Voices of the Coast: What is the PNW accent?

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Professor Alicia Beckford Wassink traces the vowels, voices and histories behind the Pacific Northwest accent. 

Written By Annie Bostwick

Visuals By Alyssa Garcia

In 2006, Professor Alicia Beckford Wassink, was approached by an undergraduate student at the University of Washington. The student from Boston told her that they had been invited to a 'cake' party. Wassink said the student loved to bake and arrived at the party with a Boston cream cake in hand only to realize he had been invited to a 'keg' party.  

Wassink, now the director of the sociolinguistics laboratory at UW, said this interaction prompted her to dive deeper into what characterizes the way people speak in the Pacific Northwest.

The way certain dialects are perceived by listeners is usually accompanied by social stereotypes. Many Americans, Pacific Northwesterners included, like to say they "don't have an accent," but Professor Wassink will tell you that this is a common fallacy.

English speakers with a southern accent are associated with rural lifestyles while other dialect regions evoke other social generalizations. Pacific Northwest English is often lumped into the dialect described as "Standard American English."

"There are fewer stereotypes in this region," said Wassink. "So when people think about Oregon and Washington, they're not aware of the kinds of social identities that distinguish life here, and they can't think of any broad stereotypes that are nonstandard."

Linguistic change typically occurs over three generations, so Wassink designed the Pacific Northwest English Survey to study at least three generations of families with roots in the PNW. 

In Wassink's sociolinguistic study, voice recordings are brought into the lab where characteristics of speech are isolated and analyzed. "But unlike normal phonetic studies, we really want to know about the social conditions under which the vowel features evolved," said Wassink. 

The Pacific Northwest English Survey found that, while other American dialects in the South or in New England were formed in ethnic enclaves, the PNW English formed because of interethnic mixing. 

Language contact between fur traders and trappers and Native Americans is the earliest example of this in the west. Later, immigration from the Yukon Gold Rush, the Oregon Trail and the transcontinental railroad facilitated even more contact between different ethnic groups in the west. 

One vowel feature that resulted from this in the PNW was the cot-caught merger. "We actually have one less vowel in our vowel system than other parts of the country do," said Wassink. Because of this, the "au" sound in the word "caught" is less pronounced by speakers. "They sound exactly the same here in the Pacific Northwest, and the beginning of it seems to have been in the area of the US west of the Mississippi." 

Words like "roof" and "poof" demonstrate another unique vowel characteristic in the PNW where the double "oo" sounds more like an "uh" sound when pronounced by PNW speakers. 

While studying the evolution of English in the PNW, Wassink's research has led her to collaborate with the Yakama Nation in Washington. Part of the PNW English Survey studied how, despite the displacement and language endangerment the Yakama people experienced at the hands of white settlers, the "dialect [of English] spoken on the Yakama Reservation has been greatly influenced by the Yakama language." 

The survey found clear similarities between Yakama English and its heritage language. "One of the things that I was really proud of was that we can actually use our acoustic analysis," said Wassink. 

Her lab graphed vowel systems from the analyzed recordings to visually demonstrate similarities in the systems. "I think it's a visually impactful way of saying that there is definitely some retention from Yakama Sahaptin on the English of the valley," said Wassink. "You don't see that in any other Washington speakers."  

Wassink's long term study of English in the PNW has helped piece together a story of constant immigration, settlement and cultural contact in the west. The PNW English Survey is still ongoing. Historical timelines, phonetic findings and updates on the study can be found on the UW's PNWE website.