

I’ve always been a fairly shy loner, so it’s good for me to get out and engage like this, and I think I’ve grown a lot from doing all of these interviews.  Last summer a woman in Baltimore leaned over to me and said, “You’re a good interviewer” when she caught me between my attempts to catch the accent of the waitress at Hon’s.  She was a reporter and said that not only were my questions good and open-ended, but my listening was helping them to answer more openly and with longer replies.

I’ve learned a lot from pursuing this all so adamantly the last few years.  There’s a whole lot that I love about what I do.  I’m glad the recordings end up helping so many other people, too.  That’s what gets me through all of the editing process for the recordings, which is a long, rather unpleasant ordeal… I just spent three pretty solid days editing what I picked up so far in the trip.  I’m ready to take a break and go get some more!

Chicago, here I come!

I actually spent a week in LA in May picking up a number of recordings (more on this soon!), including some African-American Vernacular English.  I’ve had a strong range of recordings for AAVE from throughout the south, but I’ve needed to expand recordings from the north and west.

To that end, I’m on my way northeast towards Detroit, and then on to Chicago, where I used to teach composition at a largely African-American  university for six years.  Along the way, I’m heading through Texas, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in the old 87 VW camper – so far, so good! (That’s something to be proud of, when driving an 87 veedub.)

Yesterday, heading northeast out of Houston, I spotted an old gentleman attempting to hitchhike on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.  He seemed harmless enough, seeming to be 70 years old, so I stopped to give him a lift.

He also seemed to have suffered from a stroke at some point in the past.  I imagine he hadn’t gotten the full range of treatments he needed, and some of that was indicated by his challenges with speech – I couldn’t understand where he was headed!  This is a little problematic for the driver…

After struggling for a bit, I just started driving and trusted that he would let me know when we were there.  He kept trying to communicate with me, but between his speech difficulties and my inability to hear him over the sound of the road – the windows have to be down on the van to keep from sweating to death in the Texas heat – I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say…

Finally I asked him to write it down, and he wrote Dibeaux.  Unfortunately there’s no such thing on the map, but I finally saw the upcoming town of Diboll on the map!  

It’s possible he was Cajun or Creole, which would help explain the spelling choice, but either way it was clear that the person who told him where to go didn’t quite make it to the L’s at the end, a common feature in a lot of American speech, and certainly a big factor in AAVE.

This African-American gentleman was going to meet a family member, so odds are he’d only heard the name of the town from them, which helps me to understand the absence of L’s in the understanding and in the spelling.  Final L’s often sound like a W – or like “eaux” if you’re from southwest Louisiana…

The picture’s a little blurry, but it’s done while driving.  It’s a VW, though, so I’m sure I wasn’t back up to 55 by the time I took this.  I’ll be spending the entire trip in the slow lane.  Wave as you pass me!

Notice I gave in to the tendency a lot of people have when they do this – jutting the head forward on every emphasized word.  Looks especially goofy with my pencil neck!

I’ve learned a lot about what I should be doing on the site – though a lot of it is guess work, even from the experts.  I’ve also learned a lot about what the people who are doing the searching are thinking.  The challenge is that there are a TON of misconceptions out there.

Learning an English Accent

A lot of people search for information on Learning an English Accent, but, in the words of Princess Bride, ”I do not think it means what you think it means.”  If you want to learn an accent of English, you’re really looking at a VERY broad category.  Firstly, you are probably not making a distinction between an accent and a dialect, which is okay – most people use the terms interchangeably.  But “accent of English” is frightfully broad – that can really be ANY accent or dialect in the world, while speaking English.

Learning a British English Accent

It’s very possible that the person is really trying to learn a British accent, but that’s pretty broadly interpreted by a lot of people…  Some people would really only mean that they want to learn RP or a Standard British accent, while others might even think of a Scottish accent as a British accent – which might offend some people, quite frankly.  It’s usually best to offend people immediately, though, so that they either get over it or go away… 

This is still a really broad category.  We’ve really only got a limited selection of accents of the UK at this point, though I’m planning an extended trip within the next year or two that should remedy that.  If only the magic plastic card-giving people didn’t know my phone number, it could happen sooner.

Learning an American English Accent

This is also a frightfully broad category.  New York accents are quite different from Chicago accents, but you also have to be more specific about it being an upstate NY accent or a NYC accent.  People who have Boston accents will never agree that you can do theirs, even if you’re from there.  There’s sort of no such thing as a General American accent – Central Plains Midwest probably comes the closest.  I was just working with an Australian actress this week who was working on a Mid-Atlantic accent, which doesn’t exist today except in movies, which is the main place it ever existed, frankly.

Other English Accents

But, oh, there’s so much more:  Australian accents, New Zealand accents, Canadian accents…  South African accents will be another future development for the site, as will Caribbean accents.  This isn’t even getting into the accents of people who are speaking English as a second language, such as a French Canadian speaking English. Belize, anyone?  Belize is a country in Central America just south of Mexico that has English as the first language.  There aren’t a lot of plays or movies that call for the accent, though, so that’s a little further off into the future for the AccentHelp site.  I really think I need to take a trip there, though…

Learning an Accent

Any time you learn an accent, you’re generalizing a bit – you’re basing a broad concept of accent based on a grouping of individuals’ idiolects and figuring out what’s essential in them to tell us that you are from the appropriate place (not to mention other issues, such as class and ethnicity.)  The more specific you can be in your search and the way you think about it, the more specific you can be in the search results you come away with, and accent you come away with.

If you ever feel a little lost about what accent is appropriate, feel free to send an email my way.  I’ll be only too happy to be your personal Google SEO’er.  Let’s both just pretend we know what that means.

Listening to Southern Accents

Along the way, it’s great to hear the variety of Southern accents when I stop to rest and fill up with gas and grub, and also just by drifting along the radio dial.  Most stations have announcers who use something that approximates a more neutral American sound, but when I seek out some kind of talk radio, invariably it’s local (unless it’s the “big names” of talk radio).  Most of the time I have to tune out the content to maintain my sanity, but the sounds are glorious.

Call-in shows are my favorite.  Not only can I hear the sounds of the area, I get to hear the rich variety that the locals speak.  Any time you try to learn an accent, especially as taught by the AccentHelp downloads or other similar materials, you’re hearing a “coming together” of the common sounds of a place (or class, or race, or nameless other influences).  It’s a gathering of ideolects (a single person’s way of speaking) grouped to figure out the common indicative elements that get called an accent or a dialect.  Once you get it, it’s your job to make it an ideolect again.

If I didn’t tune out the content, I might not use the term “ideolect” but, rather, something that sounds similar…  I have a low tolerance for wacked-out opinions from either side of the aisle.  Ideolect, indeed.

There used to be a lot more, even just when I was a kid in the 70′s: a grocery store, three gas stations, two restaurants, three bars, a hardware story, and a lot more.  But the 80′s ate towns like mine up.  Walmart came along, fast food came to the “big town” 12 miles away, and my little corner of the world changed.

It was still a great place to grow up.  Not a lot of diversity – though we did have both Danes AND Swedes – but there was a solid educational system, and everyone felt accountable.  I think those things are still true, though there’s now a hint more diversity and the school has had to consolidate to keep going. (It’s won them some state basketball championships, though!)  There’s still a sense of small-town pride and a strong sense of community.

Iowa Accents

If you’re learning an Iowa accent, you could work on a fairly neutral American accent.  There’s not a lot that makes it a distinct regional accent, so many would call it General American or a Broadcast Standard American accent.  There’s a tendency to drop the sound into the back of the throat a bit, though, and the “ash” vowel tends to flatten a bit (though not to the degree of a stereotypical Chicago accent).  I still prefer to “drop my g’s” in most of my speech: goin’, doin’, bein’.)

There are also other typical midwest pronunciations that carry through.  Most people say eltse for else, bolth for both, korder for quarter, and rul for rural. (Our mail came to RR1: Rural Route 1 or Rul Raut Wun.)  Like most Americans, we said kalm instead of kahm for calm and dook instead of dyook for Duke.  It’s pop - not soda.  We also gave our own pronunciation to foreign words for place names, just like most Americans.  I lived in Buena Vista County: Byoonuh Vistuh, not Bwaynuh Veestuh.  And, just like most Americans, it’s Counny, not County - get rid of that t after an n.  (git rid, I should say.)

It’s not Southern, though.  That’s one mistake people will make when they think of an Iowa accent.  That Southern accent quality doesn’t really kick in until you get a little ways into Missouri.

Even in this tiny community of 900, there was some diversity in the accents.  I grew up about 75 miles from the Minnesota border, so there were some elements of that Minnesota accent that carried into some residents, if not most.  The main element of that was probably the twang of the Upper Midwest sound.  You may hear that throughout Iowa, depending on the individual, but up north and in smaller towns especially (which is most of what Iowa is – even the cities are big small towns).  But some people would even have a hint of that almost Canadian sound of the Minnesota/North Dakota accent:  The oh sound would drop the second half of the diphthong and become a long ooo instead.

Iowa Accent Audio Samples & Examples

You’ll hear a few examples in the Iowa accent audio included with the AccentHelp download for the Central Plains Midwest Accent.  There’s a bit of a southeast Iowa speaker at the end of the sample audio for that download where you can hear some of that twang, for example.

You can find a few examples on YouTube, too.  This young lady has that back-of-the-tongue placement and that ooo, and she happens to say eltse.  She also has the correct Iowa attitude.  You’ll see it if you know it…  Iowa Governor Terry Branstad is another good native Iowan example.  If you listen to the accents of the students in this piece from my old college, you’ll hear a number of Iowans.

Iowa Accent Recordings

In addition to some other dialect recording destinations, I’ll be back in Iowa this summer to pick up more samples.  I’ve also got some fun planned: I’ve got a high school reunion and I’ll be home for Newell Pride Days.  As of May 1, I’ll find out if I’m selected to be able to ride RAGBRAI, a week-long bike ride across the state of Iowa, which I’ve always wanted to do!  (I’ll also be doing a Warrior Dash run with my son and my nieces down near Des Moines – a muddy mess with beer at the end, though not a distinctly Iowa thing to do…)  My greatest hope for the visit, however, is to get some hometown sweet corn.  Ain’t nothin can touch the sweet corn I can get back home.  Nothin.

We drove into Quebec to pursue recordings for the Canadian French accent.  Much success!  Happily, I met a number of Canucks who were more than willing to chat, even with my little recorder shoved into the mix.

I found French-speaking Quebec residents to be wonderfully open.  I made my run of tourism offices, and almost all were fully cooperative.  (Happily one person had a long chat with me before the supervisor said it should have never happened.)

There are definitely some differences from a purely French accent, though the differences are not significant.  It really is more about the Canadian influence on the speakers’ English (versus the British influence on the English of most French people.)  The biggest difference – in my first reflections on the accent – seem to be about the intonation pattern.

Montreal French & English

What still struck me more than the accent, or even the usual tourist reflections about the beautiful and striking history of Old Montreal, was how amazing the food was at Schwartz’s, Montreal’s Hebrew deli.  Damn, that was some good food!  Smoked meat, mmmm!

The accents were nothing like what else we had experienced in Montreal.  Our understanding is that the east of Montreal is more French and the west is more English, but this was straight north of Old Montreal and also of Montreal’s shopping and business district.  Ah, yes, of course: Hebrew deli!

We’d been told to go here by a friend who used to live in the city, and we were pleased to see it had just been the topic of a musical at a local theatre just a few months before our visit.  The deli was a classic beyond our experience.  It was now a cultural icon of Montreal.

Almost everyone there spoke English, including our middle eastern waiter.  We were only a few short blocks north, but the culture had shifted severely.  French Montreal was charming and wonderful, but the English-speaking Montreal satisfied the deeper desires of my belly, which trumps all.

French Canadian Accents

Notre Dame de Montreal

When someone says they want to speak with a Canadian accent, they generally mean they want to speak English.  Canada is technically a bi-lingual country, recognizing both French and English as the official languages.  This shows up in road signs all across Canada, though the French is primarily spoken in and around Quebec, more towards the east of Canada.

If you’re hoping to learn a French Canadian accent, you’ll be pretty darned close if you just learn a French accent of a person from France.  The English speaking is quite close – French Canadian tends to have some of the Canadianisms in it, whereas “French French” is more influenced by being based in the English of England, usually.  The actual French, however, is quite different.  The two languages have grown apart over the last couple of centuries, though many of the speakers would still be mutually understandable with the major variations being the more modern terminology – slang is hugely different.

Canadian Maritimes Accents

These are also not what a lot of people think of as a “Canadian accent.”  The far east coast of Canada, including the islands off the coast and around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is often called the Atlantic Provinces, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.  The first three of these are known as the Maritimes Provinces – Newfoundland and Labrador are the odd one out, all the more odd because the two are one province…  (Newfoundland – the more populated of the two-in-one – is often considered a separate accent from the rest of the Maritimes, too, but we have to generalize at some point in order to discuss accents rather than a single person’s mode of speaking.)

There are a number of French speakers here as well, especially in areas closer to Quebec.  Portions of this region are also known as Acadia.  People who were forced out of there in the mid-18th century, and many of them fled to southern Louisiana – the term Cajun comes from a casual way of saying Acadian.  Both Cajun French and Cajun accents vary from the French and English of contemporary Acadians – separated by a couple of centuries.

Unfortunately our travels didn’t take us this far east, so development of this accent for AccentHelp will have to wait for another trip.

Canadian Accents

When most people inquire about learning a Canadian accent, they mean something based in English from west of Quebec.  They probably also aren’t suggesting something too far north in the country, such as all the way up in Nunavut, the newest Canadian province.  They also don’t usually mean the accent of First Nations – “Native Americans” doesn’t really apply north of the border – though many First Nations speak with an accent identical to the European-Canadians in their community.

I’d still subdivide this Canadian accent into two major categories: General Canadian and Broad Canadian.  General Canadian is a lot like General American or American Broadcast Standard, though it has some distinct differences.  Broad Canadian is more along the line of the stereotypical Canadian accent of Bob and Doug McKenzie from SCTV – The Great White North.  This is closer to the oot and aboot stereotype – though, in reality, that description of the pronunciation is grossly inaccurate and is often offensive to Canadians.

General Canadian can be found all across the middle and west of Canada, but it seems to be primarily in the eastern part of this region, especially around Toronto.  The strongest stereotypical Broad Canadian is especially present in and around Manitoba – in general, “country” accents tend to be more Broad, whereas “city” accents tend more toward the General.  These are all covered in our Canadian accent download, including audio from across central and western Canada.

Lake Agnes in Banff National Park - Canadian Rockies

Canadian Accent Audio

For an example of some Canadian accent audio, here‘s a fairly middle-of-the-road Canadian accent and a discussion of words on YouTube.  She hits on some of the ways that both General and Broad Canadian vary from Midwest American accents.

Keep in mind that any time you categorize an accent or dialect, you’re making a generalization.  Especially any Canadians out there may read this and argue that a Vancouver accent is frightfully different from someone who lives in Victoria, but we have to generalize to some degree to even talk about accents and dialects…

Learning a Cockney Accent

When you’re working on any accent, it’s still job number one to be heard and understood.  Clear articulation is a necessity no matter what the accent is, and the moment you’re working on anything other than a “standard” accent (Standard British/RP or General American, for example) there are a lot of elements that move you away from what’s probably clearest to the audience.  It’s very common to drop consonants in consonant clusters – such as saying ghosts as ghos.  Some call this lazy speech, but it’s probably just efficient speech, really.

In order to learn a Cockney accent for performance, it’s great to have recordings of native speakers, which we do have here on AccentHelp, but even if you listen to Cockney accents, you may be aiming for a target that won’t serve the production.  On the upside, when I interviewed various East End Londoners, they recognized that they were speaking to a different audience than they may usually.  In one recording, for example, you’ll hear the interviewee’s daughter in the background accusing her of putting her posh voice on for me.  ”Cleaning up” your speech in the accent will probably serve the show much better.

One of the ways I often have actors address this is to simply ask What? after a line.  I might even ask again, resulting in a third degree of clarity.  That’s often the extreme that you need to go to for understandability, and this is definitely true with a Cockney accent.  I like to shortcut to thinking of it as “talking to the idiot.”  Sometimes all you have to do is look at me, and talking to the idiot is pretty easy to motivate…

Listen to a Cockney Accent

Still looking for resources?  Here’s a great video of Danny Dyer speaking with a clearly-Cockney accent, but he’s quite understandable.